I hope temu and the other Chinese companies in that segment stop selling overseas. Their model is just incredibly destructive to the environment, they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
You will find the exact same items on Amazon, except usually more expensive.
There are many items sold on Aliexpress that are of decent quality.
I think the point is to buy what you really need, and focus on quality, rather than impulse buying cheap stuff that ends up in the garbage after a month.
Our consumerism is hooked onto cheap crap, the factories producing it are only fulfilling the demand.
Demand doesn't need to get fulfilled. The people profiting off this are still the other half of the problem.
It's just a natural byproduct of poverty and a shrinking middle class in the United States. HN readers are not the target customers of Temu. It's those people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford quality goods whatsoever. It's the same as the low quality garbage found in predatory dollar stores in poor neighborhoods.
If you pay peanuts obviously you’re gonna get garbage. You chose to buy garbage, why blame the producer lol.
I don't buy anything from temu, but I also want that nobody else buys stuff from temu.
Good that you're not a policy maker. I'll order something from temu today
I did an experiment for my blog awhile back that never got written up (lack of time, mostly), but it is was just me ordering about $30US of stuff from Temu to see why they were so aggressively marketing themselves, the app auto-installing on my Samsung smartphone I have for work, etc.
The experience left me feeling very, very dirty.
The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar portable power banks, and two small canvas backpacks. Each arrived in separate packages on different days, all shipped from what appeared to be the same CA facility, so right off the bat, we're two strikes against environmental friendliness.
The items were, as you'd expect, utter trash.
- Fire Sicks: these are those magnesium bars shaped like a little key that you strike with a piece of metal to create a spark, this allowing you to maybe start a fire. Now, I've been starting camp fires without flame for most of my life (probably the only thing I took away from my time in the Boy Scouts), so I've seen plenty of junk products that claim to do the same, but these take the cake. The actual "magnesium" bar was coated in a thick black paint for some reason? And the striking tool is a flimsy piece of aluminum coated in orange paint. Useless. I had to use a bit of sandpaper to remove the paint, giving access to the metal parts of both tools, and even then, the spark created was barely hot enough to catch a pile of dead leaves on fire. I don't know what they actually used to make these, but don't assume they will save your butt in a survival situation
- "Solar" Battery Bank: these are just regular USB power banks with a an extremely inefficient photovoltaic panel glued on. It is only capable of powering the green "charging" LED but definitely does not recharge the power bank itself. After I discharged them to see how long it would take to recharge with the solar panel, they sat in direct sunlight for 3 full days before I gave up with no additional power stored. However, they're not a total loss. They still work as you'd expect a regular USB power bank would, rechargeable with a typical micro-USB cord with two outputs to charge your devices. Didn't notice any weird voltages when charging my stuff, either. At the very least, they will not end up in a landfill because I can make use of them on camping trips.
- Canvas Backpack: the stitching is a joke, so don't expect to put anything heavy in these. My wife sews as a hobby, ended up deconstructing them and reinforcing them with some proper canvas material that made them way more rugged and able to hold gear (I use one for fishing magnet crap and the other for rock-hounding tools) but we could not help but wonder just how little the workers were paid to paid these garbage bags and what those conditions are like.
Their business model is built entirely on selling you garbage you do not need that will likely just be thrown away after a few (if any) uses unless you are more diy, willing to try to find ways to make things work or repurpose them. The entire shopping experience is gamified with spinning wheels and lightning deals, coupons falling from the sky, etc, to the point where it was ridiculous and intrusively preventing from searching for things I wanted to order. It felt like their target audience was the old ladies I see spending 8 hours a day glue to the chair of a slot machine in the local casinos. It was so absurd I felt like was in a cartoon about consumerism and actually experienced guilt for having conducted the experiment.
I personally am always weary of cheap power banks. Given the rest of the corners cut on the device, how sure are you that the circuitry and the batteries themselves are of acceptable safety standards.
Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.
Paying more =/= quality, unfortunately. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. Don't be afraid to open up those battery banks now and then if you want to be sure, put a meter on them and scope them if you know how, but you'll find what I typically find; a lot of the same cheap components all wrapped in a pretty package. But because one came from China and one was "made" in the USA, you'll pay a lot more for one than you will the other. You can probably guess which.
