They weren't, really. They were just pretending to in order to raise the stakes so the audience would feel more invested in the outcome of the quiz.
They'd already decided before the game started that they'd donate more money than he could possibly win even if he'd answered every question perfectly.
We have a supermarket chain where I live that's in the top 5 worldwide. At the card machine, it asks "would you like to round up your bill to the nearest euro to help <charity>?. If I could respond, it would be "you're the bigget retailer in Europe and beyond. How about you do it?"
This is becoming more and more of a thing in the US too. I know Taco Bell specifically asks if you’d like to round up to go towards their scholarship fund for workers. It’s a nice thought but I’m not subsidizing a multibillion dollar corporations PR campaign.
not really. It is a deduction sure, but they have to take that money in first. So if you donate $50, they have to take it on to their books making them $50 up which means they would pay tax on that $50, but instead they can deduct that $50 so they are in the same position as not having the money donated. They do however get to say we donated 1 Trillion Dollars to charities when it was their customers that did, and likely deduct expenses relating to collecting the money. It wouldn't surprise me if they somehow can deduct cost of terminals or whatever. Note my information is for Australia but I am pretty sure tax deductions are similar in most of the world like this.
P.S. it is still super shitty of big businesses doing this.
The store is a collection agent: The money you donate is considered your contribution to the charity, not the store's donation. The store acts as a facilitator, collecting the donations on behalf of the charity.
This and the misconception that you should avoid making more than x amount so you dont get taxed at a higher bracket are common misconceptions thay really get my goat.
It truly is ridiculous that the majority of these companies get money for charity from their customers, claim it's solely donated by themselves, then the charity they donate to turns out to be a private charity funded by the original company which gets used for purely tax dodging purposes
And people who aren't well off are pressured to fund this cycle.
For them to donate, they would have to “force” you to donate by increasing by a tiny amount their prices of all of their products.
Once you understand that, you understand that it’s more fair if you have the option of paying the supermarket products the same and the option of donating separately.
If they raise prices they also lose customers to other supermarket chains that don’t have the same donation policy, as the same product will be cheaper elsewhere.
If they don’t raise prices they will either have fiscal deficits, or would have to reduce the employees wages.
Imma be honest, as someone who worked in a chain store at supply level, the margins are razor thin, the one i worked ofr the profit margin was about 5% for goods excluding tobacco, as it is set by the laws how much you can charge for it there margin is even worse. It is done for convinience of people the company never sees the money, they do not touch it, they cannot use it for taxes like some people suggest.
Didn't work at supply level, but I did work at store level and can confirm: margins are a lot thinner than people think. Tobacco in particular has about a 5% margin, any services such as lottery are only about 1% (to the point a whole day's lottery rollover sales don't even pay for 1 member of staff for 1 hour), the vast majority of stock had 10-20% margin, and chilled produce had about 40%. That 40% sounds good until you factor in the amount of stuff that gets abandoned in warm areas, fresh dumped in freezers, goes out of date, is damaged by customers, comes in unsellable from supplier, and then only makes a small % of our daily sales.
From memory, our store margin was about 16%, wages took up about 9-13% of sales, not margin (amount depended on the quarter). Some quarters we'd actually lose money (and were expected to), by the end of the year the store would make 3% profit for the shareholders
That is not how tax deductions work, and is misinformation. You can claim it as a tax deduction, and the IRS doesn’t want the corporation to double dip on it.
I assume this is because people don’t use cash anymore and therefore the charity boxes at the til are no longer used for spare change. So this is the electronic equivalent of that.
I find this one odd; its simply asking if you would rather have a flat even amount charged and you can simply round up the change to donate.
The corporation doesn't benefit from it, they don't write it off - it actually just goes to charity. In fact you yourself get to write it off as a donation. If you don't wanna do it just keep hitting no.
literally just taxing the wealthy and dropping support for corporations like this in lieu of cooperatives that actively seek to redistribute capital and wealth would do the trick
Ellen would always say something like “You got enough right for $8,000! But our friends at Shutterfly want to round that up to $20,000!”
The donations always happened. It’s just something to fill the airwaves and make the sponsors look good.
In this one, he got 5/7 to get $5,000 out of a maximum $7,000. Ulta Beauty “rounded” it to $10,000, an impossible number to start. No matter what, all 10k was being donated.
Tbf to the show at the end they round the number up to 10k, more than what it would have been if he answered every question right anyway so it was always going to be 10k, they just wanted to have some fun with it first.
I know people hate Ellen but this isn't the first time a talk show has done this. It's like these people have never seen a celebrity charity event. Celebrity jeopardy?
NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell me does this every weekend, sometimes they round up sometimes they just basically tell the contestant the answer if they are about to get it wrong.
But Ellen did always give the full amount at the end of the game regardless of how well the gests/audience did at the games. Same with prizes, at the end of the games she would give the same prize of the winners to the losers as well. People are really memory-holing the way this show worked
At the end of the day, Ellen is just a mean bitch, in lists of most hated celebrities she ranks higher than actual criminals that beat people half to death, which maybe suggests that at this stage, the level of dislike is a little irrational.
The cost of marketing campaigns centered around only the fact that a corporation is donating to some cause often far exceed the actual amount being donated.
