Rise of fast-fashion Shein, Temu roils global air cargo industry
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
Shein and Temu shipping all through planes.
Without being a super eco-conscious person, I am wondering if those ultra-fast-fashion is sustainable. I am sure some of those products are great. But the amount of trash that it would generate is staggering.
It feels like it is a massive transfer of trash from one country to the rest of the world... done in individual packages... sent by plane. I fail to see how society in general is benefiting from it.
It isn't. If you want to dress sustainably, you should be primarily buying second-hand clothes (and ideally ones that are made from textiles that survive years of wear and wash). Fast-fashion is an ecological disaster, both in terms of the sheer volume of low-quality material produced and its byproducts (e.g. dye discharges in water from factories).
Interesting, is there some sort of desiccant, or active drying method involved?
What I have noticed is that when I do this, my clothes no longer develop a mildewy smell if I forget them sitting wet. They still come out smelling clean (i.e. not smelling.)
What categories of "stuff" do you see as something that could last 100 years?
Houses fall apart quickly without maintenance: when roofs fail, or moisture gets in through other means, you get mold and other problems. Plumbing problems can also cause a lot of destruction. Also, earthquakes will quickly topple houses made of brick and stone.
>books and good quality paper,
Lots of books don't have good quality paper, and it falls apart after a few decades. It might not be such a problem now, but a lot of latter-20th-century books have fallen apart because of this.
>bicycle frames (metal)
Steel bike frames rust, and both steel and aluminum frames can have welds break because of the stresses of riding and use. However, most of the money in a decent bicycle is in the wheels and components, not the frame, unless you have a high-end bike (carbon fiber), and these all wear out with use.
>good quality furniture
Highly susceptible to water damage, even from drinks. Finishes get beat up with use. Wood warps with moisture changes. Solid wood furniture without veneers is probably best for avoiding ugly damage from use, but warps easier, and costs a lot.
>paintings
These only last because people are really careful with them. Even so, to be really kept in good shape they need highly controlled conditions: ask any art museum.
>anything made of glass or metal.
Glass stuff is easily broken from use.
And I need to read it.
Workout clothes are plastic, some T-shirts are plastic too, some are cotton. Socks are cotton or wool. I put them in a bucket of cold water with a detergent made for that (sorry, I don't know the English word for that.) Liquid for wool and socks, powder for the other clothes. Five minutes are enough. Up to here is not worse that putting everything into a washing machine and you can do it in any house.
The tedious part is washing away the soap with cold water. That takes time. I hang the T-shirts and the large clothes and wash them with a hand shower. You need a place to do it without flooding the house. For small clothes and socks, the bathroom sink. Squeeze out water gently by compression, don't twist.
Then I hang them to dry. From here on is the same as with a washing machine. Once they stop dripping water you can put them anywhere. In winter you need either a window in the sun or a source of heat or it will take forever and they'll smell. Don't put them directly on a heater, that would destroy anything plastic quickly. Leave a span.
This is not something that can be done in every house but if you can then clothes will last much longer especially the workout plastic ones. Check the detergents for water temperature, colors, type of fabric, time etc.
Edit: make sure to let air flow somehow because that water in the clothes must get out of the house or you'll get mold especially in some climates.
From Terry Pratchett:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
I've worn a 15 € supermarket-brand hoodie around the house for about ten years before it started showing any signs of fatigue at the elbows. I've had more expensive, "name brand" articles of clothing wear out after much shorter and lighter use. In between, the absolute worst was a 30-40 € H&M blouse which became two sizes too big after a month.
Fashion brands aren't build for quality. They're built for aesthetic. If given a trade-off between ruggedness and something more frivolous and daring, a fashion brand should pick the latter. That's how they differentiate.
The sibling below mentions Tommy Hilfiger, and it just reminded me that one of the worst pieces of clothing I ever bought was from a Tommy store in New York.
One store that's absolutely worth a visit if you live in NY is the century 21 outlet mall near ground zero. I've been there twice when I attended a conference and you get really good quality clothing for cheap, that was absolutely worth it. Every single one of those lasted a long time.
I too have a hoodie which is probably going on 15 years old now. It's finally started getting faded and looking a bit old but still very much usable, think it came from Walmart when I was visiting the US.
