It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some do not sell through Amazon.
Being born before the internet existed, I started ordering products delivered by mail in the catalog era. I am biased toward locating "real brands" that have built reputations for high quality. I miss these brands. I loved the transition from catalogs to websites, but it seems like in the last 10-15 years fake "brands" that can offer no promises whatsoever have been killing off the motivation for having real ones that guarantee high quality.
When I went to Shenzhen I found some of these brands with stalls in their vast malls. They're real places. As you walk through you navigate around an obstacle course of dollies, hear endless packing tape and occasionally point out, "oh look, there's Owawuwo, I got a cheap projector from them".
Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via the regular MTR. Don't take the HSR, they do not offer it there and you will be turned away. You Must go to the office at Louhu station, it is the only way. It's easy, just take the metro.
Anyways, at LoWu it takes about 45 minutes after doing the paper work. It was very easy. Visa approval for Americans this exact way is estimated to be north of 98%. Exchange your HKD at the government run forex up stairs in the mall after entering China, it's a 1.5% commission, best I've ever seen. Then pay in cash - your Western credit cards Will Not Work. It is a fairly easy day trip - about 45min from Kowloon by rail. The 5-day Visa is a Single Entry.
To go to the trading district take Luobao line (#1) to Huaqianglu (3 stops). It's a 10 minute train trip or a fairly uneventful hour walk if you're up to it. English at the trading district and the border mall is ok. Everywhere else, not so much.
Recommended. The place is absolutely bonkers.
They have this wildly intricate culture of price bargaining. If you're looking to actually buy stuff, you can get amazing deals. But I just went as a tourist.
I went a decade ago (on a standard tourist visa, was easy to get but I had to plan far ahead ). It was neat, but I wouldn’t say it’s a must visit, or a top 5 Chinese destination.
The one cool thing was seeing new products at Shenzen, and then a couple months later starting to see those products in American retailers. Seeing the markup and the flow this way really opened my eyes to how the American consumer is exploited.
Sure but if you happen to be in Hong Kong, which you can just fly into as an American with a standard passport, and you want to go to Real China and didn't bother with the Visa interview, then you actually can with this "one weird trick"!
It's certainly a hard border, Shenzhen is as China as Tijuana is Mexico. So if you're in HK and have a day to travel around, give it a go, it's a fun adventure.
>"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."
>"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."
>"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"
> It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
You have to be careful, though. There are a shocking number of legit-looking brands with their own sites that are just drop-shipping the same stuff, at an enormous markup. My wife found a piece of clothing she liked for $60; a quick image search found it (with the exact same images) for $8 on Shein. Nice hustle, if you can make it work.
> after he posted a video on social media titled "MADE IN AMERICA!" in which he said "he could conceal the fact that his shirts are made in China by ripping out the original tags and replacing them with tags stating that the merchandise was made in the United States".
I've found I buy fewer things in general, and also the things I do buy are of higher quality when I do it in person. Might even get some useful advice if it's something like a tool. Also it's just more fun, especially if it's a nice bike ride, walk, or trip on transit.
> And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
My girlfriend needed a humidifier last week. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and Lowe's had mostly the same 2-3 brands of single-room humidifiers, most of which were no-name companies that apparently "specialize" in humidifiers (i.e. were spun up to be a shell for selling cheap humidifiers). We found one Honeywell branded one on sale and went with that since it's a legit brand; it was defective (lots of reviews online having the same issue), so we had to return it and make a decision between Walmart's Equate brand and one of the no-name ones from Target. She wasn't sure if she wanted a larger or smaller version of the no-name one, but we ended up not having an option because the Target shelf was empty of the smaller ones. Home Depot had the same model for $10 more, but we were at Target anyway because they at least had her second choice for color, while Home Depot only had her third.
In-person shopping has become just as crappy as online shopping, with a lot of the same problems regarding quality and brand control. The only difference ends up being less options (which could make the experience less stressful, except the options are usually presented in some form anyway, they're just not available, which makes it frustrating). It's largely thanks to big-box stores, but it's not like someone can just up and start a small shop to sell a particular niche of product (let alone all products) with higher quality as easily as you could with a website.
Big consumer brands haven't meant anything for a long time. Honeywell and GE among those. They all sell their name to other manufacturers and have been doing so for decades. The best thing you can do is keep the receipt and make sure you follow up on returning it or getting warranty service if it breaks in those timeframes. It's really not worth even trying to do the research on things that are less than a hundred bucks. Buy something that looks nice, tape the receipt to it, and return it/warranty claim it if it acts up.
On the flip side, I cant find an ice scraper or a pair of snow / ski pants in December in Wisconsin in any store so the only avenue I have left is order on amazon since the other marketplaces are far more expensive. Depends on what you're buying I believe.
As far as tools or other general hardware - the stores like mom and pop 100 year old hardware stores are amazing and have things you probably cant find online sitting on some shelf and the owner knows exactly what box its in. I love that experience.
This is why I have a bunch of stock in Shopify. It's slowly started rolling out discovery features in its Shop app that federates its stores. I try to limit my use on Amazon to things I know can't be faked and things that are so much cheaper that I can deal with it being fake. My purchasing trends have definitely moved toward the edges - aliexpress for chinese stuff (that would normally be on Amazon) and Shopify for "buy it for life" stuff.
I'm going to genuinely miss the bicycle headlight I have bought under like 4 different brand names. I won't miss the 36 other grotesqueries sold as alternatives and produced by the same business and manufacturing environment, but I'm also not excited about having to choose between 6 $50 lights of similar quality that are locked to a GPS company's equipment. It would be great if in 10 years I could get a similar light for 25% more than the current price adjusted for future inflation. But there's no reason to believe that tariffs are going to make American products better, just that it makes the cheap products American. And there's nothing else about Trump's (or for that matter his Democratic counterparts'-) industrial policy to encourage that either.