This is not like a lesser known tidbit. This is industry standard
As much as I hate Ellen, they do give more than the outcome of the quiz. If he got 5 right, that’s $5000 won for breast cancer. Ellen would then surprise and give let’s say $40000 for example. She does it all the time, still I don’t like her one bit.
iirc the idea was at the end of it, regardless of # of correct answers, they were going to donate the money anyways but that way the narrative would have been "even though this person failed the task and didn't earn it, we are good people and we'll send the money anyways"
Which is still shit but I guess no one told him that and/or he jumped the gun instead of playing that game.
Most shows that do this do it for the stakes. Wheel of fortune does charity events with celebs all the time and every penny goes to the children. Hell even if theres a solid 2k they didnt win theyll still give that to the charity.
Accordingly to Google, she earned around 50-70 mil per year. Around ~280-380k per episode. So yeah, she could have paid it and then some, if she cared, which she don't. Much like the Rock and Oprah.
Wherever a corporate entity does this kind of thing it always makes me laugh. Not just the dangling but it’s always an absurdly low figure.
The other day I saw a commercial about how MasterCard is gonna send money every time you spend money to cancer research and the limit was $1 million
1 million fucking dollars the company made 30 billion last year and the best they can come up with for cancer patients is the amount of money a good welder can save up in 10 years.
I always think this when someone is raising money by doing a run or whatever. Why can’t they just give the money and you not have to run around dressed like a chicken or whatever? Like why does charity have to contain an element of suffering of ridicule before it’s worthwhile?
Shoutout to that guy for being a tool and trying to play virtue games while promoting his sitcom.
It's a game to make publicity. He could have said "Be a millionaire actor on one of the most successful sitcoms in history, I'll write a check for any I get wrong." and be entertaining on the entertainment show he's getting paid to be on.
What Ellen then should’ve done to both save face and be on brand is “whisper” to him, “yes, but we need to get the audience on the edge of their seats somehow.”
I just googled Ultra Beauty to see what it is. They've got more than a thousand stores in the US, so that is less than a dollar pr store pr question this guy gets right. Getting their moneys worth of advertising..
This is kind of why it's better for companies to just not donate. Everyone will always try to describe why you're bad for donating. A friend at a company I used to work at suggested that we donate to some particular thing but I was able to talk them out of it by showing them how people reacted to some other companies donating: it's just too risky because it paints a target on your back and the negative PR isn't worth it.
Oprah once opened her show gushing about diamond earrings she'd just been gifted. They cost more than my fams car at the time. Then she went on to start asking audience for money to donate to her angel network. That was my awakening.
Doug Stanhope has a pretty epic bit on this - 10k fun run for nothing. "So, my as you know my daughter has cerebral palsy" Yeah? How many hard boiled eggs would you eat??
Going off estimated US child population in 2003 (since this guy wanted to so graciously cherry pick it) that would mean of the estimated 73.1 million youth of the US, that ~12,427,000 went hungry. Saying “pretty much relatively the same in 2 decades” is insane. Currently for 2025 we are around the same 73 million (less children are being born) yes we have now added an additional 6 million children going hungry. So with making less kids, more starve.
Ever talk to a rich person, they talk about running their business the same way a regular person talks about farming in a video game, this flat out is a game to them cause they have no real reproductions
Yes, he's right, and yes, Ellen is a POS. But when they do games like this on talk shows for charity, the money usually gets donated regardless of the outcome of the game.
Yeah it always bugs me how people in general on the internet will donate but ONLY if SOMEONE ELSE do a job that is completely unrelated for them.
I mean okay this way you know what amount to give because the limit depends on the other. But why don't just give it in the first place instead of playing with money that could save lives? If anyway you were willing to give the max amount (if the man answered correctly on all questions), why just not do it in the first place? Because if he answers wrong 1 time, this is 1000 less to help people in need, although you were ready to give them—this is just "the game."
I personally find it disgusting, but it is everywhere, even with big youtubers and all.
I love the people calling her a bully and stuff yet don't realize the disgusting attitude they themselves have in this very thread. She might be an asshole but none of y'all are showing you are any better.
In 2019 the Washington Redskins partnered with a charity to donate 100 meals to children for every touchdown they scored in their game against the New York Giants.
He is but if we're going to start asking those questions then what's stopping him from donating a 1000 for each he gets wrong? He's also wealthy, probably not Ellen or her production rich but he was part of the main cast of a hit show for over a decade
I've always thought this whenever a company tries tactics like this to drum up good will. Wth does me buying your dumb product have to do with you doing the right thing.
It's not profitable. If the contestant does really bad they typically don't air it and don't make money off of it. If they air it, not only do they get free PR for donating to charity, but they also get tax write-offs.
It should be “we’re donating money to breast cancer research, but for ever question you get right, $1000 of that money goes to any a cancer research/charity of your choice”
It’s that simple. Still a fun game, but no one has to be an asshole
•
u/AutoModerator Jul 17 '25
Thank you for posting to r/SipsTea! Make sure to follow all the subreddit rules.
Check out our Reddit Chat!
Make sure to join our brand new Discord Server to chat with friends!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.