Is Temu the Future of Buying Things? Imagine If Amazon and TikTok Had a Baby

They're apparently spending a ton on advertising. A couple of months ago, suddenly a significant percentage of the ads I'm getting served are for Temu (I can't run an ad blocker on everything, unfortunately). I've never been to the site. The ads are mostly for things I've never (knowingly) shown interest in. It's like "show so many ads for our cheap crap and he'll eventually click on one one day!".

No, it’s a bunch of garbage like that other Chinese site wish.

Literally garbage consumerism to the next level shit products.

I understand some greek philosopher (Aristotle?) used to go down to market just to marvel at all the things he (in particular) had no wish to buy. If only he had lived to see the brave new world of retail-level Revenue Management!

(now all we need is to match up the demand side with the supply side: imagine a sort of Mechanical Turk that offers baskets of tasks a user can bid to accomplish in exchange for tchochkes/groceries shipped to them...)

> "In some ways, Temu could not be more out of step with some current trends in the American market, where delivery times are all-important, name brands carry enormous weight, and sustainability and ethical sourcing are marketing fodder."

Really? Maybe it's all marketing fodder and people are looking for lower prices?

On arXiv I see a huge literature of papers go by on “sequential recommendation”, almost all from researchers in China and India. Looks like a “missile gap” for e-commerce if you ask me.

I have to wonder if people are actually buying stuff from them, or if they are just shipping unsellable garbage to random people.