To absolutely HATE when shops ask you to donate?

[ProfessionallyIrritated]

IABU and I know it, I’m just hot, bothered and peeved off.

you know when you’re in literally anywhere, like for instance McDonalds and it always wants you to round up to the nearest pound… I can deal with it on self service tills as you can just click no.

was in Poundland earlier buying a couple of essential cleaning bits, came to £4.50 (don’t get me started on how nothing in POUNDLAND is ever A POUND anymore!!!!!!)

self serve tills aren’t even working so I go to a regular till.

Barely-out-of-his-teens cashier scans my items and then was like “and would you like to donate £3 to” I don’t even remember what it was. I was like no thank you, and he went (loudly) “are you sure? You could make a difference to someone today”

me: no thank you, and I don’t think you should be pressuring people into making donations when they don’t want to.

him: well a lot of our customers do donate so that’s why we ask

if it was rounding up to the nearest 10p or even 50p I don’t think I’d mind as much but THREE POUNDS? that’s only just less than what my shopping came to…..

I know charities need to raise money and IA definitely BU but why the fuck do shops ask people to donate to charity? It doesn’t help their buisness presumably. And what happened to just pressing a button on the PIN pad to say no instead of having to verbally broadcast it? It’s almost like being peer pressured into donating ffs.

I can barely afford to live as it is, I don’t have the money to be donating to charity at the moment as mean as that makes me sound

It is not true in the UK.

I always think what a bad business plan it is. I go into poundland. Spend a few pounds and they ask if I want to donate £3. I either say yes, thus doubling the price of the cheap goods I deliberately went to a cheap shop to buy or I say no and feel embarrassed. Either way I don't go back until I forget there is a £3 surcharge to buying cheap cleaning products there. Anybody who wants to spend an extra £3 on their kitchen spray will be picking it up with the rest of their weekly shop in the supermarket not doing a poundland run.

Pets at Home also do this.

I was in Poundland the other day and they asked if I wanted to donate 25p.

YANBU , they also shouldn’t allow charity chuggers to stand right in the entrance to the shop .

I detest this too. Sometimes, when I've seen them there hassling other shoppers as they leave, I've changed my mind and not bothered going in the shop. Not sure that's quite what the shop wanted to happen...

Our local BP used to have the 'add 25p for charity?' thing on the card terminal, where you were forced to say Yes or No before you could pay. No indication whatsoever about which charity it's for! Not likely. Call me paranoid, but I always suspect that it will be for an unpopular/controversial charity if they're deliberately avoiding telling me which one it is. How hard would it be to have a little board next to the terminal, telling you the charity?

Even if it were a charity I wholeheartedly supported, it's much more efficient if I give independently and then they can claim gift aid on the donation.

“are you sure? You could make a difference to someone today”

They have no way of knowing how much of a difference it could make to you/your family and what you might have to go without if you had to lose £3 of your very tight budget - especially somewhere like Poundland. Harvey Nicks, maybe...

They can ask. You can say no. That should be the end of it. You should not have to justify yourself. The sales assistant should not have tried to harass you.

I always say no because I give to my own charities. You also know these places are going to say They donated X amount; no they didn’t, we did!

Not tax deductible (or reacted to positively) in the US

theconversation.com/amp/checkout-charity-can-increase-a-shoppers-anxiety-especially-when-asks-are-automated-190495

I didn't even get asked in Wilkinson's once. He just told me to press the green button before I paid. Got a hacky look when I pressed the other one.

This way of squeezing of coin out of people is underhand and irritating at shop tills. I give enough to sodden charity thanks

I always say no because I give to my own charities. You also know these places are going to say They donated X amount; no they didn’t, we did!

They always make a big thing about whichever service station chain it is who 'raise so much money' for Children In Need every year. They rarely if ever point out that it's all the people stopping for a wee and a Gregg's that actually chuck the money into the fancy bucket.

I didn't even get asked in Wilkinson's once. He just told me to press the green button before I paid. Got a hacky look when I pressed the other one.

I wonder if they're given targets, like they do with the checkout upselling in so many shops: do they get rewarded if over a certain percentage of customers give; or do they get punished if not enough do? Either way, this is outrageous.

It comes up on our card machine where I work . I don’t think anyone actually asks we just press clear before passing the machine to the customer .

Just say no you don't want to donate. Simple.

Are you sure you want to tell the OP to cancel the cheque?

