A donation with a sales target

A shop in Riyadh puts a small card by the till. A share of every purchase, it says, goes to a children's charity. Customers like it. Some choose the shop partly because of it, and the charity is grateful for every riyal.

It is worth asking what that card actually is.

If the money only moves when a sale does, it is not quite a gift. It is a cost of selling, the same family as a discount or a referral fee, paid to a cause instead of to a customer. Often it is less than the shop would happily pay anyone else who sent a buyer through the door. The warm feeling at the counter does a lot of the work, and it comes cheaply.

That does not make it bad. Real money reaches real people, and plenty of good has been funded this way.

But it explains what tends to happen next. When the shop has a slow year, or a new owner goes looking for costs to trim, the card disappears. Nobody announces it. The giving was tied to marketing, so it is judged like marketing, and marketing gets cut.

There is an old argument about what a business owes the place it trades in. One side says its only job is profit, so giving money away is a kind of leak. The other says a business makes an unwritten deal with its neighbours, and part of that deal is looking after them even when nobody is counting.

The card by the till sits awkwardly between the two. It borrows the language of the second while running on the logic of the first.

Customers rarely ask which one they are dealing with. They find out the year the card goes missing.