12 Days of Hanutech, Day 4
Amazon Smile

During this pandemic emergency health-awareness opportunity, many of us are doing a lot more online shopping.


I mean, even after two vaccinations and a booster, I still feel funny about heading out to crowded stores. Like, what if I need a healthy snack (like a 3-lb bag of M&Ms) but someone is standing in the candy aisle? What am I supposed to do, not buy M&Ms? Ridiculous. 


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And don't even get me started about those "Sharing size" bags of M&Ms. You can't make me follow your "rules," Comprade Candy.
I like to support my local businesses as best as I can, and I admit that we’ve enjoyed more than a few “support your local restaurants” take-out dinners, but frequently, it’s just easier and quicker to order something on Amazon, knowing that I can rely on FedEx or UPS to do the work of delivering it to me in two or three days. For those of us pressed for holiday-shopping time, this can be a lifesaver.

But instead of going to the regular Amazon.com site, I go to the secret Amazon store called Amazon Smile. It’s still Amazon, and it works exactly the same, with the same products and same eligibility for Prime shipping.

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It’s like knowing the VIP entrance to the same store.  
When you use Amazon Smile, 0.5% of your payments goes to charity. And you get to choose which charity, from a list of thousands. Most well-known large charities are there, like Unicef, Doctors Without Borders, American Red Cross, ASPCA, and Meals on Wheels. But there are also tons of local charities, too. For example, a quick search shows dozens of charities from Walpole, like
  • Walpole Little League
  • Walpole Girls Softball Association
  • Walpole Pop Warner Football Association
  • Walpole Community Food Pantry
  • Walpole Public Library Endowment Trust
  • Walpole Scholarship Foundation
  • Walpole Footlighters
  • Walpole Robotics Foundation
  • Walpole Media Corporation
  • Walpole Youth Soccer Association
  • Walpole Youth Basketball Association
  • Walpole Families of Faith
  • and many more
All you have to do is shop at smile.amazon.com instead of shopping at www.amazon.com and Amazon takes care of the rest, supporting the charity that is most important to you.

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Since I do this to Amazon, it’s nice to see them throw some back.
If you’re going to shop on Amazon anyway (again, M&Ms, people, don’t run out of M&Ms), consider shopping at Amazon Smile and share some love with your favorite charity.
🙂 Tom