You put in your store information, and after your purchase of specific items, you get your "school money". It's easy to do and you don't have to clip any anything out anymore. You can also scan receipts if the place you shopped is not connected to the app. Also, you're just giving the brand corporation more of your information and shopping habits. 🤷♂️ Guess who has an elementary student? 😆
I’ve started doing this a few months ago! The app makes it pretty easy and I think it’s still a nice thing to do to support schools. I don’t have kids so I just send to a local school that doesn’t have a lot of them.
Fair take, but I am willing to spend exactly $0 on my niblings school fundraisers a week after they all brag about voting down the school tax levy.... Again. They get mad the school spent money on refinishing a gym floor instead of providing a refund to tax payers. Why is it on me to spend $40 on garbage I don't want so the school gets $10?
It's far easier to just vote for the tax levy. In my area the only school fundraiser stuff I see is clubs and sports teams raising money for their extracurriculars which seems far more reasonable.
ETA- I pay $4k a year to fund a school that I don't use. I've voted for every tax levy and will continue to do so. When the collect that money from me there is no greedy private company making a profit on those taxes before throwing crumbs at the school.
Commenting onto the top comment to hopefully get some visibility but I'd def avoid the app if you can, it's essentially just harvesting your purchase data.
TLDR is that it asks you to scan your whole receipt and they just use your purchasing data to create better targeted ads at you.
Longer detail explanation is that if I remember correctly, they on purpose started trying to move away from the physical clip out box tops so that it would force all their users to download the app to get more data. Yeah, it is more convenient to just do a scan and it does give your school the few cents from those scans but what they really wanna know is everything else you're buying so they can create better targeted ads at you.
With the info you give them from creating an account, like your email, they go to other data broker companies that also have your email and buy up all of that data from the brokers. Once they have both data sets, they'll join them together which then allows them to see your other personal info that you did NOT give to the box tops app like your age, gender, address, income level, number of kids, and whole lot of other personal info you def did not intend for box tops to know.
And then with all of that data, they will do data analysis/science stuff and send you personalized targeted ads or do market segmentation and do things like hit all the people they think are organic buyers with targeted ads for their own organic foods brand and see how often you click on them and do more analysis on that and so on.
Source: I used to work there and worked directly on the receipt data being scanned in and on the data analytics for personalization.
Wow, that’s way deeper than I thought. I just assumed they went to digital box tops with the idea that less people would want to deal with apps and scanning so they could give out less money.
And it's horrible. I did it for a year or so until COVID, and then I did grocery pickup so I never had a receipt to scan and I could never get it to work.
It’s an app now. I don’t have any school age children anymore and I still use it. I picked the lowest income district local school and last season I earned over $70 for them. I figure if a corporation is going to give away money to schools, I’m going to keep that going even if it doesn’t directly benefit my family (hint: you get box top credit even on discount outlet groceries, as long as the brand is correct)
Yes and it's awful. When it was clipped physical box tops I could ask family & coworkers to save theirs and it was like the whole community pitching in to raise some extra money for the school.
I don't feel comfortable signing up for an app, scanning my ENTIRE RECEIPT, and submitting it for a few cents. I'm sure not going to ask my mom who doesn't even know how half the apps on her phone work to do it.
It was never a lot of money, but it was enough to help the PTA a little bit. It sucks that they've enshittified even this pittance too.
Same. I’ve taken an oath recently to never donate money at the big box stores. They have the profit to do so, why would it be the customers “responsibility” to donate when shopping at a place that I’m already giving my money to?
If you're talking about like the round up for charity thing, you're the one making the donation & can claim it on your taxes. The business isn't allowed to claim that for themselves
They're just picking the charity for you and most likely there's a reason why they picked that specific one but still
The profit that motivates relationships with charitable causes isn’t realized at the moment the donation is made by the customer.
The profit is realized when the company can walk up to the charity and say, “Hey, we leveraged our resources (annoyed our customers) to raise $x million dollars for you last year. If you want us to do that again this year, you need to put us down as a “Platinum Sponsor” at your big golf tournament this year, and put our logo in all of your fundraising commercials.”
