Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads
searchengineland.com
searchengineland.com
That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.
Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some do not sell through Amazon.
Being born before the internet existed, I started ordering products delivered by mail in the catalog era. I am biased toward locating "real brands" that have built reputations for high quality. I miss these brands. I loved the transition from catalogs to websites, but it seems like in the last 10-15 years fake "brands" that can offer no promises whatsoever have been killing off the motivation for having real ones that guarantee high quality.
Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via the regular MTR. Don't take the HSR, they do not offer it there and you will be turned away. You Must go to the office at Louhu station, it is the only way. It's easy, just take the metro.
Anyways, at LoWu it takes about 45 minutes after doing the paper work. It was very easy. Visa approval for Americans this exact way is estimated to be north of 98%. Exchange your HKD at the government run forex up stairs in the mall after entering China, it's a 1.5% commission, best I've ever seen. Then pay in cash - your Western credit cards Will Not Work. It is a fairly easy day trip - about 45min from Kowloon by rail. The 5-day Visa is a Single Entry.
To go to the trading district take Luobao line (#1) to Huaqianglu (3 stops). It's a 10 minute train trip or a fairly uneventful hour walk if you're up to it. English at the trading district and the border mall is ok. Everywhere else, not so much.
Recommended. The place is absolutely bonkers.
They have this wildly intricate culture of price bargaining. If you're looking to actually buy stuff, you can get amazing deals. But I just went as a tourist.
The one cool thing was seeing new products at Shenzen, and then a couple months later starting to see those products in American retailers. Seeing the markup and the flow this way really opened my eyes to how the American consumer is exploited.
You have to be careful, though. There are a shocking number of legit-looking brands with their own sites that are just drop-shipping the same stuff, at an enormous markup. My wife found a piece of clothing she liked for $60; a quick image search found it (with the exact same images) for $8 on Shein. Nice hustle, if you can make it work.
> And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
In-person shopping has become just as crappy as online shopping, with a lot of the same problems regarding quality and brand control. The only difference ends up being less options (which could make the experience less stressful, except the options are usually presented in some form anyway, they're just not available, which makes it frustrating). It's largely thanks to big-box stores, but it's not like someone can just up and start a small shop to sell a particular niche of product (let alone all products) with higher quality as easily as you could with a website.
As far as tools or other general hardware - the stores like mom and pop 100 year old hardware stores are amazing and have things you probably cant find online sitting on some shelf and the owner knows exactly what box its in. I love that experience.
Maybe just spoiled from the early days of Walmart and now Amazon.
Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s just more profitable for them not to
I needed to make a 3/4" hole in a 1/8" thick mild steel angle to repair a cart. Didn't have a drill bit that size and quickly realized that a hole saw would be a better choice. Off to Amazon. After some browsing, found the same 3/4" carbide-tipped holesaw from a million resellers. Found a package of two for $13. Following the logic of "even if they only last for one hole, it's still cheaper than buying a good drill bit that I'll never use again", I ordered it. Item arrived and it looked as cheaply made as the photo!
But what do I have to lose? For $13, it's worth a shot.
Chucked up the holesaw, dripped some cutting oil on the metal and went to work. Fricking thing went through the steel like it wasn't even there. I was fully expecting that the teeth would chip off and go flying about halfway through, or it wouldn't do crap and the metal would work-harden, making my job even harder or worst case, the entire flimsy-looking thing would shatter (I have excellent safety glasses BTW). No, about 1 minute later I had a nice clean 3/4" hole with perfect edges that didn't even need deburring.
That led to the first Amazon review that I ever wrote: I was that shocked at how well it performed. Turned on my (Amazon-bought) stick welder and finished the repair.
Otherwise it’s often a good value, and sometimes the “brand” name is really the knockoff with a trademark on the box.
The carburetor on my leaf blower failed and needed a rebuild. The “name brand” kits were $40-60 at Home Depot and Lowe’s. I got some random kit on Amazon that was the same main part, with a different (and better) kit of tubes, etc than the retail one.
Same thing with clothes. I’ve had great luck with workout clothes, my girlfriend did well with dresses and other stuff. Just be smart about it — $10 jeans are gonna be garbage.
Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
This is why I still buy from Amazon.
I'll gladly take the cheaper alternatives instead of being charged 2 or 3 times the amount I'd pay if I import it myself.
The above is similar to recent reviews I've seen.
It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon. A great example of why competition is necessary, and not just from one other entity equally interested in allowing the others existing to avoid being a "monopoly"
Amazon took my review down.