In the same vein I've got an old pair of dirt cheap trainers I bought on another US trip in about 2008, still abosolutely fine and cost under $20. In contrast the expensive pair of converse I bought less than 2 years ago are already falling apart.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39533939 [2]https://textileexchange.org/responsible-wool-standard/
> if I know they will last and they are made to my standard
That's exactly the issue. How do you know that as a regular person?
I'm mostly happy with my shirts for example, which I think are made locally in France (but don't know how they source their materials). Their quality seems to be fairly stable, and if I buy them on sale, they're very good value for money.
But with other name brands, it's been more hit and miss. Levi's jeans, for example. One pair has lasted so long, I don't even remember when I've bought it, used it a lot riding a motorbike. Another pair has started thinning between the thighs in maybe two years of lighter use (going to the office or out around town), and it's never even been close to my bike.
> I've yet to find anything outerwear(hoodies, jeans, shorts etc) made to my standard that is less than $100, I'm not sure it's possible if you include responsible sourcing.
I'm absolutely fine with paying more for garments that last. What I hate, is paying a ton and ending up with poor quality.
If you would be able to articulate what you look for in a quality garment, I'm sure a lot of people would be more than happy to read on it.
Doc Martens for footwear if you like boots; they're mendable.
Tilly's shirts have held up surprisingly well for me but I think they carry Dickies stuff there anyway.
Dryers degrade most clothing and cause pilling. Avoid them and hang dry wherever possible.
They don't even fit the same! One is clearly larger, whereas the other was skin-tight when new. One seems somewhat thicker than the other.
....or not and it will fall apart just as quick if not quicker.
I wish if it was just "pay us extra and it will last longer"
For those curious. Hang drying alone is a much smaller part of effort and gets you a lot closer to having your clothes not wear out prematurely.
I don't really take any special care, just put it in the washing machine every now and again.
They use Merino wool, however not very much of their wool is sourced through the Responsible Wool Program(4% as of 2022), so there is a lot of wool in their cloths come from places you may not like how the sheep are treated. Their cotton is around 60% slave free(not bad for a fast fashion brand).
I recently got into sewing, turns out it's a very good way to learn how to recognise good quality clothes. It's also a very good way to recycle old adult clothes into brand new clothes for children. Highly recommend to any nerd wanting to do some manual labour away for the computer.
[0] French brand, all sorts https://www.loom.fr/
[1] British brand, underwear for men https://bluebuck.net/
And yes, I know that sounds a lot like Homer and his blue pants.
Well, clothes that survive years of wear and wash are not so easy to be found. And sustainable clothes that you can buy at your local shops are incredibly expensive and the resulting quality is still meh.
Fast fashion is on the rise since people don't want to spend big money on clothes that are almost comparable to the ones sold by fast fashion stores, but just with a big label on it.
IMHO the big blame isn't on consumers or on fast fashion stores, but on the competition, that lowered their quality, raised their prices and expected to make profit from this strategy.
To close the circle, people buy cheap things, including clothes, because their purchasing power hasn't scaled up like inflation, but in many countries the purchasing power has dropped (example: Italy, where salaries are stuck to the 1990 levels)
I have €20 shirts that have lasted for more than a decade and €100 shirts that looked like crap after a few months. Brand is not a guarantee either, I have bought superficially similar products from the same brand with radically different results (I suppose they were made in different factories). Same goes for material, there is 100% cotton clothing that is great and other is absolute crap. Over the years I have found a few brands that I more or less trust, but the process involves a staggering amount of trial and error because most brands are just either bad or inconsistent. In particular, European brands seem to be the worst offenders (and I say this as an European). American brands seem somewhat more reliable, although this might be just statistical noise from small sample or selection bias from American brands that reach Europe.
In general, I find the whole textile industry outraging. No other physical goods industry that I know has so little regard for the customer. What would happen if a brand sold 14" laptops that actually were 13" and short-circuited your whole home when plugged in? At the very least people would return them, and probably many would sue. But with clothes, it's very common to buy size 36 pants that turn out to be smaller than your size 34 pants (apparently, they haven't mastered the technology of measuring tape) and that bleed dye and spoil your whole laundry when you wash them. And we have somehow collectively decided that those obviously avoidable things are acceptable. Why?
I'd point at software, but I guess it's not physical, so the next "best" thing would be... just about all the bottom-feeder dirt cheap stuff from Aliexpress/Temu/etc., that I'm even more apalled that they exist now that I hear they're being shipped by air.
Anyway.
> And we have somehow collectively decided that those obviously avoidable things are acceptable. Why?