15 different variants of the same product, all obviously cheaply made from the same factory, with varying degrees of quality control and reviews strewn about the various “brands” of the product so that it’s much harder to have a negative review everywhere.
Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s just more profitable for them not to
There are flecks of gold in the midst of all that dirt.
I needed to make a 3/4" hole in a 1/8" thick mild steel angle to repair a cart. Didn't have a drill bit that size and quickly realized that a hole saw would be a better choice. Off to Amazon. After some browsing, found the same 3/4" carbide-tipped holesaw from a million resellers. Found a package of two for $13. Following the logic of "even if they only last for one hole, it's still cheaper than buying a good drill bit that I'll never use again", I ordered it. Item arrived and it looked as cheaply made as the photo!
But what do I have to lose? For $13, it's worth a shot.
Chucked up the holesaw, dripped some cutting oil on the metal and went to work. Fricking thing went through the steel like it wasn't even there. I was fully expecting that the teeth would chip off and go flying about halfway through, or it wouldn't do crap and the metal would work-harden, making my job even harder or worst case, the entire flimsy-looking thing would shatter (I have excellent safety glasses BTW). No, about 1 minute later I had a nice clean 3/4" hole with perfect edges that didn't even need deburring.
That led to the first Amazon review that I ever wrote: I was that shocked at how well it performed. Turned on my (Amazon-bought) stick welder and finished the repair.
I think the key is to have a sort of risk framework. Things that handle data, are a fire risk or are direct knockoffs avoid.
Otherwise it’s often a good value, and sometimes the “brand” name is really the knockoff with a trademark on the box.
The carburetor on my leaf blower failed and needed a rebuild. The “name brand” kits were $40-60 at Home Depot and Lowe’s. I got some random kit on Amazon that was the same main part, with a different (and better) kit of tubes, etc than the retail one.
Same thing with clothes. I’ve had great luck with workout clothes, my girlfriend did well with dresses and other stuff. Just be smart about it — $10 jeans are gonna be garbage.
I ended up drastically cutting back on Amazon purchases when they started getting flooded with brands like that.
Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
If the quality sucks (or at least doesn't match expectations), return it. Shipping is fast and returns are easy. The vendor takes the consequence of the return. Rarely do I buy product that has subpar quality that I need to return it. Just do your research.
Hah, well easy may be in the eye of the beholder. The closest dropoff for Amazon returns is about a 20 minute drive, its a CVS that has lost one return I tried to send back. I often don't leave our farm more than once a week, mailing off a few returns a year isn't a big deal but I don't want to make a habit of it.
My research, and experience with Amazon, just left me avoiding it when I can. That's not always possible and there's plenty of good stuff to buy on Amazon as well, but 2 day delivery can mean a week here and returns aren't as simple as dropping it off a block from an office in the city.
I love it in terms of consumer experience. I like several products from AliExpress and the like, but sometimes find they're available for the same price or cheaper and faster with better customer service from Amazon. I don't care that they have generic brand names in either case
I'm with you. I don't really understand the complaints, since Amazon's return policy means that you aren't really taking a risk when you buy, even from randomly-named brands.
That rather depends on your ability to evaluate what you get. I have no qualms telling non-technical people "buy USB-C chargers from the Apple Store", knowing perfectly well what quality I will get. However, you can't even guarantee you'll get something genuine from Amazon anymore even if you select that exact same product.
Exactly. And most people think, "well, I'm super technical, so I'll know," but that only works for your own field. I can tell if a USB-C charger is genuine or not, but I know that I don't know enough about clothing irons or magazine sleeves or a hundred other items to tell if it's crap or not within the return period. Sometimes, I may never know if I don't try a different one for an extended period of time.
It only shows what people are buying, not what they want to buy. Cheap crap might sell a ton because it's cheap and listed at the top of the search results. Which then feeds into it being kept at the top of the search results. A lot of times if the item is cheap enough people don't bother with returns and rather just throw the item out, something that will go completely unseen by the metrics.
Ratings are also not very helpful because they are manipulated in a variety of ways. Things like bots/mechanical turks, putting offers in the package to give people money back if they rate the item 5 stars, or hijacking a well rated product listing by changing it later or taking advantage of item variants system.
So, I very much don't trust any of their data myself.
> putting offers in the package to give people money back if they rate the item 5 stars,
I had something similar but more convoluted happen with the car mount I got for my phone. The box included a card stating to email them to sign up for their warranty. Emailing them signed me up for their loyalty emails, which are infrequent enough that I actually didn't mind them. The loyalty emails frequently included offers of "free gifts." One day, I actually replied to one asking for it, and they explained I'd be buying it from them on Amazon and then they'd pay me back for it-- in exchange for a review, of course.
I'd had similar things offered to me as a YouTuber with companies wanting "reviews" but making me do the purchase myself (I've done one or two of them). The fact that it's just being offered to mainstream consumers now is ridiculous. It means you can't trust any of the reviews (or at least the positive ones; I normally look for negative ones with photos these days).
I don't think its so easy to pull apart what people are buying and what they want to buy.
Amazon has a pretty crippling hold on the online retail industry, and they collect massive amounts of data to decide what to put in front of people.
Targeted marketing and the partnership between marketing and psychology is nothing new, it has gotten stronger though. I have a hard time looking at a market run like that as a roughly free market where the successful products indicate what buyers actually want rather than what they were best coerced (or "nudged") into buying.
I would say there are other viable platforms people could offer on but Amazon actively punishes people for trying to work out of their ecosystem by penalizing them for offering lower prices than on Amazon
It's an optimization loop where one part of the cycle (showing people stuff and seeing if they buy it) is very fast, and one part (product development) is very slow. This is sure to find local, rather than global maxima.
Yeah, and it's not even necessarily a problem with the product itself. Sometimes I do want something cheap and disposable. The problem is that you have roughly zero information about the retailer, and manufacturer, and anyone in between. If one product listing gets bad reviews, someone can spin up 5 more listings with slightly different metadata. It's effectively a Sybil attack against the reputation system of the market.
