The New Scrooge

Are there lemonade stands that donate more to charity than Amazon.com?

With Amazon.com's recent announcement of profits of $645 million on revenues of $19.17 billion last year, the company isn't just surviving the recession—it's pounding its rivals into the dust. So it's cakes and ale all around for charitable beneficiaries of the Seattle giant's largesse, right?

Sure—if they're buying.

While Amazon.com is famously cheap in its prices, it's also become infamously cheap to the community it lives in. The tacit silence over Amazon's stinginess was first broken in a 2007 complaint on a Publishers Weekly blog by a rival Seattle bricks-and-mortar bookseller. When Paul Constant, books editor at the Seattle alt-weekly the Stranger, followed up on the post last year, he hit a stone wall: "[Amazon.com] has refused to return repeated e-mails and calls from The Stranger about the company's seemingly nonexistent contributions to the Seattle arts scene," he wrote at the time. "Internet searches for any sign of philanthropy on behalf of the company prove fruitless."

- By Paul Collins, Slate.com

Read the rest of the article here.