I imagine for the same reason most tech sucks: because the market is supply-driven, and doesn't get any useful feedback from the customers. Buyers choose from what is available, and the choice is only between bearing the bullshit, or doing without a category of goods - which for clothes is even harder than with smartphones... It's neat little local minimum in developed markets: even when the barrier to entry is low (much easier to launch a clothes line than build a smartphone), the most profitable move for all competitors is still to double-down on the race to the bottom.
Or put another way: customers have a certain amount of dissatisfaction they're willing to tolerate. Anything more satisfying than that limit is just leaving money on the table.
Humankind as a whole is not benefitting from this. It’s a net-negative. It’s a loan with future generations as collateral, one that those whom are responsible for this never intend to repay.
https://www.slavefreechocolate.org/ethical-chocolate-compani...
Nobody cares what Western companies do in Kenia or Bangladesh but the knives come out for China moving up the value chain.
You think you're living in an open and free society, yet in reality, you're immersed in lies. Yesterday, I saw a news report on YouTube that shocked me, and what was even more shocking was that the video had zero comments underneath it. Refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=xgJgKCIN-kw&ab_c...
I don't know these companies, but I am pretty sure those products are shit.
SOD. Shit on demand.
Just looked at the prices. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck quacks like a duck...
"Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily.."
How boring. They should do just in time production. Have AI create an infinite amount of products that are JIT produced when you order.
fees to sell on amazon are very high.
clothing is specially expensive with referral fees of 17% plus per unit fixed fees for shipping and returns.
on low price products these fixed fees are specially onerous. on a $15 product all fees could be 2/3 of the price.
so shein could sell you something for $6-8 and get as much as they would by selling it on Amazon $15.
that said, amazon will start lowering clothing fees in april. who would have thought that some competition would be good for customers.
I am sure the same can be applied to many situations, including numerous one you (and I) are engaging. It just depends how much moral grounds you would like to project to feel better.
What is actually benefiting society? There is likely slightly more than one answer to that.
All thoroughly unnecessary stuff, unless you happen to like it and are able to afford it.
Also, no one needs their morning shot of FB or HN ...
And we may speculate for hours whether fur or golf accessories "good for society" and there likely will be no consensus on the matter :)
It doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. The grand scheme of things being something like 70 million new passenger cars being sold each year. Now that's a lot of future trash.
In theory the stuff they send should go through customs, but they practically DDoS the system by sending the 20 things you ordered in 20 packages, all marked below the price that would warrant a customs declaration - no matter the actual cost of the item.
The customs over here would've had to hire a significant percentage of the whole population just to manage the packages...
I've never had a single AliExpress package be held at customs and I've been ordering stuff from there before it was cool.
Is there an uber-for-plane-luggage that I don't know about ?
> Shein drops up to 10,000 new items on its website daily, for all sizes and tastes. The retailer doesn't make these clothes in large amounts; it produces a few hundred and orders more only if enough people start to buy them. Once they do, it can turn a design into a garment in as little as 10 days.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1204983212/shein-america-fast...
That feels like a rude stereotyping that is dismissive of the buyers. Maybe not your thing but no need to get judgy about it. The buyers know what they are getting.
They choose to buy Shein for their own reasons - a good practice is to assume people have good reasons (maybe other reasons than the quality or reasons that you don't understand).
As you say, "people know what they are getting", and that's fine.
I really don't understand some people's choices, but that's why it's interesting!
Saying it's just 'utter garbage' is to simple.
https://en.adererror.com/product/sig-trs-tag-hoodie-zip-up-0...
A hoodie like this could last you 10 years easily if you took care of it, made in South Korea, tripe weight cotton.
A cheap Temu hoodie, by comparison, would need to make it a single year, maybe only 6–8 months, to have equivalent lifespan / $. (If priced at $25, or like $15.)
Shoes: New Balance 990v4 (USA). Socks: Darn Tough (USA). Jeans: Texas Jeans (USA). Undershirt: Sloane (USA). Underpants: Duckworth (USA). Shirt: Gitman (USA).
The only non-US things I own tend to be shoes (Italy, Spain) and jackets (UK). Or gifts.
YES it does cost more. But here's the thing: I have fewer, nicer, things that last longer and I almost certainly spend way less annually than someone buying $7 shirts from Shein or Walmart clothes.
So, buying trash made of the worst possible materials by slave labor is a choice unless you are the poorest of the poor in which case you, and only you, get a pass.
