Posted by jjp 6 hours ago
There's something unpleasantly snobbish with the way business is done here, a spirit of "if you have to ask the price, our business is not for you". For example, in Instagram, "Local offerings" pop up all the time in the feed. The ones which are truly local end up in a "call us to know more" button, no pricing info disclosed. The ones that show actual prices tend to be shell companies with no employees, no doubt a thin wrapper around an importer from Asia.
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 line should be drawn by parents.
The paternalism really has gone too far,
and people are (incorrectly and dangerously) expecting to be protected now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it’s a problem of allowing the collapse of your own civilization?
Small businesses that do the work of curating a niche item, doing QA work that's absent on the shipments from china, and then offering much stronger aftermarket support/replacement/repair? That is often worth a (substantial) premium over wondering if the item showing up in a month is going to work as intended.
Aka like Amazon but with much smaller margins.
The savings would come from the fact sea freight is so much cheaper than air freight.
There’s a reason the likes of Aldi and Lidl have limited product choice.
Europe has historically had pretty strict consumer protection laws, and ever since the end of the Cold War these consumer protection laws have been slowly chipped away. When I was a kid for example companies were not allowed to target children in their marketing material. When American media became predominant in the continent, instead of enforcing our own consumer protection laws against American advertisers, regulators just ignored it and allowed it to proliferate, effectively making ads targeting children legal in the continent. Regulators have been showing the exact same inaction towards Chinese retailers breaking our own laws as they did towards American advertisers three decades ago. I foresee that consumer safety laws getting the same fate as the ban on ads targeting children.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
It's not all of it. Some things are seriously worse quality. But really a ton of the "better quality" is just better marketing.
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a "gentle" reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
Anything that unpredictably dumps large amounts of kinetic energy on failure is one of those.
I had a buddy that bought the tool for getting car suspension springs on from Harbor Freight, and I definitely wouldn't roll those dice.
There was a time where society didn't buy clothes to only wear once or twice but would instead rent them for those occasions.
https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/amazon-is-wrong-to-use-...
I downvote comments like this, since they make the comment useless. No-one can vouch for or argue against the comment when it's some "part" of a continent of over 40 countries.
The clothes are all 100% plastic polyester shit with extra chemicals. If you have proof of otherwise, show me.
Yes I make enough to buy good clothes. If I REALLY need cheap clothes H&M basics are always there.
Same with anything else, IT and tech parts I shop in Sweden.
What else?
Like, what is so needed now that you did not need before but you need to buy plastic China crap from Temu now?
In Australia, the product selection is often limited, and a lot of local stores are just reselling Chinese-made products with huge markups anyway. At that point, you may as well order directly from China and save money.
It also saves 10% GST.
We also have laws making the store selling the thing that burnt down your house liable for what they sold, which make them think twice about selling a random off-brand fire-starter with unknown manufacturer. This worked great until Temu, Amazon, and Alibaba entered the market claiming to be "marketplaces" connecting "importers to suppliers" while clearly behaving like a store.
The core issue is that, if the producer cannot be sued, the seller cannot be sued, then there is no reason to follow any safety what-so-ever. So fine the distributor until they put some quality control or standards on the producers they give market to, may solve the issue.
The US has this issue as well, though more focus on individuals suing for each case rather than broad-spectrum compliance regulation. The outcome is the same; with nobody to sue, there is no reason to make things safe for human use.
So what else are you going to do? Paperwork up front for every single product?
That's basically how drugs won the war on drugs, yes.
The average EU salary is €39,808. It's equivalent to a €636 fine. Though this is based on income, not net profit so it's actually more impactful to the average person than to Temu.
1. It's not, and
2. Who cares if somebody gets fired for PR purposes? Especially with a severance that will make sure that their great-grandchildren will never have to work and your great-grandchildren will be paying them rent?
Everybody doing tens of billions of $ of business shrugs off a $200M fine. They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
Again, that's not how it works, although I know people have this romanticized view of big companies casually shrugging off 200M fines like nothing.
>>They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.
Again, cool idea for a book, but doesn't happen in reality. No one gets a pat on the back and a bonus for being fined 200M.
This is also part of the EU's larger tariffs against China [3].
[0] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1361926.shtml
[1] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362200.shtml
[2] - https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202605/1362161.shtml
[3] - https://www.ft.com/content/e28fe696-ac30-4543-a105-febc82789...
Ahah, China going Adam Smith on the EU.
Peacefully, so far. Let's hope they don't go "opium war" on free trade.
> A major source of this latest wave of the so-called "China shock" narrative is the claim that the EU's trade deficit with China reached 360 billion euros in 2025.
These are the same people whose collective knickers are getting in a twist over Trump, mind you.
[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/01/30/china-traf...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russians-...
According to Eurostat, the average gross annual salary in the EU is around €39,800 per year for full-time employment. The average net salary comes to roughly €2,461 per month, or about €29,500 net per year.
0.4% of an average worker's gross annual salary = roughly €159.
There’s zero demand for products that are hiding safety issues that nobody was seeking out (e.g., toys with lead paint, batteries that explode)
Demand for illegal things isn’t in a vacuum. It’s hard to enact prohibition on alcohol or cannabis (extremely easy to produce) versus prohibiting something more complicated to make, difficult to smuggle, or less desirable to buy.
If my government bans Crocs am I going to go through the engineering effort to make them myself? Plus, if I go outside the cops will see my illegal Crocs very quickly. I have plenty of alternatives to Crocs and most of them are better. Most likely, I won’t even think about the ban.
We have a good example with incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know anyone who has attempted to violate the ban on home incandescent light bulbs.
The whole “everything should be legal anyway because there will always be a black market” philosophy is not a universal truth and we need to stop assuming that it makes sense.
Funny, because I remember that when this ban was first introduced in my country there actually was a black market for incandescent light bulbs. Some stores would keep selling them as “special purpose” or “vibration-resistant”. It only ended when LED bulbs appeared on the market, because they are strictly superior product (not like fluorescent ones EU tried to promote earlier)
bigclivedotcom takes apart some of the Temu stuff on YouTube and some of the electronics is atrocious.
So Temu should be sued if a house burns down from a generic-brand e-bike that they imported and took money for.