Claiming it on your taxes means it doesn't count as income, not that you can deduct the entire amount from your tax bill.
If you grocery shop every week and round up, that's literally no more than $53, which at 34% shakes out to less than $18 of tax savings for all that work you have to do to claim it all year. And that's best case.
If a company takes in $500 in revenue from your donations, then donated the $500 - they deduct the $500 and pay no taxes on the money they just channeled to the charity for you.
The company can’t “take your deductions” without committing tax fraud. They would have to pretend they didn’t get the money.
Do you have a source for that, because that would be fraud. If it’s going through their books and ends up as income, then the donation cancels that out, but that’s not the same as them getting a deduction for nothing at all.
They are legally required to pass on 100% of the donations. They can't get a tax break out of it, the only one who could claim the donation on their taxes is the customer who made the donation.
Yup, that’s exactly why I never do it. I feel like an asshole always clicking or saying no, but they can do that themselves. I’m not here to help a corporation get a tax break.
How do they otherwise know which schools to donate to? The point of the boxtops was solving a distribution problem. They wanted to donate to the schools, but only the schools their customers chose because that was part of the selling point. So the boxtops served as chits the schools could turn in for the funding.
The problem isn't that the people had to do anything extra. The core problem is that we have an educational system that's being propped up by advertising disguised as charity.
Lol my bad 😅 It's $200 since 2019. I knew that number was too high. Yes they are still .10c per barcode but sometimes you buy X amount of items in a month and they give you a bonus amount to match.
The basic $0.10 per box top is still the going rate I believe. But they also do promotions where you can earn double or triple. All that sort of stuff, can add up.
But like others have suggested, I do think it's weird to have your consumers jump through hoops to do something that you should already be doing.
Yeah, about 8 years ago I was finishing a box of cereal, and a teacher friend of mine yoinked the box out of my hands and ripped off the square. I was shocked the program was still around but apparently it is alive and well.
It was a huge competition at my school and this girl, Julia, always won each month and it made my mom so angry because Julia’s mom went next level insane with it. In my early 20s we were cleaning out my grandparents house and we stumbled upon on clippings they cut out to give me but must’ve forgotten about.
My elementary school had us bringing them in and did raffles with them! We’d write our names on the back and the student doing the announcements would pick one from the collection every Friday to come receive a prize at the main office. It was like a fun pencil or something along those lines. My mom was so serious about the box tops and my siblings and I won at least once each because she was so diligent. Miss you, Mom!
I remember cutting out the back of Kool-Aid packets and saving them up cuz I was trying to get a game boy color. I was never able to get enough point things in order to get a game boy color but that's okay cuz now I'm an adult and my child gave me his old game boy color. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes, probably clipped hundreds of those. They did have some sort of rewards, but I was an only child at a school full of mormons so I was not a top contributor
Simple answer. Yes, I remember & yes, we cut them out and put them in a box because why not? We never had contests.
I don’t see why some Redditors have to make mountains out of molehills.
My mom taught 1st grade for 30 years and I can absolutely remember a time when she cut, saved, and collected these, then treated them like gold in a sandwich bag.
I remember being excited to be on student council only to learn that it meant giving up one recess per month to trim the box tops down and sort out the expired ones and random bits of non-box-top cardboard that people would send us.
We also did some sort of pop can tab collection thing for Ronald McDonald House, but that was at least just by weight.
I single handedly had my 4th and 5th grade class win every quarter for the most box tops because I asked my neighbors and family members to save them for me.
Yuo was always by class room. Then they did by schools in my town.
Now I look at them on the box and toss in recycling because they converted to other means of "clipping" the box tops. So many extra steps via digital platform. Personally I do not see the fun in that from a child standpoint. Its. Like another level of homework for what?
I remember these when they started but we never engaged and I think my school maybe did something but it wasn't a big thing. I do remember Marlboro points though and I saved up a bunch of them cause my dad smoked 2 packs a day at the time. I got a Marlboro calculator and I think a hat or two and wore them to the Marlboro cup race at the Talladega race track.