A single digit percentage of Americans.
Keep on making excuses.
If everyone who didn't make minimum wage spent more consciously instead of just gulping down cheap Chinese goods like a hungry hungry hippo eats marbles and shopped locally economies of scale would make higher quality products available to everyone.
I don't participate in races to the bottom.
Your comment just proved my point.
Would you accuse the Seattle coffee industry that can roast and drop ship a custom bag of coffee in under 3 days of running on slave labor? Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor? No, of course you wouldn't. But we do that for China because we assume that it's still the world's sweat shop rather than the world's most sophisticated manufacturing hub.
China is the Silicon Valley of textiles (and it's the Silicon Valley of many other manufacturing industries). Chinese factories that generally pay better wages that afford much better conditions than other textile hubs and can pump out high quality products very quickly. Luxury clothing brands depend on China and generally not a lot of other textile-producing countries for their best quality items.
What Shein, Temu, and AliExpress are actually doing in the market is streamlining the overseas shipping process to cut down delivery times that used to be unreliable and take months with poor tracking and changing that to a generally reliable 8-12 business day shipping infrastructure.
Making the assumption that these websites only sell landfill-bound junk is an assumption that a competing business will make at their own peril. The way I see it, canceling my Amazon Prime subscription and moving most of those purchases to AliExpress has resulted in lower costs with equal quality.
I'm not saying that Shein's quality specifically is any good, but if you haven't been paying attention, clothing quality at mainstream Western stores like Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx, Ross, Zara, H&M, etc, isn't really much if any better than the low end no-brand stuff you find from China.
https://humantraffickingsearch.org/there-could-be-labor-expl...
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/starbucks-illegally-ke...
>Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor?
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2013-mar-20-la-fi-tn...
To me it seems odd that the statement “they have free slave labor” would be considered to be specific to one firm.
It’s legitimately 2 million enslaved Muslims imprisoned, working for $0.
https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
I do think this senate report is a little bit butthurt that their own regulations and trade agreements have enabled the business model.
It seems like it would be trivial to block out platforms in violation of US law via pressure by payment networks. That’s where I’m confused at the level of inaction given that this report includes a screenshot of a product page in violation. Visa and Mastercard can get Pornhub to vet their “suppliers” but they can’t do the same for Temu? They don’t even need a court order to do this.
The reality is the next generation of hard-tech and pretty much everything innovative in materials and manufacturing is coming out of China.
Like we are hearing a whole bunch of nonsense now about rare-earths and how China is nearly 100% of the supply of several along with processed graphene etc.
But what that story is missing is the less sophisticated stuff they were able to massively revolutionize also.
For instance most Western media declare the Belt and Road program a massive failure without looking at it's impact on things like nickel. Indonesia is now one of the worlds biggest suppliers because they a) banned export of unprocessed nickel and then lent hard into the BRI borrowing from China and allowing Chinese operated mines to setup their own processing there. As a result more of the value add is captured in Indonesia (the whole goal of all of this) and now Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of nickle pig iron and stainless steel. How is this possible when giant (and heavily experienced) Western mining companies in places like Australia (which also have vast nickle reserves) were both established and ready to expand? Well that comes down to tech and expertise. China was able to design and build a new class of nickle smelters that were 2-3x as capital efficient as the Western equivalent plants in Australia.
What impact did that have? Well a giant reduction in the price of nickel of course as Indonesia went from nearly no output to over 1.8M tons.
There are tons of other examples, especially in anything related to the next generation of energy. Solar, batteries, nukes, all the inputs for the above like polysilicon etc.
The Chinese are fucking good at this stuff and pretending they just copy and do stuff cheap is not only a massive disservice to the Chinese engineers that make this happen but also a dangerous mistake if you want to go into business competing with them.
(Commodified clothes are a pet fascination of mine. The fact that we've gone from spending 15% of our annual income on apparel to 2-3% in just over a century is astounding[1]).
Briefly looked at the wife's side of the closest. First article that I stumbled upon with a Shein tag was a long sleeve blouse: neck tag labeled made in China, material tag (inner botton-left) labeled 5% elastane, 95% polyester.
Another article, cardigan: China, 100% acrylic.
Technology and scale made it so that boot story actually comes out in favor of the person buying and replacing cheap boots.
I think fast fashion is pretty awful, all around. Clothes are cheaper than ever (great!), but we're also buying more, lower-quality, more wasteful clothes than ever.
