Charity at supermarkets - will you please give a dollar?

[tagryn]

If you've been to a supermarket, Target, KMart, etc. in the past few years, you've probably been asked "Do you want to donate a dollar today to fight breast cancer/raise awareness of diabetes/save a Panda from Bill Gates?" Blogger DC Universe has an interesting post on that titled "The War On Charity". An point I hadn't considered is that corporations get to take tax writeoffs for the charitable contributions they collect, and also get to claim the $$$ collected for PR purposes as donations made by the corporation (instead of having to actually use their own money). So, it isn't nearly as altruistic as it seems on the face of it.