I don’t see why it would only be Chinese immigrants doing it.
It’s all over the place.
It’s all fun and games until you’re left with a bunch of crap you can’t sell, or it turns out you were shipping dangerous products and now you’re on the hook for it.
Enjoy your 5% profits though.
Yeah this is literally just the newest version of what people have been doing with Amazon and Ebay markets for like 20 years. Anyone can bulk order random shit on Alibaba and then mark it up for the US market. This is just cutting out the middle man.
It’s Sinophobia masquerading as news.
Temu is like NAFTA for American “business” people.
You cut out the factory worker first, then cut out the American importer.
But the U.S. government’s moves to crack down on cheap e-commerce parcels from China have pushed sellers to rethink their business strategies.
So, there’s the problem then. If they made it all more expensive for the American consumer, then that solves the problem. /s
On a serious note: it’s obviously cheaper because there’s no physical shop with no staff. Isn’t this how Bezos started out, from a garage?
Who is buying that shit? I’ve never once heard someone say “look at this great thing I got on temu!”. I’ve literally only seen wish-fail stuff. It seems like a company that extracts pennies from putting shit directly into the landfill.
Tons of people. My wife bought a $7 digital camera off of there for one of our kids and 2 years later, both of our kids still love playing with it and it works perfectly fine. We’ve bought a couple of other toys off of there without issue. But yeah, the majority of the products on there are typically garbage.
Only thing I worry about with toys is if the plastic they use is non-toxic. Most cheap toys sold online aren’t tested for plastic toxicity.
True enough, but toxic toys aren’t super common in the US. It certainly happens, but they eventually get detected and recalled. That being said, with Trump’s plans for gutting regulatory bodies even further, I’ll be much less inclined to order cheap toys from online.
Ive never heard of anything from temu or similar being recalled
Nothing in the article you linked states any sort recalls just companies stating that they take safety seriously. We all know that if a big corporation is saying something its definitely fact and theyd never lie.
If your kid tries to eat their camera you have bigger issues to worry about.
Heavy metals and volatile chemicals can leech through skin. Some have cumulative effects.
If you think toxic means harmful only if you eat it, I’ve got a glow in the dark watch to sell you.
That will match my authentic late 1800s green wallpaper perfectly.
Not the best example, the health risks from radium dials were mostly to the people that painted them, because they licked their brushes to point them.
mostly is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Would you like to buy my glow in the dark watch, then?
I haven’t bought from temu, but I’ve bought loads of stuff for various things on similar sites like aliexpress. If I have the time to wait for the shipping, it’s the exact same components as I buy in electronics supply stores here, but at a fraction of the price. I prefer to not pay a 300-400% markup for no real reason.
Temu is more on par with wish. It’s really scanmy and disingenuous. Descriptions will claim one thing but send you some junk product instead.
AliExpress is a lot more legit. They’re still cheap products, but at least you know what you’re getting.
Anything you can find on Temu you could get from Ali, and usually even a bit cheaper, Temu just adds a predatory interface and false marketing on top of it, and people who have no experience with what Chinese manufacturing actually costs think it’s miraculous.
It isn’t, I’ve been buying this same stuff for almost two decades from sites like DealExpess, BangGood, Gearbest and then just straight from AliExpress. Temu is just the first to properly break through with the advertising. Because it’s mostly just bullshit.
And they gameified it by making it if you got someone else to sign up you both got insane coupons to make stuff that they were selling as loss leaders even cheaper and get enough and you could get it for free.
It made it a race to get the most people to sign up for the app as the very rare person got a switch for free for being better than any advertisement.
They must have been bleeding money for the name recognition. I still think their name equals trash.
AliExpress (if you are not the person thiking you can get a 4TB SSD for 20€) is great.
It started off as a “for people” Alibaba.com and I have bought lots of quality stuff there including a phone, circuits, tools (not the best but they will probably outlive me), 3D printer stuff etc etc.
Temu is like wish, just crap.
I would say you should be free to make the decision to forego the advantages working though a middle man affords you, if you would prefer the savings. That said, there’s consumer protection, quality certification (important for insurance purposes), returns, after sales care and I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff. Nothing to do with differences in the product itself, more so the guarantee of a product that does what it says on the tin.
I use AliExpress for all the little items in my life that can fail without any real problem.
I need a comb and get 2/$1 to my door. $3/4/5 each in a physical store for the same. I don’t think you’re appreciating how often these are literally the same products.
The retail sector has long ago entered enshittification. I’m not blind to the real people working in the field, but paying more for a product does not increase the chance of any positive environmental or social outcome. Feeding the beast, feeds their investors.
There is no ethical consumption.
There is no ethical consumption.
“What, me worry?”
It’s the exact same components I would have bought at a local store if there were any.
