But I still think chargers and children's toys are exactly where the line should be drawn
I’ve seen some reviewers intentionally break links to bad products.
Though after enough appeals, Amazon found a court willing to annul the verdict and force the regulator who issued the fine to reexamine: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/win-amazon-luxembou...
Don't get me wrong. I think companies should be held to higher standards: i just don't understand why only Temu is being held responsible of the entire broken capitalist system.
The first is liability. If they're selling chargers that burn down houses, they get sued, and they don't want to get sued, so they don't want to sell chargers that burn down houses.
The second is regulatory requirements. This one is generally worse. The incumbents capture the regulators to e.g. have the law require their technology or raise costs to exclude new entrants. The rules are often inefficient or poorly conceived with bad cost/benefit ratios. And companies making products that are dangerous but nevertheless comply with the rules will point to their checkbox compliance to dodge liability.
The problem with the first one is that it doesn't work well against companies outside the jurisdiction, because then you can't sue them, and the importer will be a small entity that just files for bankruptcy if you try to sue them. But the second one has the exact same problem. They sell products that don't comply with the rules; if you try to fine them they're outside the jurisdiction and the only thing in the jurisdiction is a fungible importer that will dissolve if you try to go after them.
In that environment the thing that actually works is the third thing. Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones. But this is the thing the second one inhibits, because then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted. And then customers are stuck choosing between the overpriced incumbents and the far cheaper foreign suppliers that may or may not be safe, with many people risking the latter because they have so much lower margins.
Then we can't drink our water, can't eat anything from our soil, sometimes can't even breathe our air. But we are the only ones facing consequences while the rich fuckers are partying on yachts.
To be clear, i'm not against foreign products. But a french exec deciding to employ quasi-slave labor and destroy the environment on the other side of the world to maximize profits should 100% be jailed. That's already technically a crime.
Also, how does it get you anything over simple liability for fraud and harm? Why does the honest seller have to write a document if nobody is going to look at it and the dishonest one is going to skip doing it anyway?
Milk was filled with borax and formaldehyde, coffee was cut with sawdust/charred bone/lead, spices were often 100% counterfeit.
The market (heavily) incentivized fraud.
In New York, in one year (1857), 8000 infants died to "swill milk" [0].
The second option (FDA and regulation) wasn't lobbied for, and the Food Bill of 1902 actually failed through heavy (counter)lobbying initially [1], until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [2] passed.
[0] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1858/05/13/785...
In less rich countries it is how things work right now.
The incentives in the market has never changed. That's what regulation is for, shifting market incentives/forces to favor consumers/society.
[0] https://www.kptv.com/2026/05/28/woman-sentenced-conspiring-d...
Pollution is an externality. If Alice hires a company to do "Hydro Excavation" and they pollute Bob's water, even if Bob knows all about it and is entirely opposed, he can't prevent it by not patronizing them because he isn't a party to the transaction. So the solution to this has to be to prohibit pollution.
Product safety is about information. When Bob knows that a particular brand of milk is adulterated with chalk, he doesn't buy it. Which means that all you need for this is product labeling and liability. If the ingredients list chalk, the customer who doesn't want chalk doesn't buy it. If the ingredients don't list chalk then the seller is not in compliance if the product contains it. If the battery is unsafe then you can both not purchase it because the reviews concluded it was unsafe or sue them if your house burns down. And the compliance process is simple: You list the actual ingredients on the label and have responsibility for damages caused by your product. No massive regulatory bureaucracy with thousands of pages of rules, just liability for fraud and harm.
The problem for all of these is that the perpetrator has to be in your jurisdiction. If companies in China are emitting copious amounts of CO2, regulations in Europe can't do much about it. If those companies are making unsafe products that end up on the world market, you can't sue them in the US because they have no real presence in the US. But complex product regulations don't solve that either, because they too are subject to the same problem; foreign companies drop ship things that don't comply. Nor does putting the liability in the wrong place, because generic transportation or payments intermediaries are in a worse position than the government itself to be the ones evaluating things that come over the border.
Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
This is regulation, and it's only as good as enforcement. Meaning it requires government inspections and labs. Again, we've already proven this in history.
> sue them if your house burns down
Sure, if you only care about compensation and not prevention. Also I don't think you've considered the practicalities of your example, in that no regular person will 1. determine the battery cause. 2. prove it. 3. bring a successful suit against a corporation.
> Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
Well... they do seize millions of products yearly. It's generally sub-$800 packages getting through. Your original point of incumbents targetting upstarts and thus forcing "burner" companies is the wrong causality. Burner companies are incentivized to specifically skirt liability and reputation. Regulating the frontend incentivizes self-policing against sub-companies designed to be dissolved.
.. which are of course the easiest thing to fake.
> then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted.
This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything? And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?
How do you get Consumer Reports to publish a fake product review? Can you point to even one instance of that actually happening?
> This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything?
Huawei is a pretty conspicuous example of it actually happening. They were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. Meanwhile there seem to be a huge number of other products from the same country with white labels or rotating unknown brands for some reason even though they probably come out of the same factory.
> And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?
That there is a difference between regulatory compliance and actual safety is obviously the point. All the incumbents need is for the rules to be complicated enough that compliance requires you to be a massive bureaucracy, or that nobody is really complying but selective enforcement gets imposed when someone undesirable is starting to look like a real challenger.
No need. Just have dozens of companies produce hundreds of new junk products every year. Then there's no way all products can be reviewed, and no way they can be properly reviewed: what's interesting about a review is the failure mode of the products, which you have no idea about when you have 10 new Samsung smartphones coming out every year.
> [Huawei] were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. selective enforcement gets imposed when someone undesirable is starting to look like a real challenger.
Yes, selective enforcement is the problem. Not regulations. Regulations are not strong enough. But they need to be applied evenly. Why is it legal for Apple and Samsung to produce junk, but not Huawei? (rhetorical question, please don't answer) We need proper consumer protection. Any company producing a product should have 10 years or 20 years warranty, and should be legally mandated to produce/sell spare parts for 20+ years (as in, real spare parts, not "replacement motherboard" which costs the entire smartphone).
Suddenly, the junk makers would produce less junk. Maybe there'd only be a new Samsung/iPhone every 5 years, but it would probably be as solid and repairable as older Nokias.
They are not really. If one of the big brand shop is found importing stuff with fake certificate, they’ll experience the same thing. One of the advantage of the stores you mention is that they have a procedure for recalls, and their responsibility is on the line if they sell faulty goods. Good luck getting anything from Temu or AliExpress in the same situation (at least Amazon is very good with this).
I can't name a single executive that was jailed over this period here in France. Yet if the law was applied justly thousands of executives and engineers would rot in jail and the world would arguably be a much better place because it would provide incentives for companies to actually behave and not destroy our planet and livelihoods. So are companies really taking responsibility for the lives they destroy? Not so sure.
Can your family? How about your neibhbors? Does anyone you know have this ability?
There is no common sense to be had here. There are people with more specialized information that I have that look into this. There are laws to address this - and I'm pretty sure these laws were written with the blood of folks killed by faulty products.
Edit: Reply to Scroll_Swe as I am rate-limited to posting new comments. The chargers in budget stores are identical to Temu chargers are are frequently recalled.
The main difference with most physical stores is that those will accept responsibility for the stuff they sell, because otherwise regulations would put them out of business.
Frequently, the listing uses the exact same photo.
It's especially clear for clothes listings, as there's usually a model.
I’ve seen model photos of clothes that clearly doesn’t exist until after you place the order.
Edit: Reply to lozenge as I am still rate-limited by HN. Some of them get recalled, the vast majority of them are still being sold and could burn your house down.
In EU, if you buy Temu, you are the importer and you become responsible for CE marking breaches etc. 0 help for you.