Have they removed reviews you report? I've only ever heard of them removing legitimate negative reviews.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=firewire+to+usb+adapter
It's fascinating to me that every letter-soup brand is competing on a product that is literally fraud.
There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't show at all. Fortunately, nothing seems damaged on either side.
I've only got 6 tapes so I'm sending them off to a service and sending the adapter back to Amazon.
I think the only way to avoid disappointment is to avoid Amazon altogether. Their customer experience is extremely deceptive and engineered to make you spend the most money. From the featured searches all the way to how it charges you paid shipping instead of free at checkout.
We should all feel burned enough at this point and stop rewarding them. Bezos purchased the Washington Post for all this money, and he won't stop there.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
I bought a garden hose sprayer at Dollar General for $1, and it leaked immediately. $1 is so little now that it was basically free, but even for free it wouldn't have been worth it, and I'm not going to make a trip to get a $1 refund. At some point, "cheap" is so bad that it has negative value, as it only adds clutter and waste.
People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US. People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
I really have to wonder how important this Chinese junk is. They make so much junk for the US, that the EU, including Von der Lyon, had to make a plan to deal with Chinese companies wanting to, and I quote here, "dump" all their exports on to the EU market.
The EU is very protectionist over their countries' economic outputs and manufacturing. But if the US does that...
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of. Sure at the individual level we can find advantages to it, but I'm arguing that we're collectively worst off.
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.
This was the logic under Deng, and the reason China is now a peer state. Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
They would be helped by better job opportunities where they live, by more governmental protections for workers where they live etc.
But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
It is exactly what harms them.
With that logic one can defend keeping children in tantalum mines in the supply chain of an iPhone. That's not an acceptable status quo...
Removing the market for immoral exploitation of beings and the environment is a necessary step. The size of the market for things made fairly needs to grow.
good:
- replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
questionable:
- limit nicotine products to 10ml, so now instead of buying one bottle (200ml for example) of nicotine you have to buy 20 bottles 10ml each - ???
In this case, the safety concerns outweigh the environmental concerns.
> - replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
This belongs at least in "questionable" if not just "bad"
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
You don't have to pay it -- if you don't, the package gets returned to sender or destroyed.
The post office delivers you a slip with information to go to your local post office to pay it and pick up the package. With UPS and FedEx you get a notice to pay online, and they deliver it once you do, as far as I know.
I've never heard of something being delivered without the tariff already having been paid, and then it going to collections. Has anyone ever experienced that personally? I don't see how that would be legal, or why a delivery service would expose themselves to risk of nonpayment.
I think they also send everything from EU warehouses because that loophole was closed years ago.
No offense to guys talking about other topics on those occasions.
How does that work? I am assuming it’s not US as I had never got any tariff charges or brokerage fees from the likes of FedEx or UPS.
You pay the sticker price, which does not include tariffs. The package ships. It arrives at the US border, and the carrier (DHL or whoever) bills you for the import tax before it leaves the port.
Maybe this will change, but up until now when importing things, tariffs were not part of the price paid to the seller.
...unlike our friends on the European continent.
That is, of course, entirely false. In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs, and even if that would be the case, there are many downsides that don’t have anything to do with tariffs.
> and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet
The FTA with the US has been "happening soon" for about a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it. And with a protectionist American government, it would put the UK at a significant disadvantage.
> unlike our friends on the European continent
LOL. Nobody on the continent wants its country in the same position as the UK is. Brexit killed any political movement to leave the EU for a generation.
While hoping is free, the negative impact of Brexit has been extensively documented. Hell, there's even a Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit
Get ready for the chlorine chicken!
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
ref. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/trump-aga...
But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
So when possible I always shop within the EU, or maybe the US.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
Not "anyone"; only the 4% of humanity that lives in the USA.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
A slightly greyer version: you open the box, add a ribbon to every item, repackage it, mark it "final assembly in France".
Unfortunately for you, your business probably gets outcompeted by the guy who has the same idea in Canada.
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
It is only useful to people compulsively buying clothing regardless of the quality and who will never wear twice the same thing. Disposable stuff/waste.
One would only do that to their worst enemy.
OK I am exagerrating a bit and had a handful lf decent stuff from aliexpress/wish/temu. But you can typically only order for yourself as the quality testing is non existent. It is totally unsuitable for gifts. Mechanical pieces are often out of tolerance, clothing way uglier inperson than in photo, electronic stuff can last only days or years but you have no way to know for sure, finitions in general are very bad in general.
So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.
This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly. A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.
Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.
Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.
The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
Not just better value for money, I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.
