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I hate these companies, they are the end game of hyper-consumerist Capitalism. Cheap junk, made largely with slave labor, with extremely toxic chemicals that destroy our environment, most of which gets dumped after a few uses in landfills to slowly rot and leak micro plastics into everything.
DO NOT BUY FROM THEM!!!
Influencers on TikTok doing $200 haul videos with huge boxes of this swill for their addicted viewers, it's horrific.
I swear these companies are a secret operation to hurt both the economy of the United States and the health of the nation.
Nah, it's just disregard for people's health. Nobody cares if someone on the other side of the ocean gets a little lead poisoning six months from now, because by then they'll have the money and be long gone.
I was going to binge purchase off Temu at one point - inexpensive junk stuff to tickle my fancy. But in good conscience, I just couldn’t. It’s wasted money on stuff I don’t trust made by exploited workers or knocked off patents that ends up in a landfill.
Would I confidently let my kids play with the toys and tchotchkes? I don’t even buy stuff for them from Amazon cause of all the counterfeit and toxic crap. I know some consumers have to be extra price conscious. It sucks that they’re relegated to crap quality products that are less durable and essentially more disposable (not to say that better quality junk isn’t disposable junk in modern times).
Amazon at this point is just Aliexpress with better shipping. I seriously have made it a point to just find what I want on amazon then find it for 1/2 price on aliexpress.
You buy something from Amazon and it's just a company dropshipping you the product they bought from AliExpress
Amazon for me is just a search engine. A shit one at that, because the actual search function sucks. I have to search for a product related to what I want and then keep clicking on "products you might want". And after finding what I want just go to the manufacturer's website and buy it for 10€ less.
knocked off patents
This is the least problematic part of your complaint. There's a lot of good quality knock-offs in Asia, sometimes from the exact same factory as the originals. T-shirts should not be $500, no matter what quality they are. Baseball caps should be $20 maximum. They cost like $5 to make a good one that sells for $500.
So, do you have any relatives that would want to work for 2$ per hour to assemble 2 baseball caps with good quality per hour?
If so, I think i have a buisness plan.
I think I you heard the wrong argument here
You're not wrong. Temu and Shein are actually running at a loss because of all the promotions they do and how cheap they are able to sell things. The Chinese government is doing this to fuck with American economics. Making American companies also drive down prices and exploit labor even more.
"it's a conspiracy chat"
That's not conspiracy 😂 that's what they are trying to achieve. Ideally they want to disturb the market so much and that people only shops there, making other business lose money and eventually comes to be the main supplier. Same goes for the EV market.
it's just being cheap. People want cheap stuff, they produce cheap stuff. Using toxic processes or fewer checks makes things cheap
I agree. But a lot of the non-cheap stuff is just as toxic and exploitative. We’ve found clothing that’s for sale in a national supermarket chain for sale on Temu for a fraction of the price. Is it a knock-off or the same product being marked up? I suspect the latter is often the case.
Nah private companies just don't give two shits about anything but profit.
Unrestricted capitalism is indistinguishable from an attack.
I have a canon printer, and canon DRM’d the maintenance cartridge so you have to keep buying new ones, even if they aren’t close to full. First and only purchase on ali was a device to fix that little issue.
Some good / some bad. Mostly, I would argue, due to the greed of corporations.
The problem is that greed & sociopathy are, fundamentally, rewarded by every single system that humans have ever devised, and the single and only safeguard is a properly educated and logical (sane) citizenry who understand that, a community is interdependent, Rome wasn't built in a day, civilization is a product of the collective and, are willing to take action to defend that collective.
The rub is that the wealthy/powerful will always try to attain more power/wealth, so unregulated, centralized, capitalism/socialism is guaranteed to result in the most immoral, unethical, sociopathic, criminals being the most successful. All they have to do is succeed once, while we have to defend for infinity.
Every time I see Temu ads, hair in back of my neck stand up and my tin foil hat starts to itch.
You should probably not buy your tinfoil from Shein then...
Tell me more how the free market will solve everything.
We’ve learned absolutely nothing from Wish.
I wonder how much of the stuff they sell us straight up illegal to be sold in the countries where the buyers are, but they get away with it because there's no enforcement.
So much of it. You can buy liquid mercury and gallium on these sites and they ship in barely-padded glass vials via airmail.
It's recklessly illegal. Not only are these metals highly regulated, they can oxidize an infinite amount of aluminum, which can compromise an aircraft hull from the inside.
I can buy ozone generators, and even Amazon won’t ship those to me. Yes the ban is stupid, but it’s an example I’ve come across.
Shut them all down. Our planet is getting hotter, companies like them should be permanently shut down for ALL of the emissions they emit.
The headline is misleading.
You can buy products from anywhere, including your local speciality shops, which arent safe.
Most supplements, for example, are neither pure or safe, containing ingredients not found on the label or at doses too high to be safe.
And walk into any store and you're likely to find loads of products with literal cancer warnings on them (prop 65) just from using those products as intended.
Consumers should be made aware of these things, but I think it's impossible to avoid them. Not when profits dictate material choices and quality.
surprised pikachu face
And what’s worse is they’re probably tested on animals.
technically correct since humans are animals.
Very optimistic of you to think they actually tested it :)
True
They're probably not tested at all.
It’s almost a by the book buy off. You don’t get a salary that can afford anything like good food and clothes because we want salaries to be cheap in the west while we increase the profits from rents, fees etc. However, we will pay you off by externalising all the costs of getting you cheap crap on other people that you don’t have to see (and the environment in general).
It’s of course not an actual conspiracy, just a confluence of terrible impulses and motivations.
You get what you pay for. Paying garbage prices [often] means you're getting garbage.
Chupika face