(One of the things that fascinates me about this trend is how bimodal the apparel market is: a reasonable but naive assumption is that economies of scale would also lower the cost for clothes made from nicer textiles - especially when manufactured in the same locations - but instead anything that's "nicer" than low-weight cotton gets a quality tax.)
A few pairs of darn toughs, ridge merino base layers and well made denim will last you a decade. Also unless you're exercising in them hardly needs any washing. Just doesn't smell. Ymmv
Can't imagine wearing all that polyester and acrylic crap. Doesn't feel good, doesn't look good, doesn't last, and yeah microplastics.
The “conclusion” was that people looking for the cheapest stuff are going to inevitably buy at the cheapest end, provoking a race to the bottom for manufacturers. People who like brands, quality, or status will go to the high end, independent of price, creating incentives for the companies to just sell things more expensively for a higher margin. There just wasn’t (according to the comments) enough market mass (nor business interest) to cater for that middle spot that ironically so many of us are looking for.
If you ignore the externalities. Extending the analogy, the boot story comes out in favor of buying cheap boots AND the persons' grandchildren have to struggle against ecological challenges they did not create and only tangentially benefit from.
Temu, and yes. Mostly Vietnam and China, as these are largely Chinese SMBs selling on there.
Shein was kinda the same but with influencers, literally contracting any influencer no matter how small and 'gifting' them with 'shopping hauls'
Temu is an offshoot of Pinduoduo, a massive Chinese retailer that was founded in 2015.
Shein was founded in 2008 and started retail in Europe in the early 2010s.
You have Mercari (Japan), Rakuten (pan-Asia), Coupang (Korea), Shoppee (ASEAN), Lazada (ASEAN), Flipkart (India), Myntra (India), Daraz (Pakistan), Haraj (Gulf states), etc on along with known players like Amazon.
E-commerce is way more cutting edge in Asia than in North America tbh
Spread across a tremendously diverse set of cultures and languages, but a much bigger market for companies that grow there.
It's more so the fact that Asian countries still have low margins manufacturers with little to no overhead.
I can open a garments or shirt factory with minimal overhead anywhere in Asia, but if I tried opening a Maquiladora here in the US, I'd be facing a 10-20 year federal sentence like those guys who brought Thais illegally to the Garment District in LA in the 90s.
All I need is 10 sewing machines, 10 semi-skilled laborers, some consistent electricity, and a bit of cash to pay off the local labor inspector. I def can't do that here in the US anymore.
The Western media bubble is wilfully ignorant, I'd guess mostly out of incompetence rather than malice.
I'm afraid we'll be schooled in the future, hope it doesn't hurt too much.
Not saying working in chinese companies is great - 996 is no joke, but results are speaking out for itself.
X becoming a 'ghost town' of bots as AI-generated spam content floods internet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39535310
As results go that's one of the greatest feats of speedrunning faceplanting a richly inhabited site in recent times.
Every platform out there is suffering from AI generated "content", that's not news, and X is not any different. It has nothing to do with laying off 85% of useless staff.
1) bad looking cheap, falls apart quickly. 2) good looking cheap, falls apart quickly.. 3) Unaffordable.
before Aliexpress/temu etc. there were only 2 options.
Sorry - couldn't resist to comment :)
... but I don't want to avoid exploiting people as much as I can.
What does TikTok ship?
No, Shein is not just only doing that, they have everything happening in a single village. From designing to production is just across the street, so everything is done fast and cheaply.
These kinds of platforms (Shien, Temu/PDD, Shoppee, Flipkart, etc) are very popular in Asia.
I'm surprised they got the dx.com domain name: must have cost them quite a penny. All dead now.
Dunno about Shein and Temu, but I think Aliexpress at least charges sales tax for US purchases nowadays.
This is going to be interesting.
And before AliExpress opened we had people importing stuff through eBay which was also cheaper than local retailers and Amazon.
The advantage used to be Amazon'd ship it to you in a couple days, but I'm getting a lot of 30+ day arrival estimates there too now.
And pretty much always, you can find the same item (same pics too) with prime shipping for a slight amount more because they just sent it to FBA.
They sneakily removed the "Sold by Amazon" filter a while ago too and I'm not sure why. It's the only indicator that gives me any amount of confidence in the product quality these days.
https://www.parcelandpostaltechnologyinternational.com/opini...