A recent example: I was looking for something to balance the 3rd axis on my telescope, There are very few products on the market from mainstream brands and none were what I needed. On Ali I easily found several options. These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.
Same goes for storage bags and cases. You can often find a bag or case specifically made for your device, while there isn’t anything for sale locally.
Design and manufacturing is obviously a major part of the equation with this product sector, and no doubt the Chinese can do that as good as, or even better than domestic brands in many respects. What they don't do as well, as far as I'm aware, is any significant destructive testing.
The bonus is I can now spend even more absurd amounts of money on bike components, which is the true dream of any true cycling enthusiast.
Their products can also be bought either directly or from other bike-specialized shops, they don't sell exclusively through Aliexpress.
Do you follow Trace Velo on YouTube? Any others you recommend (aside from China Cycling)?
I got my last esp-32 from Mouser iirc. In Europe. They finally sorted out EU fulfillment warehouses.
As long as you don't value safety.[1]
[1]: https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/skin-melted...
This article is outrage bait, especially obvious given the incredibly graphic pictures and the high focus on emotional statements combined with the low amount of actually important detail (what went wrong? It's not what you or the article are implying, which is the fire risk).
I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?
My seller ID is separate, my last name is also Milne, but my first is James.
He wrote a book called "The Red House Mystery", I wrote an homage to it because I am related to the man, called "Red House". Different products, with different ISBNs.
Combined reviews. [0]
That's not exactly a fair process for customers - and no, I can't get them uncombined. I've been trying for years. But if the seller can't get rid of something completely misleading, that seems to have been caused by a very badly automated process, then there are processes at Amazon that cause problems.
[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Red-House-James-Milne-ebook/dp/B0C...
On non-Amazon products it's a coin toss for negative reviews. Many are published, some are not. Can't explain why.
Google is not better, negative reviews I leave on Maps are published very selectively. Maybe big-tech found a way to monetize this too. I know sites like Yelp are more or less an extortion business where you pay to get negative reviews wiped.
If you choose a star rating below five, Temu asks if you'd like to request a refund or seek other assistance. The one time I said yes -- it was a keyboard where a shift key wouldn't trigger consistently at the peculiar angle that my typing style hit it at -- it immediately gave me a 100% refund and said just keep it.
But I've left other low-star rating without trouble. The refund/assistance suggestion is an entirely optional sidetrack.
I always thought the review scams on Amazon were more driven by the third-party sellers doing stuff like listing takeover, astroturfing reviews, bribing customers for good reviews, etc., but maybe I'm wrong. I have personally received multiple offers from third-party sellers of incentives to leave good reviews.
It came with a "get $20 if you leave a 5 star review" card in it.
I took a picture and included it in my review.
Amazon declined to publish it.
So, they do shady shit like this for sure.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
>They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
Why did you do that? Did they pay you? Or did you get the stuff for free?
I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.
I suggest to sort by order number and not stars.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
My experience so far has been good. Negative reviews seem fair, and give a good indication of what to expect (maybe I've lowered my expectations from the start).
If you want compare, at least compare with facts.
I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
I've had almost solely good experiences with AE, but it does take experience to shop there (never trust the photos, if the price is too cheap it's a scam, batteries are always fake, etc).
I found Aliexpress to be great for retro gaming consoles, for anyone interested and willing to wait, you can get an "R36S" which can play all the old gameboy games and other retro games for ~$30.
Several years ago, I was frustrated with the insane costs of hockey sticks. I'd been going through sticks at about a 6-8 month clip since high school and having to buy $300 hockey sticks every six months was not something I was happy about.
I got on Alibaba, sent out several emails saying I was an equipment manager for a US based hockey team. The team was looking to get some stock sticks for backups since players were going through sticks like crazy.
I emailed two companies who did carbon fiber manufacturing. One company made one-piece composite sticks that were blank. You could tell them what length, flex, lie and blade pattern you wanted and then if you wanted 12K or 14K carbon fibre. I got two 12K blanks. They were impressively durable and lasted for well over a year. Almost twice as long as my expensive retail sticks. They were a little more whippy than I was used to, but it was easy getting used to it.
The other company was a bit shady. The first email I got back was someone asking me how many top of the line Bauer sticks I needed. I asked him how that was possible and he just said he had access and just give him the specs and they'll send them out. I ordered two of those to boot thinking it was a pretty big gamble. Turns out they were legit. My buddies who used the same retail model couldn't tell the difference. We went over the graphics and couldn't see any difference either. Ironically, I still have one of these Bauer 1X Lite sticks that I use when I get down to a single stick and I'm waiting for the newer ones to ship.
