It does make you wonder.
But it helps if you think of it as advertising money. Or tchotchke money.
(Which, considering how long this thread is and how long people here and elsewhere spend spreading the word it pretty much *is* a viral advertising campaign.)
Well run conpanies have budgets that make sense for them: Apple might assign $200 for a launch budget on the next iPhone and blanket TV with warm and fuzzy ads that may translate into 2Billion in added sales which given Apple's legendary markups means those $200M *may* translate into an extra billion for the McDuck vault.
Amazon has an advertising budget but they don't operate on Apple's scale. Their ads are few and limited. More to generate coverage of the ads than looking to generate direct sales. (Think of the pool ads or the recent PRIME Air video.)
Other business have budgets for giveaways, T-shirts and stuff. Once upon a time Amazon sent me a couple free insulated travel cups. They long since stopped doing that.
What they are doing these days, though, is letting buyers choose their freebies.
The individual orders don't matter; they are bookkept as normal. Somebody bought a coloring book, they made the same profit as usual. *How* that purchase is paid for doesn't matter to the bottom line. What will matter is how much total business was generated by the pot of money they set aside to cover the perk. Say they budgeted $20M for the perk and it saves them $10M in shipping and generates $19m in added sales. They made an extra $11 million though it may seem like they lost money.
(In reality, the added sales multiplier will be more than a fraction but some of those sales they were going to get anyway. Still they just turned trinket giveaway money into shipping cost savings, a sale, and "buzz". And as we've seen in the news lately, Amazon is very interested in both reducing shipping costs and increasing Prime sales. The buzz is frosting. Or maybe the buzz is the cake...
So they set aside a pot of money to do that.
They are still doing it so it must be a net win when *all* their interests are factored in. Which, apparently, the travel cups weren't...