Air freight China to US is very roughly $3/KG. Assume T-shirts (as a light weight good that is going to trend lower price), at an ASP of $5 and weight of 150g. A $30 order (Shein minimum for free shipping) is going to be 6 shirts at 900g for a cost of $2.70. Surepost/Smartpost tier delivery is $5 or lower; even retail-available services would be $7. In comparison, Amazon FBA for 2 shirts at $15 each would charge $7.16 for fulfillment. At December rates, they would also have charged $5.1 in platform fees, which was reduced to as low as $1.5 now due to this competition. That's $12.26 in fulfillment cost for the Amazon order of 2 T-shirts, compared to 6 T-shirts shipped China to US door for $8.70 est.
The above is generous to Amazon. 6 shirts for $5 each on Amazon would cost $22.98-26.58 to sell, and they have an array of additional fees.
It also ignores FBA freight costs - sea freight and duties/tariffs that D2C air avoids due to de minimis. On the other side, I'm ignoring fixed/semi-fixed platform costs and pick/pack costs; I have no idea what that costs in China, but it has to be a tiny fraction of the cost in the US.
The only thing I know of right now (I am sure there are lots I don’t know) is chicken feet, which is basically where all the profit is in the chicken industry.
Surely we HN users must be able to think of something we could ship to China cheaply!
Software, Movies, TV Series, Songs, Video Games, Technology Licenses
An Oppo or LibrePhone might be a peer substitute to an iPhone a neckbeard on HN, but an Apple iPhone is still a luxury good.
Sell goods with a strong brand cache and they will continue to sell like hotcakes.
You will be skewered for using a knockoff.
Conversely, this is why Temu and Shien do well - why should I spend $20 at Uniqlo or $40 at GAP on fast fashion when I can spend $10 for the exact same thing on those Apps. It comes from the same factories in China and Vietnam anyhow
Tbf this happens anywhere in the developing world - Asia, Eastern Europe, South+Central America, or Africa.
Which sounds like an awesome side effect.
This isn't quite true: Uniqlo only sells their own designs. You may think Uniqlo's and Temu/Shein's stuff is basically the same cheap crap, but the designs really are different. AFAICT, Shein's business is copying other higher-end brand stuff and making it in various different factories, whereas Uniqlo (along with its sister brand, GU) designs its own stuff that's really popular in the Japanese market.
Yes, the US can sell a lot of things, but are these physical items created here to take up cargo space? Sure, Microsoft makes a lot of video games and software, but we're probably not literally shipping Xboxes or video games from the US to China. Yes, the US might be selling that, but it probably isn't using cargo space for return flights.
soybeans, corn, oil. but mostly by ships
Edit: judging by https://u.osu.edu/nopaylean/ractopamine-free-facts-info/ the US is going backwards: "Effective for the 2022 Fair, the use of ractopamine is no longer banned for use in the Fairfield County Jr Fair Swine Show"
> Soybeans were the nation's top export to China in 2022 — in fact, the US exported nearly twice as much value in soybeans as it did any other product. The legumes were 11.6% of overall US exports to China
https://usafacts.org/articles/what-are-the-top-us-exports-to...
Electronics are #2. Crude oil #3. Blood products (probably plasma) #4. Aircraft & parts #5.
Products with high brand value.
There's a reason why aspirational people show off Apple iPhones, Mercedes cars, Rolex watches, and Louis Vuitton bags
I've written more than enough about this in previous comments so read those.
If some low karma commenter (not you pkulak) wants start a flame war about this they can piss off
The Chines can buy other Chinese goods sold in the US with some degree of assurance to quality standards and minimal supply chain fraud. Without that expensive high tech devices will fail due to pervasive fraud in the supply chain. China can try to crack down on such fraud but that is really hard to do effectively, much easier to ‘outsource’ quality control with normal business incentives.
The US isn’t the only country with quality control and the standards have degraded, so has the reliability of contract law has also degraded. So this ‘service’ may not be maintainable long term. For example, Amazon to me is now a faster and more expensive Alibaba, I cannot rely on Amazons quality control or reviews. It would have been so easy to algorithmically ensure quality but less profitable and Amazon chose the option with more profit.
In Australia there are faux grocery stores where people (often Chinese nationals) film themselves buying groceries to send to China. Is called ‘daigou’. Things like baby powder and alcohol. For one I would never drink alcohol in China, a friend almost died there from drinking fake beer. The idea of using sewer oil for cooking still makes me gag.
