Thank you for saving me money! I have been saving up for a little birthday gift for myself, which I was planning to get from Temu and the extra charge would make it way over my budget. Thanks again!
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.
Am I taking crazy pills? Am I the only one who buys things a few times per year? This rampant consumerism is depressing.
Really my day to day experience isn't this at all. I have good amounts of "chinese junk" tools that I use on a weekly/monthly basis that I paid probably 25% of a name brand tool and they are holding up just fine. I'm not using them daily so don't need to spend my life savings on them. I do a bit of research first so not getting the worst crap that some people run into.
Batteries are the big thing I've had excellent luck with. I can get Dewalt knockoff batteries at less than half the cost and twice the power and they last the same amount of time as my name brand.
You have to do your research for sure.
Honestly I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were still considered crap after WWII. Then their stuff massively improved and trounced US products. Japanese cars lasting 100's of thousands of miles while US junk at the time barely lasted that. This reminds me of that at a much bigger scale.
Or buy direct from Temu/AliExpress and save money?
It's not a hard choice.
I like watches. While I still pay retail for most of my watches, the bands are like 2$ on AliExpress and 15$ on Amazon. Phone cases are much much cheaper.
Certain phones aren't released domestically at all, so now I'm looking at a 100$ fee to import them. If I want to work on a project requiring a PCB that's now impossibly expensive.
There are plenty of white label products that are made in China and marked up 400+% in the US and sold under name brands.
There are plenty of times a cheap tool is useful over an expensive one.
Reality doesn't fall under your simple black and white classification.
With regards to clothing, I'm kind of glad the market for cheap shit from sweatshops is getting a beating, as I'm tired of seeing fewer and fewer legitimately durable clothing items. We need more union shops like Carhartt's (which only makes a few things anymore) building nice durable clothing. God knows a good pure cotton duck jacket or pants are both better for the environment (no petroleum products for synthetic materials and longer life) and frankly a better investment when they last years or at least months under the hardest abuse.