> I was very pleased with my "[brand name, if applicable] toilet seat, (2-pack), premium pure white, toolless installation", that I purchased for my family. Would definitely recommend it to friends and family. It arrived promptly and was in perfect condition. You exceeded your current quota please check your plan and billing details.
The above is similar to recent reviews I've seen.
It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon. A great example of why competition is necessary, and not just from one other entity equally interested in allowing the others existing to avoid being a "monopoly"
I got one of those "leave us a 5 star review for a coupon" and I had just enough of it. I left a 1 star review indicating that they offered a coupon for a good review.
My favorite is all these letter-soup Firewire-to-USB convertors which are just glue and random wires inside and are either completely inert or disastrously damaging to your peripherals:
I literally got a Firewire to USB converter yesterday to try and pull video off a DV Camcorder. A video capture card in the same price range had worked great for letting me stream VHS tapes through OBS Studio.
There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't show at all. Fortunately, nothing seems damaged on either side.
I've only got 6 tapes so I'm sending them off to a service and sending the adapter back to Amazon.
You may get rid of that, but it's still Amazon. Just recently, they fuzzed all their search results further, so when you search for something, it will give you lots of stuff you didn't search for. Similar to how Facebook Marketplace does.
I think the only way to avoid disappointment is to avoid Amazon altogether. Their customer experience is extremely deceptive and engineered to make you spend the most money. From the featured searches all the way to how it charges you paid shipping instead of free at checkout.
We should all feel burned enough at this point and stop rewarding them. Bezos purchased the Washington Post for all this money, and he won't stop there.
You are right, I did read the article but I missed the parenthetical (assuming the article was not updated, imagine). My point was that the commenter was complaining about Amazon "alphabet soup" names which is not relevant to this. There is a very specific reason those names are used. It's a very interesting story about follow on effects.
it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
What zamalek describes isn't just that China manufactures cheap products. The complain is more about retailers or marketplaces (particularly online ones) that encourage essentially anonymous, zero-cost seller accounts and product listings.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
Right. There's always been a range of products from cheap to quality. But "cheap" used to mean something that wouldn't last as long or that had limited features, but that could still be worth the lower price. Now "cheap" can mean something that will break the first time you use it, at which point is any price low enough?
I bought a garden hose sprayer at Dollar General for $1, and it leaked immediately. $1 is so little now that it was basically free, but even for free it wouldn't have been worth it, and I'm not going to make a trip to get a $1 refund. At some point, "cheap" is so bad that it has negative value, as it only adds clutter and waste.
Do you mean this is the point of a carefully planned, deliberated, executed, and announced tariff rollout, or do you mean that's the whole point of tariffs as they are currently being implemented in the United States?
The tariffs that were announced during the campaign - the same way Ross Perot did - and the reasoning was to bring us manufacturing back to the US and reduce the tax burden on US citizens? Such as writing off car payments if the car is American?
People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US. People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
I really have to wonder how important this Chinese junk is. They make so much junk for the US, that the EU, including Von der Lyon, had to make a plan to deal with Chinese companies wanting to, and I quote here, "dump" all their exports on to the EU market.
The EU is very protectionist over their countries' economic outputs and manufacturing. But if the US does that...
> People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US.
The "reciprocal" tariffs are based on not the tariff duties foreign countries imposed on US goods, but the trade deficit the US has with said foreign country. There's a lot of idiocy in the tariffs, but this was one of the loudest complaints people had with them.
> People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
Because the list of "countries" being charged made it clear that it wasn't being based on a list of countries as people understand them. Uninhabited islands and islands consisting only of US military bases being on the list were strong signs of the lack of competence in the planning for the tariffs.
And really, that's why people are complaining so hard: it is abundantly clear that tariffs are being rolled out in a botched manner by incompetent people for inane reasons, so whatever positive effect they might have is completely ruined and all of their negative effects are intensely amplified.
I don’t think anyone is claiming there’s secret industry on the islands. But a “data error” is probably understating it, that is what did actually appear on the bills of lading. Whether it was a bizarre innocent mistake or sort of some kind of financial scheme is unclear.
Maybe. That’s clearly the likely case for Norfolk.
Do you know if tariffs are assessed based on the country of origin in the bill of lading? The Guardian article doesn’t answer that question. I’d suspect so since that’s how everyone is counting imports and exports, but the Guardian article isn’t clear.
The USA and the EU more or less have had even import duties. The USA averaging out at 1.47 % and the EU at 1.39 %. [1]
The EU has been advocating for a free-trade agreement, the TTIP, with the USA from 2013 on. It was buried in 2016 by the 45th president of the USA, who somehow thought it unfair. The EU has proposed a free-trade agreement only a few weeks ago. [2]
You may believe what you want, but at least in dealings with the USA the EU has always promoted free trade. Even Fox News acknowledges that ;)
Hold on now. For consumers, the only thing that's mattered as far as we're concerned is the fact the US had de minimis, which effectively meant no duties paid on all relevant goods a US consumer might want.
The EU, on the other hand, has made buying goods from the US, for consumers, horrifically expensive, including reducing the value of non-duty paid goods to essentially zero and leaving it up to EU member countries to decide if they then wanted to charge an additional "inspection fee" often more than the value of the goods themselves. Spoiler: those countries did.
So, your point isn't really relevant from a consumer point of view. The EU and its member states have tried every dirty trick in the book to make it as awful as possible to buy anything from the US.
If readers believe I am making false claims, please engage with me. I live in Denmark, as a Dane, and this is what I and any Dane who has bought goods from the US, has experienced directly.
The actual, lived experience is far different than whatever any bloc or country may claim (such as being in favor of free trade). The EU has always been economically protectionist, since its birth.