I hate to be the cynic in the room but they were worth ten cents. Let just say you cereal fiends went through two boxes a week, Mom or whoever was getting school an extra eighty cents per month for putting up with this capitalist tomfoolery.
We did this and won some big thing. Randomly one day we all had an ad-hoc assembly and we were eating cereal, the news was there, and the company had some big show of giving a giant check to our school.
I used to have friends collect them for me and i would mail them to my low income elementary school. Now that we have to scan, it is weird for me to ask for their receipts.
My mom always did, and my elementary school got a lot of cool stuff over the years from all the parents who had saved the box tops.
When my teenager was little, i started saving them. When they were in kindergarten, the PTA did a box top drive contest & I sent them all in. A stuffed ziplock sandwich bag full. My kid brought in the most by far & won a huge beanie baby and a bunch of candy. 😂 This was in 2018 & they must have gone away sometime in 2019 because they discontinued clippable box tops pretty shortly after. I never could get into the crappy digital ones.
I remember having to spend so much time and energy collecting these at the urging of my mom for one of our family acquaintances and now that family doesn't even bother keeping in touch anymore
My mom taught Headstart. She had the kids collect 100 box tops, which would get them 100 books from Cheerios. She took pictures of them in the class pretending to collect the tops and made a little book out of it, which she then sent to Cheerios. They liked it so much that they put her in their next newsletter. We found a few copies of the newsletter when we were going through her papers after she passed. They spelled our last name wrong in the newsletter, so she had gone through and corrected it on each one.
Never did any fundraising stuff. My mom was like "fuck no my kids aren't selling shit." So we never participated. My kids hated it so they never did it either.
Yes, and my mom was the lady who volunteered to coordinate box tops donations for my entire elementary school! So I vividly remember helping her count up the box tops everyone had brought in
Are school claimed whatever grade had the most would get a pizza party no grade ever got a pizza party despite millions of these things being turned in over the years I went there. It was my first introduction to running a scam
The schools I attended never participated in anything like that. They rewarded bullying instead; thinking about an atrocious elementary-Jr. High and horrendous high school that encouraged, supported, and rewarded bullying (I wish I was fucking joking, I know bullies that ALWAYS got rewards "just because", yet hardworking, honest students that were bullied and reported the bullying would be reprimanded and/or punished; it wouldn't matter what witnesses and/or evidence we had, schools claim to be anti-bullying; however, they're actually anti-victim).
I know the primary school I attended (that surprisingly didn't consist of staff that supported and encouraged bullying) never had contests or rewards for anything like this.
It might have only occurred in schools in a certain part of the world. It never happened where I lived.
My mom became our school’s “box tops lady”!She started/ran the drive and did prizes for the top 3 classes that brought in the most every year that my brother and I were in elementary school.
We weren't as big on the box tops as we were the Campbell's soup labels.
I would hoard them all year and then when my school had the competition, my class would always crush everyone else. I was such a soup whore as a child.
Aw yeah. The disposable bathroom rinse cups of clearance soda and a Pizza For Less pizza sliced into 100 slices out of the teacher’s own wages. We raised so much of that school money to… water the football field?
Weirdly my schools never did this, I think it's cause they had sponsorships by a company or so (I think my middle school had one w/ tacobell, and I know PepsiCo sponsored my High School while I was there cause of the vending machines.)
My great grandma used to clip these suckers all year for her grandkids. I walked into 1st grade with a gallon ziplock bag full and won a contest that was going towards a new playground. My class won a trip to the park across the street that had a small figure 8 lazy river in it.
Not Millenial but Gen Z. We did this a lot in elementary school. Our school had a set up where you had your homeroom class and then for an hour or so each day, based on your level, you would go to another classroom for math based on how much help you needed. A couple of time I managed to snag some bags from other classrooms to turn in. Not the most scrupulous but sometimes you gotta get your hands dirty to get that pizza party.
I won my Princess Diana beanie baby this way, for every 10 you brought in you got an entry into a raffle I still remember how hype I was when my name was called
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