The last one closed almost 20 years ago. (Long before Temu, aliexpress and banggood)
I’d always thought there was a better use for the name Banggood than an electronic component store
I thought that’s what they call upvotes on PornHub.
I thought those were called ErectVotes
Not temu, but I buy loads of stuff from aliexpress, from dice to entire 3d printers.
As a counterpoint, I’ve bought loads of really good cycling accessories from AliExpress. It’s not impossible to buy high-quality things from China - this is after all where a large part of everything is manufactured these days - you just have to be careful not to fall for the offers that are just obviously too good to be true.
I’ve met people that have gotten decent stuff off there. Their clothes seem nice and the electronics are hit and miss.
It’s about the same rate of crap to quality as EBay these days, and Amazon is only marginally better.
Temu is insanely popular. Don’t underestimate this. Yes, it’s pure crap, but people buy it. They earn bucks.
Meaning, it’s not a valid argument to say it’s crap, and then it’s not a problem. Temu is a problem.
But then we have to start another discussion about the free market, because then Temu is valid.
Then what? Legit question, I don’t have the answer to.
The thing is that it’s not PURE crap.
It’s kind of like going to a flea market. Most of it is crap and you can still find some decent and good stuff that’s way cheaper than it should be.
Gues why: Ultra cheap labor.
And probably not 100% voluntary.I cannot obtain food and housing without work. I am being coerced to work under duress. I would like to get off this planet now. Like right now.
I don’t need to guess. I know from having been to China and having talked to people.
It’s mostly a combination of 3 things:
- Tons of infrastructure. If you decide to start manufacturing some random thing you can easily get all the stuff you need to get started.
- Regulations are generally very favorable to small startups and businesses. This is partly why so much of the stuff on Temu is crap.
- A huge population. That’s the main source of ultra cheap labor. Farmers in rural China can still make as little as $1.90 per day. All a factory owner needs to offer is more than that and they’ll have a line of applicants.
But those reasons aren’t nefarious
Do they sell Adderall?
I got some temu stuff. A 7$ bag heat sealer. Works perfectly fine.
However, I do not abide surveillance pricing. I can defeat the surveillance pricing but the procedure annoys me, so I’ve gone back to aliexpress which is easier to defeat.
What is surveillance pricing? Are they like using cookies to subtley raise the price on thing you’re searching for?
Things like using surveillance to figure out when your payday is and raising prices (just for you, and just on that day) because you psychologically are more willing to spend in that moment
That’s fucked up. Why this legal?
Because we live in a capitalist hellscape and the companies that implemented these tricks were the fastest growing segment of our economy for like 15 years (esp after the 2008 crash) so the government turned a blind eye. Now they control the world and are able to literally buy politicians
I’ve heard that if we vote, all these problems will go away. But every time I vote, there’s never an option on the ballets for “Guillotines”
You need to vote for people that will PUT guillotines on the ballot! If there are none, find someone who will, or be the change you want to see.
The free market will provide guillotines if the people truly want them. /s
Any tips on defeating aliexpress pricing? I stopped buying because everything was up so much.
It’s a process for me, I open hundreds of tabs, save all URLs, strip trackers from URLs, remove duplicates, then I reload all tabs into a fresh, empty multiaccount container, then I use a scraper addon called gatherfromtabs to pickup all the prices, then I log and setup everything up to the last page of the sale, I tally up all the totals in excel, order by price, usually 100s of ads, find the absolute 3 cheapest ones, review the ads really thoroughly to avoid scams and then buy 10-20x of whatever this item was to make it worth my time.
This process will become more difficult over time.
wtf
Aliexpress sent me a broken spoons instead of my item and refused to refund, I had an issue with Temu and was issued a quick refund. Temu seems much better than aliexpress.
Neither are good, stop using discount brainrot shopping sites
Exactly, quit using amazon.
Temu? More like Trashmu.
It’s the same low-to-medium quality crap that you can usually find on Amazon at a slightly higher price.
Reason why I only buy at AliExpress and only stuff I don’t ingest or wear on me for longer times.
Yes!
This is the way. Why pay double for eBay or Amazon to ship me stuff from AliExpress anyways for like 5 day faster shipping at best.
But only for the same garbage that they will sell anyways. Shoes are leather and can be fixed and have been at a cobbler for like $40 to new. Clothing should be bought once and last at least a year if not much much longer. So I buy from better brands in person if possible.
I don’t get why I should pay Amazon to be a shitty middle man that is trying to destroy the world more for my crap.
I only buy reputable brands from ebay or Amazon. Ingestible stuff usually locally if possible.
I bought from eBay recently and I got a package from Amazon. I don’t buy from either anymore.
You should actually report that seller to eBay. Thats against their TOS.
Yeah I tried. I actually couldn’t get a real support agent and eventually the refund period auto triggered cause the seller couldn’t figure out how for me to return it.
eBay doesn’t care. They just want their little piece.