For those not in the know (and too lazy to look it up ;)), de minimis rules for customs duties set a threshold below which no import duties are applied. The de minimis threshold for the USA used to be 800 US$ (and for now continues to be for all but imports from China), the de minimis threshold of the EU is 150 EUR. In other words, if you import goods worth less than 800 US$ into the USA from the EU no duties are applied. If you import goods worth less than 150 EUR from the USA into the EU, no duties are applied.
There is also a tax de minimis, which is a threshold when you have to pay sales and possibly other taxes, e.g. luxury, alcohol and so on. Obviously those taxes differ from country to country in the USA and the EU, and, for example, importing bourbon whiskey into Denmark would be more expensive than into Germany because of the way alcohol is taxed. But the de minimis determines when those taxes even apply. The USA leverages those taxes from a threshold of 800 US$ (again, not any longer for imports from China), while most EU nations set this de minimis threshold to 0.
Merchants usually combine all these costs (duties, taxes, fees, insurances, shipping, etc.) into something called the "landed costs" [0]. Relevant taxes and fees are higher in EU nations than in the USA, which explains most of the differences, but you are quite right, the WTO considers the USA's landing costs fairer than those of most EU nations (Germany is especially bad.) I have no special insights but I guess this is because Intra-EU trading is devoid of duties, fees and taxes (it is a free trade zone after all).
If you want to poke around a little in the various trading nations of the globe, [1] has a nice database available.
So, I do not agree with your conclusion that the EU is a protective lock box, but could improve. Thank you for pointing this aspect out. It is easy to forget about nuance and how complicated and convoluted some of these things can be.
You've done a good job of explaining the relevant de minimis rules, but you've deflected or minimized the EU's fault.
Inspection fees, duties and taxes make it so functionally no Danish consumer bothers to purchase goods shipped from the US. For Americans to then come rushing to our aid when us poor Europeans are getting a dose of what we've been giving for decades is ironic, to say the least.
When i wanted a DVD player, the cheapest near-mint one on ebay, including shipping, that had digital audio out was shipped from the UK, to the US west coast. This was ~25 years ago.
I ended up trading it for a Volkswagen Jetta. unrelated, but quirky.
This seems to assume that everything can be imported or acquired domestically. But tariffs implemented in other countries are much more specific. It makes sense to use tariffs when you have the capability to meet your domestic demand with domestic supply. Indiscriminate tariffs catch things where demand far exceeds domestic production, whether that's raw materials, specific foods, or things that will take a long time to ramp up production domestically.
Ultimately, lots of things manufactured domestically will still increase in price because of the raw materials they require.
well to be fair to parent, the tariffs weren't exactly rolled out in a sane fashion and a lot of credibility was lost along the way, though it certainly was entertaining if you're a sicko like me.
The main purpose of tariffs is to change behavior for both the consumer and the manufacturers.
Auto manufacturers have been doing this for decades when the US started imposing tariffs on Japanese manufacturers back in the 1970's. To get around the tariffs and still get access to the US markets, they would simply assemble the parts of the cars here and bypass the rules of the tariffs. Many companies then started doing the same.
This effectively changed the behavior of the companies to avoid the tariffs. The end result was more manufacturing and assembly plants here - even though most of the big production tasks of the vehicles were still done overseas.
Also, there's already been several announcements of companies moving their manufacturing to the US in order to avoid getting hit with tariffs:
Nvidia (NVDA) on Monday said it will produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the US within the next four years as the tech industry looks to bolster its domestic manufacturing footprint in the face of Trump's approach to trade policy and desire to onshore more US heavy industry.
Also, Ford made some moves to avoid both US and European tariffs:
Less than a week after the White House announced its comprehensive set of tariffs, the Dearborn automaker exclusively revealed to Ford Authority its comprehensive plan to relocate all of its assembly plants to Hawaii. The move will be made possible by state of the art 3D printing technology and has the support of the United Auto Workers.
In any event, Ford envisions Hawaii as an export hub for markets outside North America and a key pillar of the company’s domestic production capabilities. Ford will utilize an obscure maritime law from World War II as a way to get completely around European and Asian tariffs, as the original intent of the legislation enabled private companies to avoid punitive trade measures to get badly needed supplies to the Allies at the height of the conflict.
Ooooof. They got me. Ironically, this is the first article in many different search results with several other articles about how Ford will deal with the tariffs. With another article from Ford Authority on the same topic:
In addition to scrutinizing its supply chain, Ford is also in the process of stocking up on parts that comply with the current U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and it’s also taking a second look at its operations in those countries, according to Automotive News. Ford is “strategically stockpiling components where it is cost-effective and parts that are not pending engineering changes,” supply chain chief Liz Door told suppliers in a recent memo.
This is what got me. They had this article talking about looking at its operations in those countries and then the April Fools article which essentially described them doing just that.
Although I already knew Ford does most of its manufacturing in the US, I should've known better.
Instead of the US government spending away on overcapacity so Canadians can have cheap products, that money should go to public housing and healthcare subsidies. I think this is better for the US long term because agriculture is heavily subsidized and competes with housing and other industries for land and labor.
Oh yeah the money from the tariffs are definitely going to go to help average Americans. Oh wait be did this last time and 90% of the tariffs went to propping up all the industries that went to shit due to reciprocal tariffs (soy beans and others) and we never recovered. So many countries moved away from us and never came back. That's exactly what's going to happen this time, alienating is from our allies, almost like it's the point to cause chaos and alienation but wait why would trump do that hes always been on the up and up before
I don't expect an insurrectionist to do good for Americans.
I also think government spending on overcapacity so we can export food is a waste of money and bad for the economy and the environment. How many millions of acres of soy bean crops do we actually need?
If the market for exported soy suffers because of who people voted for, let's reduce the subsidies by n%, farmers will plant less won't be able to keep all their land and we can return that land to Native Americans. This is disruption we need (but won't get because murica).