Interestingly enough, by the time I had gone through three of the sticks, suddenly there were several companies popping up offering "blank" sticks for a fraction of the cost of the retail sticks. Effectively doing the same thing I did, but now as legit hockey companies trying to save players some money. All told, I think I spent around $500 for the 4 sticks I bought. A fraction of what retail sticks would've cost. I haven't gone back and ordered more sticks, just because there's so many pro stock stuff out there and so many other companies selling these blanks now.
I've been really enjoying my recent Anbernic RG 406V and it can play pretty much all the systems I want it to so I guess I'll just stick to that if the handheld market collapses.
Well you have until May 2nd to order tarrif free fyi. Most people dont realuze this.
When was the last time you used it? It was definitely true a few years ago.
They are making each time more difficult to assert the product quality. I'm super careful, but still sometimes buy from seller SHOP123456789
I feel like AliExpress has improved in this area though, likely due to pressure from Temu.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of direct access to overseas markets, rather than local distributors slapping 200% margin on Chinese sourced/produced items that you can buy from AliExpress. But I'm not in favor of flooding the market with cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap that ends up in landfill in a few weeks or days.
So no, I don't feel sorry for Temu.
The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
No. Really not much at all.
The US cut 330 million or so people out of a market of billions setting it up so the rest of the world starts getting a competitive advantage over the US.
>it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
LOLOLOL. You do not think like a capitalist. They didn't go "oh no I have to cut corners". They saw they could cut corners on costs decades ago. China has been building your name brand products for as long half the people on HN have been alive. If you look at Tiktok now, they are out right showing the factories building products you are paying hundreds/thousands for in the US for 20-50 dollars.
The US screwed itself with huge consolidations and rent seeking behaviors. We are paying huge amounts for products and not getting the value we deserve.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of words for "I ordered something on Temu once, got scammed, now the whole industry should burn down"
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.
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.
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).
Disrupting US trade quickly with massive global tariffs will cause all sorts of secondary effects like a massive downturn in ad spending - directly affecting companies like Meta and Google who look insulated right now because they don't sell physical products.
Not a great time to be dependent on ad revenue.
In 2008, there was an expectation of revenue loss. But because Google "direct advertising" directly affects sales... it was more like "sales" than traditional "marketing" in this respect.
In 2025, it may be different. We shall see.
I don't think much online ad revenue is related to physical products. The margin available for ad spend on physical goods is much slimmer. But... it's hard to predict 3rd order effects.
The first thing that gets cut is 'new channels' and experiments (read: channels that have bad measurable ROI). Pinterest, X, Snap.
After that it's the most 'wasteful' brand spending/high cost per reach broadcast media that gets cut. Cinema, local TV, and increasingly nationwide TV.
Then when the economy comes back to growth there's a broader recalibration of budgets.
Because Google search has a very simple, easy to understand impact on sales they actually grew faster in recessions. Then when the recession ends brands don't see any reason to cut that spending.
1 - https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu... 2- https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... 3 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
If they stick with the tariffs we’ll see I guess though it seems likely Trump will have to back down.
I can't believe how many people are trying to put a positive spin on the government imposing massive taxation on people's right to buy things from other countries.
It's easy to sneer at junk fashion from Temu or whatever, but access to cheap tools and parts was the lifeblood of hobbyists and experimenters across the country.
It's not just cheap clothes from Temu. This administration just took away your right to buy anything cheaply internationally. That's not a good thing.
If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
Are there any friendly nations left?
[0]: https://baptistworldaid.org.au/resources/ethical-fashion-rep...
Are they implying that app store ranking was quid pro quo for ads buys?
> The company’s inability to maintain app performance without advertising for even a single day demonstrates the fragility of its market position.
One of the strange patterns with Google is that quid pro quo is hard to even filter out as in some cases it is actually a natural part of the system. Probably a bad thing.
These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.
I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.
Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.
I'd love to see them go.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-oppos...
Dollar stores sell cheap crap and destroy communities.
So no, I don't feel quite the same about them.
They do cross domain requests to keep those trackers around.
adblocking extension hates cross-domain tracking.
They may not be toast, but I suspect there are many panicked planning meetings happening now. (Unless they were clever and had a plan ready for a while)
So maybe TEMU US can return in that form if the trade conflict settles.
The tax is the same either way, since they collect VAT for packages sent from China. The advantage is the faster delivery time.
anyway..
Amazon and other US selling platforms are also in trouble, given how much of their income is from drop shippers.
The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.