I swear these companies are a secret operation to hurt both the economy of the United States and the health of the nation.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