I think they’ll keep getting better at fraud and it’ll be harder and harder to avoid. The world seems to be increasingly corrupt and the general population does seem more amenable to fraud than even 10 years ago so I do worry that quality standards will slip to the point that we’ll have our own ‘tofu-dreg’ projects. Australia already has problems with poor concrete standards for high rises and I expect this to get worse over there.
Well, first, I assume by ‘we’ you mean the US, since not all HN users are from the US. That being said, we do ship to China, but those products don’t require an empty airplane. It’s the software, especially the open source ones, that China needs. Hardware-wise, China may be ahead of the rest of the world for various reasons, but software-wise, it’s still lagging behind. And this is not just a Chinese market issue. Remember, even Japan until recently had a majority of users who used IE!
https://usafacts.org/articles/what-are-the-top-us-exports-to...
Electronics are #2. Crude oil #3. Blood products (probably plasma) #4. Aircraft & parts #5. Cars #6 (kinda surprising). Corn #7.
Treasury Bonds.
H&M has all interest to have us think their clothes are somehow less crap and therefore it's ok to pay 5 times as much and have WAY less to choose from. Same for any brand really except very few clothing brands that follow a different approach.
Edit:// To the downvoters. What's the difference between H&M and Shein other than the price and Sortiment size? I simply don't get where we draw the line.
At least H&M won't poison you or the environment
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/56979...
Guardian says they do.
Again not saying something is good, but blaming shein and wearing H&M is pathetic.
I know they took some heat in 2021 for calling out Uyghur labour, but I suppose actually riding it from their supply chain is too difficult and too expensive.
I don't see why the same factories, using the same work force and the same base material would lead to different toxicity. A little Google foo also confirms that H&M doesn't have a positive image for their Green washing and fake eco labels either.
It's the same level of quality.
Including toxic waste, child work, forced labor and all.
It is easy to see that there are two brands here, H&M will have to succumb to pressure from the west or their physical shops will die, Shein doesn't as they are having a feast on Gen Z's attention economy.
Who will be easier to get beaten into the less horrible business to the earth?
The only difference between H&M and Shein is that H&M invests in "green" PR, while SHEIN doesn't (yet).
So some people believe there is a difference in a way both companies conduct business.
They are on it :)
Need to give them few years, so “green” shenanigans grow to h&m level :)
No. The concept of fast fashion is the problem. The slave and child labour, carelessness about environmental effects both during production and transport, poor quality clothes that release microplastics and need to be replaced much more often because they last a month. The whole thing.
> Edit:// To the downvoters. What's the difference between H&M and Shein other than the price and Sortiment size? I simply don't get where we draw the line.
Why do you need to draw a line? This was your premise and your assumption that “a lot of hate against fast fashion is from the fast fashion brands that still do brick and mortar stores”. It does not match my experience at all, or what is in mainstream media.
But at the current state of things people draw the line somewhere fictional and blame fast fashion while wearing fast fashion.
There is no indicator that shein is either worse or better than H&M or Adidas. All acting really hazardous to their environment and using forced labor.
There is literally no number I can find that would even suggest that H&M or Adidas are doing less bad to the environment.
Adidas might has a durability standard that makes it more worthy but that's not true for Zara, H&M, Shein and all other non sporty fast fashion brands.
And don't get me started how many 'luxury' brands use the exact same production chain.
> Why do you need to draw a line?
I worry because people hate on each other while all doing the exact same shit. Most people can't afford fair fashion at the current market. Many who could afford it still choose to buy bad brands. This is where we need change, not blame shein but happily buy fake eco from h&m and think this is somehow better.
This won't change the market to the better.
Indeed. Part of the problem is that nobody wants to spend money, so cheap clothes seem like a good bargain. We just don’t see the real cost because we have really poor estimates for how long these clothes will last.
That’s typically something that needs to be solved by regulation as the people by themselves won’t turn away.
> There is literally no number I can find that would even suggest that H&M or Adidas are doing less bad to the environment.
Definitely! Now, there are differences at the edges, like old-school retailers using less harmful transport modes than plane and contributing to local communities through their physical presence (jobs and taxes). But yes, the core issue is the same.
> This won't change the market to the better.
Yes, people are getting squeezed and disposable income is not improving. Blaming them for buying cheap stuff so they have some money to do something nice is counterproductive and reeks of elitism.