My Dfriend worked at Whsmith and they had to ask if you wanted any of their special offers at the till ie choc bars etc. Iften with an 'are you sure' uf you said no. If they didn't and it was their 'mystery shoppers' they ended up in quite serious trouble. Maybe Mcds have a similar policy.
Personally I will round up at the self service till but don't normally at manned tills and never had an issue when ive said no.

I couldn’t get upset over this. The ones at self-checkout and online are easy to decline. I don’t go to the tills unless I’m at Aldi’s or Lidl and they don’t ask such questions anyway.

The ones I’ve seen have been at McDonalds when using the self-service and online when ordering from Papa John’s. My order is usually a few pence and I don’t mind donating the usually 3-10 pence to round up to charity.

Oh my god, I was actually considering posting this exact thread over the weekend, but I didn't get round to it... According to the results of the poll, it seems most people are pissed off with it.

They do it in Wilkos too. Donate 10P or 20P or 50P to a 'charity' on every transaction - and I shop in there three or four times a week - so NO I am NOT going to fucking donate every time - Not at all actually... Not now!!! It's bad enough getting the 'would you like an almost out of date Terrys Chocolate Orange for £3' crap - or the 'Do you want to buy Britney Spears perfume for just £30' at the till when you go to the SAVERS store...

Even McDonald's ask you to donate 5P, 20P, 1 pound blah blah blah on the self serve machine... I even got it buying 3 items from EBAY today (stuff we need.) As I was about to pay on Paypal, I got 'do you want to donate £2.50 to the Raymond Boglin Trust..' Not the actual name, but I had NEVER heard of this charity. NO!!! FUCK OFF!!! Each of the 3 transactions had a different charity THAT I HAD NEVER HEARD OF.

Also, two different charity shops I've been in this week asked me to 'round up' FOR CHARITY... I am already spending in your fucking Charity Shop!! I spent £9.25 and they asked me if I wanted to round up to £10.00. ER FUCKING NO!

Ditto NEW LIFE shop. I spent £7.99 'Would you like to donate 50p???' ALSO a Charity shop!!! I AGAIN, was like 'no.'

I was also at a big bargain store - I think it was B and M or Poundstretcher 2 weeks ago... and they said 'do you want to round up to the nearest pound?'

What charities are all this money going to??? And WHY do they think people have so much surplus money that they can add on an extra 10% to 15% to what they've already spent? (When everything is already 40% to 50% fucking more than it was three or four years ago!) They take the absolute PISS. There's about 170,000 charities in this country.. Do these people think we want to donate every time we spend something?! And want to give an extra bit to every fucking charity? Fuck off!

I am so sick of it. It's giving me the rage now. This 'wanna give MORE of your money to charity at the till' fuckery seems to have replaced those little irksome kids at the end of the till, offering to pack your shopping, and expecting money in their little bucket towards their trip to fucking Egypt for 3 weeks, for their 'school trip.' No fuck off. I can pack my own shit!

@phoenixrosehere Self checkouts ask for you to donate to charity too! Have you never been to McDonalds???

You are NOT being unreasonable to hate it.

I tell them if the shop wants to make a donation they can do it out of their pockets not mine.

If it's a card machine I always press no. I'm paranoid that my details will go on some list somewhere and I'll be hounded by various charities forever more. If it's a cashier I tell them to get the owners to put my share in, out of their profits.

For anyone interested the charity Poundland supports is Whizz-kidz. A charity that provides specialist wheelchairs and other mobility aids for children who need them. I am not sure how long the charity has existed but I knew someone once raising money for them back in the very late 90s or early 00s.

^that is a screenshot by the way - not a request to donate.
I am not affiliated with them in any way.

Papa Johns if you remember had to fire their founder and CEO for racism and I think sexual harassment. I wonder what charities they donate to?

i had this recently, it was really difficult to find the No button.
awkward
and wrong

Didn't realise that! I always say no thanks. I have my chosen charity I donate to. It's wrong to put people under pressure like this.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, it should be illegal for shops to solicit donations "for charity" without telling you clearly what charity it goes to. The charity mentioned above (assuming honourably run) sounds a very worthy one, but it could be something like Mermaids or another highly controversial charity. If they are confident that it is a good charity and one that their customers will want to support, why wouldn't they have publicity for it?

Also, they should have to state if there are any tax/PR benefits for them or personal connections between the board of the shop and of the charity.

I'll bet these same company directors who think it acceptable to ask for random donations "for charity" would absolutely not accept it and pay up if their middle managers submitted expense claims for "miscellaneous unspecified stuff".