They can substitute US products with those from plenty of nations plowing money into overcapacity and dumping their exports on the international market.
The tariffs were definitely part of the campaign, described in detail in Project 2025 and will eventually replace higher brackets of the income tax.
This consumption tax is tax policy, not trade policy. That was evident when there was not even any discussion about excepting manufacturing inputs (neither this time nor the 45th administration).
> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
after 50 years of de-industrialization in US, it's a sad fact that US can no longer produce most of those items, yes it's totally gone. It will take a few decades to rebuild, if possible at all. For now, whatever those junks are at Amazon, there are not many options to procure them elsewhere.
Build essential stuff locally, not junk of course.
Or else the virtual economy can not sustain forever based on borrowing money while producing very little locally.
This weird demoralization has to stop. We went to the moon in less than 10 years from beginning the Apollo program. It’s less than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant on average. We deployed the COVID vaccine worldwide in less than one year. Manufacturing is not that hard. If we want to do it, we can do it and we can do it quickly.
True. The biggest impediment to increased manufacturing is the pile of onerous regulations, many of which were created by the stroke of a pen since 2008, and which can be removed by another stroke of the pen.
Do you have any substantiation for either the point that onerous regulations are the primary impediment or that most of these have been created since 2008 (by fiat or otherwise)?
It's always going to be cheaper to make things in places where labor costs and environmental responsibility expectations are low.
That's why the manufacturing companies did it. The politicians allowed it because it was meant to make the world more peaceful and prosperous. Which it did, really.
I can see how hitting the EU with tariffs is going to improve human rights ... oh wait.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. Mostly little electronics parts and specialized tools for my workshop. Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much. Obviously it's over now. Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package, even a 75 cent envelope will be charged +$75. I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet. I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks.
> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years.
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
To clarify, I'm not defending the tariffs or the way this whole thing is implemented. I'm sure it puts a lot of people in trouble.
I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of. Sure at the individual level we can find advantages to it, but I'm arguing that we're collectively worst off.
> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.
You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.
There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
There is no dissonance here, workers being put in competition with much cheaper ones on the other side of the planet is absolutely going to drive their wages down. They got 30 years of that... and many of us in Europe did too.
Wages may have to go higher at the lower end, but consumption also needs to change. Most of the price of "food" is packaging, transport and marketing, not farmers' wages. Here in France people buy on average 50 items of clothing a year, 50! The amount of items has increased by 50% in the last 15 years.
Yeah pretty funny to see mostly the same people calling for a $20+/hr "minimum wage" on one hand, and bemoaning the tarrifs on the other hand. They will tell you that if you can't pay your employees that much, then you don't have a viable business. But they will turn around and whine about how their cheap Chinese crap purchases are now going to cost what a "viable" domestic producer would have to charge.
It's easy to look at the internet at large see people with these contradictory takes. But 1) these groups may consist of entirely different people who are vocal about different topics, or 2) the wide brush obscures critical context.
I support a $20 minimum wage AND
I think tariffs can be justified, especially when we use free trade to ignore the external costs to the environment and the arbitrage of exploitative labor AND
I have a problem with implementing tariffs in such a shotgun, ill-considered, shoddy way lacking clear strategy or intent
Most people bemoaning the tariffs are doing so because they understand that production will not actually come back to the US. It's not that these people hate Americans and don't want domestic manufacturing (or to pay for it), it's that they can see the reality that this isn't what's actually going to happen. Instead, the price of goods will just rise.
A lot of these people too have been saying "buy local!" or "support black businesses!" for a while now. They're not the same people bemoaning the lost of hyper consumerist plastic junk.
I'm pretty far to the left, and I'm actually fine with tariffs on China in principle for exactly the reason that you mention. Tangentially, I don't think that "free trade" can ever be meaningfully free when goods flow freely but workers can't move to where the high-paying jobs are - it's a recipe to create market inefficiencies that companies can profit from.
However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.
I'm a lefty lib and, like lots of us, I've wanted restricted trade with China since we granted them MFN status in the '90s. I think that was a bad idea in the first place.
Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected".
Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so much. And it makes working against Chinese trade far less effective and more-costly.
Claiming these aren't a tax on Americans? That's just a lie. Chaotically switching your message and actual policies day to day? That's not how you foster investment in factories that'll take years to be net-profitable. Working against the CHIPS act? What the literal fuck, that's exactly the kind of thing you [edit: the "you" here is the administration and their boosters, not necessarily "you", the poster] claim to want! That was a really good idea!
So, I agree with a tiny amount of the overall policy, while finding its implementation incompetent, and the other parts to work so strongly against the effects of the part-I-like that I find desirable, that I doubt my motivations for wanting to reduce trade with developing authoritarian states and the administration's are even the same.
If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as well, in order to prevent evasion by trans-shipping (until and unless they restrict Chinese imports as well).
Canada has been laundering Chinese aluminum and steel, Malaysia has been laundering Chinese ‘honey’, etc.
There were way cheaper and more-effective ways to achieve that. And that's not why the administration says they're doing this, anyway. It's because we have trade deficits, period. Or it's because of fentanyl, since that was the justification for the invocation of emergency powers that're letting the executive impose tariffs at all.
>If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as wel
A good strategy would be not to impose tariffs all goods, just the more important ones, and you would do it WITH your allies. Threaten the same tariffs on allies as China if they do not get on board. You could even use the leverage to get China to increase domestic consumption so they aren't exporting so hard.
Trump's policies aren't going to achieve what he thinks they will.
This is a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but you've hooked me with your predicament: Can you allow for preorders or "Expressed interest" at a new price point? (or at a hand-wavy price point to assess interest re: overhead/bulk/etc.) If tariffs come down, you can refund/credit, but for customers who wanted this, something-at-some-price may be better than nothing-at-any-price.
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.
