Corporate Charity and a Guilty Conscience

Factual Questions
1

Several recent threads have mentioned passing the hat among SDMB members and making a donation to the Chicago Reader, in order to buy a better server, etc. The general conclusion was that this would be tantamount to corporate charity, which is in a nebulous area legally and would cause more headaches than it was worth in the long term.

Which got me to wondering…

A couple of years ago I was at a shop where I dropped about $10 worth of merchandise onto the floor and cracked it. Rather than do the right thing and pay for the goods, I surreptitiously put the merchandise back on the shelf and walked out, no one the wiser. My conscience has been bugging me about this ever since, and I’ve decided to send in a $10 money order in order to appease my guilty conscience. Long story short: could the company in question deposit this money order into their accounts just like any other transaction, or would this fall into that nether region of “corporate charity” that is hampering getting a better server for the Chicago Reader?

TIA, as I leave for the bank…

2

A simpler approach would be to buy a $15.00 item (allowing for interest appreciation), duck back in the store as if you forgot something, and put it back on the shelf. Think of it as reverse shrinkage.

Actually processing a money order and figuring out what to do with it would probably be more effort than it was worth for any store bigger than the corner drugstore.

The “putting an item back on the shelf” approach is arguably morally superior as well, because having already committed a morally dubious action in breaking the item and putting it back, paying the company back years later is almost a conspicuously immodest act of atonement.