I say that as someone who works in manufacturing as a controls and repair tech for industrial IoT and electromechanical integrations (I wear a lot of hats, long story). Trusted brands like Rockwell, Siemens, etc aren't really doing anything that much different than their cheaper competitors and they know it. It's a big part of the reason why their business model includes aggressive pushes to keep their customer "in their world," so to speak, trying to be a one-stop-shop for all their control needs when good number of applications really don't need anything beyond a Koyo Click PLC you can get used for $50 on eBay instead of the $1200 A/B unit. Heck, I've seen automation cells that could have the PLC swapped out with a $20 Arduino and nobody would know the difference except the controls guy. I'd love to say this over-priced cult-like hooey is restricted to the automation industry, but it's definitely not, and bleeds all over a variety of consumer industries, especially those of personal electronics. We are getting ripped off left and right, but if there's a fruit logo or some inventor's name we recognize on the packaging, we're okay taking out a second mortgage to afford it.
In the end, the quality standards in many cases are just a lot of hot air, CYA statements and sales BS. Price is really dictated by the customer's perception of the product, and when you create that trust, legitimate or not, you get to price your product much higher than your competitor, regardless if your product is _actually_ better than theirs. They get away with this because, for the most part, customers don't take the screws out and actually look inside.
Now, that is not to say my experience is always true. There are plenty of companies that make their quality standards and testing pretty transparent so the consumer can review them at their leisure and make a choice. I'm just saying most do not, which creates a lot of shadowy areas where many companies can get away with things simply because they know nobody is looking and taking their word at face value.
Do you really believe that the same safety standards apply to all products?
I bought an Anker Battery bank, which got recalled for some safety issue. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that some random Chinese seller would not have bothered with any of that. Likely such a safety issue would have never come to light.
Battery production is in China anyways. Do you believe that all Chinese companies adhere to the same standards and that companies who are trying to get some kind of brand reputation in the west would still choose the complete bottom end of battery production?
I don't think you read my whole comment, but carry on.
I did and I agree with most of it.
It was also irrelevant to my point, which was exclusively about the dangers of very low quality batteries.
The difference is that you can sue Siemens and Rockwell if it explodes but good luck suing Temu seller. This creates a financial incentive for qa.
I understand it was an experiment but camping supplies are the very last thing I’d order from a site whose entire purpose is to peddle low quality garbage.
> they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
Lots of words for "I ordered something on Temu once, got scammed, now the whole industry should burn down"
I have never ordered anything on temu and I never will.
It's really interesting to see people being ignorant, and proud of their ignorance. Imagine someone saying "All American products are garbage. And I obviously never bought anything American, why on Earth would I buy garbage?"
It is really interesting to see people making up stuff in their heads. Nowhere did I talk about "all", obviously Chinese factories can produce extremely high quality products. E.g. iPhones.
Temu is a trash distributor, the race to the bottom needs to be stopped. Their entire business model is being cheap and shipping trash.
> Their entire business model is being cheap and shipping trash.
[citation needed]
I spent a few thousand on items on AliExpress, and I'm satisfied with almost all of them. How come?
Because you are a consumer and someone who enjoys trash.
To be honest "consumer" is really one of the worst things to call someone, but I think it applies very well to someone like you.
It’s amazing how not only can you decide what others can and should buy, you can also decide the quality of that item for them sight unseen. You should reach out to TV producers - this skill would be very entertaining in a show!
Yes, I am very intelligent for figuring out that products, made under near slavery conditions with the sole goal of making them as cheaply as possible by companies who have exactly zero reputation and whose customers have no way to retaliate are in fact bad. This was an extremely complex deduction on my part and in no way totally obvious.
Also, things that are very bad for the environment should be banned. Not by me, but by the government.
I guess, like the rest of the positive comments, they conflate quantity of choice with quality of choice. I stopped buying stuff online mostly a few years back, covid completely destroyed my trust in online retailers, especially ones with China backed products.
I don't get the desire to pollute some other country just so one can have a hobby, go volunteer at a shelter or something useful.
Externalizing our negativity got the US pretty far, and if walking that back sucks for most people because they're used to buying literal land fill, then that's too bad.
> create so much pollution and waste in the process
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
> create much less landfill
But maybe bought from a salesman with a Humvee and a artisan that spends every last cent on overseas travel
The issue is that trying to analyse the breakdown of $ by environmental outcomes is hard.
There is a lot of propoganda about how to be environmentally sound. We tend to pick one dimension like trash output. We lack the information to be able to make better balanced decisions, for example sometimes the throwaway thing is better for the environment.
> expensive shelfs
I think that example is selection bias. I'm sure you can think of plenty of expensively wasteful examples too (it's easiest to look at other people to find that).
Counter-factual: I made some shelves from waste-stream offcuts, and other shelves were going to be thrown out. Plus costs to paint them (much much less than even the cheapest of new shelves).
You are speaking from the position of privilege. Not everyone is as lucky as you are in your country, let alone the world.