That stuff is all over Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County actually has one of the most if not the most EPA superfund sites. It's the leftover legacy of chip manufacturing. When you rent in the Bay Area, the landlord does not have to disclose TCE contamination to you. TCE can cause birth defects and low birth weight in weeks if breathed in by pregnant women. If you're renting in the Bay Area, Google the address and make sure the property is not over a TCE contamination area.
> Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries
This was the logic under Deng, and the reason China is now a peer state. Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs.
"If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs."
This argument is absolutely accurate and somewhere between two and six decades late depending on who you feel like blaming for offshoring. Present day all we're doing is poking inflation with a stick, threatening the bond market (and eventually the dollar reserve), and encouraging economic partners to look elsewhere for stability. 3 guesses how all that ends.
The thing that really annoys me is tariffs could have been used SO much more intelligently. For example a 24 month increasing schedule. That gives business the kind of incentive to affect manufacturing and something they can plan against.
But now we have a dumpster fire and tariffs will have an even worse reputation.
It might have been better reputation-wise than the current game of chicken, but tariffs will always sour economic partnerships, which in turn leads to bolstering alternative economic partnerships...
That tariffs are in use is not proof that it is untrue. Even with the current dumpster fire we still trade with the US, but that obviously does not mean there has been no harm.
For countries, tariffs is not something that is just shrugged off as it impacts their economy, there will always be political countermeasures to strongly discourage that tariffs are applied that harms them. Retaliatory tariffs, impact on other negotiations and relationships, etc.
For companies, tariffs harm profits and fair competition on both supply chain and consumer side, depending on where the tariffs are located. The company would strategize for maximum profit margins, circumventing tariffs, remove countries from their supply chain, and focusing on more profitable markets.
It wouldn't be a boycott the same way it is now of course. It would be a slower process. But tariffs is a way to force the market and always have wide negative effects. One just hopes that certain long-term side-effects (like high import cost causing focus on driving down local supply cost) is worth the impact (local cost of living increase, drop in investments, drop in friendly reputation).
>Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
But poverty has dropped and income has risen under the CCP? You can argue that the CCP doesn't actually care about "individuals moving out of poverty", and all they care about is staying in power, but this is the sort of accusation that could be levied against governments in the west as well.
Apparently the CCP does suppress wages in various ways to keep export goods manufactured cheaply/competitively. It's probably more of an economic strategy than an expression of collectivism but I can't be sure.
I fully agree on the environmental part. Shipping all this stuff individually is incredibly wasteful. Even the combined packages from AliExpress someone else mentioned this is the case, since there's a ton of unnecessary packaging wasting space and resources.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
You remind me of Chamath Palihapitiya. He's this billionaire who likes to call things "cheap low quality junk" too, but for him it's anything is under like $5000, or not made in Milan or the French riviera. He's hamming it up for the audience but the point is the same. Every strata of wealth has the luxury of not buying the "cheap low quality junk" of the strata below it. To you, they are temu possessions, but to another person they are just their possessions. Everyone would love to be wealthy enough to never check a pricetag. And even then, plenty of products last just as long no matter what you spend on them. Many things are literally identical and just marked up 10x by the middleman who imported it to your local store.
> But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
It is exactly what harms them.
With that logic one can defend keeping children in tantalum mines in the supply chain of an iPhone. That's not an acceptable status quo...
Removing the market for immoral exploitation of beings and the environment is a necessary step. The size of the market for things made fairly needs to grow.
There are kids in Congo that are claiming to be older than they are so they can get work in mines to feed themselves and their families. If they don’t work they and their families starve, but if they do work they are encouraging immoral child labor. I don’t understand why many people think the answer is easy and straightforward in that case, this sounds like the trolley problem to me.
The people involved in international aid in particular know fine well that it's not an easy problem to solve... Exploitation and corruption is at every level here. For a children in Congo it may be a better option if the only alternative is to starve, but let's not pretend that everyone from the mine owner to the smartphone buyer is not profiting from that situation.
As a consumer one of the few immediate means of action we have is to at least refuse these products when we can... Then yeah, vote, donate, get involved for these kids to live decently.
Let’s say we boycott the Congo because they allow child labor (or turn a blind eye to it), and they see our “fix” (disallow it, let them starve) as barbaric because they have nowhere near enough resources to just make the starving problem go away (or to consider that as a possible solution). Did we make progress on anything by cutting the Congo off economically? We already know that if the country became richer the problem would probably go away naturally, but making it poorer instead, why?
I kind of understand why China invests in Africa the way it does vs how the west seems to just throw charity and morality at it. Development would solve the problem naturally (a richer society will stop sending their kids to the mines, or having their schools organize them to make fireworks, a sad state of affairs that happened less than two decades ago in China but now is unthinkable).
The nicotine bottle size constraint is a safety concern. Spilling a 200ml bottle of nicotine easily has the potential to cause lethality or morbidity through skin absorption, particularly in children. A 10ml bottle can still cause injury, but it is way more likely to be survivable.
In this case, the safety concerns outweigh the environmental concerns.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet.
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
The person you are replying to isn't claiming that the seller pays the tariffs, they are saying that it's not in the seller's interest to notify buyers of the tariff charge because it's essentially free anti-tariff messaging once buyers are hit with the sudden fees.
but in the process all their customers will have been burned buying something from Temu and many will be wary of buying in the future even if the tariff situation improves etc?
That's certainly how it worked out in Europe, where the processing fee was much less (€5-10 usually).
Since 2021 foreign merchants can send the goods tax paid, they collect the VAT and send it to to EU country, so there's no fees at customs. It works perfectly fine, but many people don't realize it or don't trust this.
Yep, this is my experience here in Greece. I'd randomly get maybe 5% of packages having a 3 € "customs fee" on top, but everything else was much cheaper. Now I have to pay VAT and import duties on everything, nothing gets extra fees but everything costs 50% more.