*My bad this USED TO be the case but not anymore apparently
There’s name brand (Apple, Anker, etc → made in China but made well), then there’s off-brand (cheaper than above but still made decently), then store-brand (Harbor Freight and friends, too; cheaper but still functional, not quite as nice), then dollar-store brand (barely functional but usually still “safe”), then Temu-shit (often not fit for purpose and fake certifications, actually dangerous).
The line should be drawn by parents.
The paternalism really has gone too far,
and people are (incorrectly and dangerously) expecting to be protected now.
but, you’re only going to achieve moving the cheapo builders stateside where they’re easier to enforce on.
That race to the bottom isn’t going anywhere - if someone can save a grand half-heartedly wrapping their own packs, they’re going to.
Consumer standards are a net benefit to society.
> and people are (incorrectly and dangerously) expecting to be protected now.
The general public hasn’t the faintest idea how to differentiate between a safe product and an unsafe one, and they shouldn’t have to
The problem being that a marketplace platform with millions of small sellers has no reasonable way to do this either.
It's not Walmart you're proposing to unperson here.
Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.
They are not Walmart.
> Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.
If you send money to someone in the PayPal app, are they responsible for what you bought? Not just for giving you a refund; for having liability if your house burns down. If the seller keeps their inventory in a rented space, should you be able to sue their landlord? If FedEx delivers a package to you, are they responsible for the regulatory compliance of what's inside?
Consider what would happen if you did that. Could a normal person buy or sell something or rent space or send packages, if the intermediary had to take on liability for anything you do with it?
Fedex has (almost) no idea what they're shipping.
These are not even apples and oranges.
because people now assume if you can buy it, it’s safe,
because their responsibility has been relieved of them.
I’ll do whatever reading, and due diligence keeps my family safe.
I’ll abstain from things until I’m sure.
Others might choose the same.
We’re not disagreeing.
You can't. So... abstain from everything? Make everything yourself - how will you have time with a job? Will you know the food you grow is safe and that your ground isn't polluted with things you can't test for at home? How about the equipment used to make that food - is the metal in that plow made of lead? Is the engine on the tractor safe?
Your due diligence is only possible because other people - usually with specialized education and/or experience - have made laws and standards to keep you safe. You don't have to personally check everything.
Try again.
You can answer the questions the exact same ways the other path uses,
yes,
and often with more rigor/vigor than just “legal minimum”.
You simply cannot have the knowledge to know if everything is safe - no matter what your specialty, there are things you'll have to just trust others for safety. Sure, you might buy a lead test kit that someone else has made, but the only way to know that the test kit works is to monitor your family for lead poisoning unless you have specialized knowledge. And if you have that specialized knowledge, it'll come at the cost of other specialized knowledge. You can't personally know if that bridge you drive on is safe AND know about the metal in your plow AND know if the light bulb you bough is a hazard AND know that your antibiotic matches the label on the box instead of it being that one you are allergic to AND know all the other stuff is safe.
Everything requires trust in products or services unless you have information.
General Mills hasn’t earned that trust.
I specifically addressed why I don’t need to know what metal is in the plow
to review end-products,
and you chose to ignore that point
and just talk some more.
You can't trust the company making the lead test kits any more than you can trust General Mills. How would you know the tests are real, especially without a regulating body to verify that stuff?
What if it isn't General Mills and Cheerios? Do you test everything that comes in contact with your food? What is in their plows?
You aren't just testing the Cheerios. You are just choosing to trust one thing instead of another and you simply cannot have time to test all of the Cheerios in addition to the other things in life.
Lead tests, and lead-testing labs, stay around by being accurate, reproducible science.
General Mills stays around by putting out wholesome commercials so you buy their slop.
My family and I could eat a total of 10 food products.
You don’t know my life, don’t project yours.
You don’t need to check every box of Cheerios to know to avoid Cheerios.
I’ll review - as deeply as possible - the supply chains for my meats, produce, etc.
The more local you go, the more possible this becomes.
And I think that sentiment is significantly more representative of the populace outside of some edge cases around speech and vices. The vast majority of people do not want to have to investigate if their food has too much rat shit in it. They want the rat shit out of the meat or the meat not to be on the shelves.