Tesco in cash machine charity donation uproar

Customers are told that by drawing cash from the supermarket giant's ATMs they are helping the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity.

 Their slogan is "every little
helps" and miserly Tesco bosses are doing just that… by giving
ONE EIGHTIETH of a penny to charity when you use one of their
cashpoints. But the small print shows how little each visit to the
hole in the wall contributes. Customers would have to use a Tesco ATM
8,000 times before the supermarket gives £1. If 800,000 punch
in their pin number, the total reaches £100 – and when the
machines have been used eight million times, the charity gets £1,000.

The promotion, which runs until the end
of February, is hoped to raise £33,000 for the cause.

Tesco – which made record profits of
£2.8billion in 2007 – decided their 2008 charity should be
Marie Curie, which cares for people with terminal cancer.

A Tesco spokesman said: "This is
money going to charity that would not otherwise be going there. We
have 15million customers a week so we should raise quite a bit."