I guess the intent was to let local shops compete with AE, and they succeeded, because the prices are much more in line with the local market, I just miss all the cheap stuff :P
This is the Australian system as well. A lot cheaper for the government to collect with the tradeoff that small no name Chinese sellers can pretty much ignore it without penalty.
But the person receiving the package doesn't receive the package until they've paid the tariff.
You don't have to pay it -- if you don't, the package gets returned to sender or destroyed.
The post office delivers you a slip with information to go to your local post office to pay it and pick up the package. With UPS and FedEx you get a notice to pay online, and they deliver it once you do, as far as I know.
I've never heard of something being delivered without the tariff already having been paid, and then it going to collections. Has anyone ever experienced that personally? I don't see how that would be legal, or why a delivery service would expose themselves to risk of nonpayment.
It depends on the carrier. As multiple other commenters have explained, you can absolutely be hit with a tariff fee after receiving the package.
They do not care if you didn't want to pay the tariff. They don't want to deal with warehousing it, offloading it, or returning it to sender. They want to get it into your hands and deal with the logistics later.
That is not normal. Even a recent article explains:
> US customers who placed orders on shopping websites like the popular Chinese fast-fashion platform Shein have been particularly impacted, even if they made their purchases long before the tariffs were announced. They are now forced to either pay hefty fees—in some cases, more than the value of the items inside — or have their packages sent back.
> They show Love’s order was put on hold for several hours, during which she received the notice asking her to pay the import duties. DHL also noted the package would be returned in five days if she declined to do so.
I can find a few anecdotes online about FedEx delivering first and then charging later. I can also find people saying they called FedEx and refused to pay, and FedEx waived the amount. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how FedEx can hold you responsible for payment when you didn't engage in business with them -- you didn't purchase anything from them and you didn't sign any contract with them. If they paid the tariff before delivering to you, then that's on them.
So if I wanted to mess with someone I can just send them tons of cheap crap from Temu and they'll be forced to pay tariffs for items they never asked for?
> send you to collections if you don't pay it
That doesn't make sense. So can I cause troubles to someone by ordering an unwanted $1 temu item to their house, and thereby summon a collection agency to them (if they don't pay the $75 fee)?
You ordered the package, so you have to pay the fees. If you gift the package to someone, that is nice of you but they do not become involved in your purchase by that.
wow i see a variation of SWAT'ing someone. Just flood your unliked neighbour with aliexpress packages. It costs you 0.5$ ant 75$ for him. real life DoS attack.
And because they aren't morons, Pizza places will generally deny an order of 20 pizzas, pay on delivery, to an address they don't have an existing relationship with.
Cops haven't seemed to figure out that way of reducing abuse. Maybe if we pay them what we pay pizza delivery workers they will figure out how not to swat people.
Pizza places figured out not to do that because it's more profitable not to do that. Cops don't care because they still get to play with their toys and they generally have qualified immunity for civil violations that occur during the swatting.
You can not deliver a pizza based on a 2% chance of fraud. If there's a chance of bomb, shooting etc the same threshold doesn't apply. So the police have completely different criteria.
I assume we'll see backups on both sides. Containers backed up in Chinese ports and a huge backlog of unclaimed packages and delayed tariff bills waiting for USPS/UPS/FedEx to process them.
I doubt credit card purchases will be an option once we start seeing a lot of chargebacks. They are an absolute pita to deal with for the vendor and processor. I expect your payment options will be limited to those that don’t allow chargebacks.
You get a letter from your delivery company (in the UK, usually the Post Office or Royal Mail) with a link to pay import taxes. Once you pay, the delivery is scheduled.
Depending on country rules, it is sometimes possible for the sender to pay and then include the charges in their delivery fees.
You pay the sticker price, which does not include tariffs. The package ships. It arrives at the US border, and the carrier (DHL or whoever) bills you for the import tax before it leaves the port.
Maybe this will change, but up until now when importing things, tariffs were not part of the price paid to the seller.
Let's say I have a nemesis, I could in theory spend 100$ in packages from China, and ship it to them. And they'll have to pay 245$ in tariffs ? (245% today).
The bill received is a "you must pay this if you want the package. If you do not, we will destroy the package". It's not a contractual obligation where you get sent to collections or take a credit hit if you don't pay.
In the situation you described, the end result is that your nemesis does nothing, pays nothing, and you are out $100.
> Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs
That is, of course, entirely false. In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs, and even if that would be the case, there are many downsides that don’t have anything to do with tariffs.
> and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet
The FTA with the US has been "happening soon" for about a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it. And with a protectionist American government, it would put the UK at a significant disadvantage.
> unlike our friends on the European continent
LOL. Nobody on the continent wants its country in the same position as the UK is. Brexit killed any political movement to leave the EU for a generation.
They were not applied. Tomorrow, they can be 30% or 5.36%. If your only goal was depending on a fluke and a brain fart of a senile old man 10 years after Brexit was voted, then I don’t need to tell you how poorly thought out it was. If that is your measure of success, then Russia and Belarus welcome you.
1. The EU has that reprieve. Given the EU can bite back, it's possible that reprieve becomes permanent.
2. Last time Trump slapped tariffs on UK + EU, Biden prioritised reversing tariffs on the EU first because they're a bigger trading partner than the UK.
As the above poster pointed out, that's to say nothing of the many downsides of not being in the EU.
Why do you think it's an exaggeration? I mean it has measurably put them in a worse financial spot than before. I'd call the US tariffs a disaster and I'm not sure which one wiped out more from which nation's economy
Wait why would $0.75 have a $75 charge? Is there a minimum tariff that’s not as widely reported reported on? That would be a 10000% tariff. Or is this just exaggeration
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
As far as I know, the way it works is shipping companies can do the % package value (ad valorem duty) or the flat rate per package (specific duty) but have to do the same method for all packages and can only change their method once a month.[1]
My speculation is the ad valorem duty requires more manpower to implement and so that's why there's the specific duty option. Especially because they originally temporarily halted the de minimis changes due to USPS not being able to handle it.
Executive order 14266 is the most recent rates with 120% ad valorem or $100 / $200 specific (gated by date as noted above). [2]
There are plenty of things where Temu charges $2.00 and I would be fine paying a 120% tariff on that to bring it to $4.40, because Amazon is charging $8.99 and retailers are selling a seventy pack for $30.
But I would not be fine paying a $100 tariff to bring it to $102.
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ?
I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clear on how the rest of this works.
In the EO language there is no "whichever is greater", the shipping company picks (note this all specifically for de minimis, <$800 value, packages).
In EO 14256:
> Transportation carriers delivering shipments to the United States from the PRC or Hong Kong sent through the international postal network must collect and remit duties to CBP under the approach outlined in either subsection (c)(i) or subsection (c)(ii) of this section. Transportation carriers must apply the same duty collection methodology to all shipments; however, transportation carriers may change their collection methodology once a month or on such other periodic timeframe as CBP determines appropriate, upon providing 24-hour notice to CBP.
(c)(i) is Ad Valorem Duty and (c)(ii) is Specific Duty
Back when the tariff was first announced I remember seeing a whitehouse.gov announcement saying it was 30% with a $25 minimum per package. I can't find that but the [newest Fact sheet](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...) dated 4/2/25 just has the vaguely worded "either / or".
Your question is so simply put it seems like there should be an easy answer but it seems like there's a lot of interpretations on what's going to happen. It's possible that all of these sources were true on the day they were posted but the rules are continuously changing.
Its going to be great. I can't wait to see how MAGA explains this one away. Eventually the pain will be enough that hopefully the bubble breaks with some of them.
If what Trump says is any sign to how MAGA explains it, then the answer is: if you don't want to pay those large fees, buy local. Sure the cost will go up, and significantly so in the "short term" (however long that is ...), but in the long term we will have more local manufacturing.
disclaimer: I personally don't agree with that, so no need to argue against me. Just answering OP's question, because I feel that it is important to understand the other side.
I have a bunch of white oak from a tree I cut down and had milled into lumber.
I wanted to make a bunch of benches for friends/family, etc. I have the lumber so all I needed was the bench ends/legs.
I looked at the domestic options and it was going to cost. I couldn't find anyone that would sell a set of legs for under $300 a piece or wanted me to "contact them for pricing." and that's all BEFORE shipping.
Keep in mind that your local bigbox store sells an almost exact replica of the made in China bench legs with crap lumber for $99. It'd be cheaper for me to buy those, junk the lumber and use my own.
I then checked alibaba and walked through the process of getting RFQ. The competent sellers who knew what I wanted and what to do were easy to work with and quick to check the various shipping costs - the per unit price would be pretty low($20ish even with my low volume order) but shipping would be $50-$70 a per set of legs due to the weight of the cast iron. BUT, now, even with tariffs, that leg would go from $~90 to $180ish AND I'd still be well below what the domestic cost is.
If I go forward at all, I'll still probably go with the Alibaba folks. I don't see how USA manufacturers will suddenly start producing these sort of bulky intermediary consumer products anytime soon.
And its going to be fine. Amish mostly make everything they need, have no debt, no trade deficits, have lots of kids and are thriving. I'm not saying this to be snarky, all Americans can be as happy as billionaines: https://www.businessinsider.com/if-you-want-to-be-happier-sh...
"Is it possible to step off the hedonic treadmill? The best approach involves silencing our desires, restraining the insatiable appetite of our dopamine neurons. This is what the Amish have done. They have learned to live without modern consumerism. They don't use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quite permanence to heady growth. The end result is a happiness boom. The Amish turn out to be as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. Furthermore, their rates of depression are more than ten fold lower than the rest of the American population. The Amish are content because they have learned to ignore their dopaminergic pleas for more." https://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/16/happiness-wealth-...
What would happen if everyone lived like the Amish though? I’m assuming they are still profiting from modern science they wouldn’t be able to come up with, right? Or are they refusing MRI scans and Chemotherapy too?
I think the point wasn't that that specific example scales to the whole nation but more that if that specific example works as well as it does at the scale that it does than surely some middle ground between "import basically every consumer good" and "the amish" would scale to the entire nation with acceptable tradeoffs.
My theory is that all our modern junk doesn't necessarily cause depression, but it allows us to take on more chronic depression and other mental problems (distraction, dopamine hits, etc.) Like the way added safety features to cars just caused drivers to drive worse to compensate.
US "liberal" media is being extremely cagey about what and how it reports on this admin. They know they're in its crosshairs and are doing this clumsy balancing act of trying to retain their relatively left-leaning or centrist viewers while trying not to draw any more ire. It won't work, of course, and if we continue on this trajectory you can expect that they'll change over to apologia and ass-kissing or be dismantled.
> At this point it's basically capitlism against authoritarianism
Ha. You say that as though those things are incompatible. Some capital is putting up token resistance to the rise of authoritarianism, but it can't be a strong counterforce because that would risk retribution. Instead more and more capitalists bend the knee in hopes of favorable treatment. That's why I say the likes of CNN and NBC will switch to bootlicking before long.
There's a very large political base, particularly of young people, that is more than ready for leftist politics.
It just doesn't get any funding from the millionaires who fund the DNC or the billionaires who fund the GOP. And money is how political organizations run. We have too much wealth inequality to effectively enfranchise most of the population; Capitalism ate democracy, film at 11.
There's so much chaos being flooded out all at once that things that massively impact normal people don't have time to gain traction in the news. And the moment things do make the news, there's an even larger flood of people everywhere saying, "Fake news. Didn't happen." followed by "So what? How does this affect you personally?" and then ending with "This is actually a great thing and you're suspicious if you're against this."
Sites like Amazon and probably aliexpress/temu require a documented shipment before you can write a review. Shippers sometimes send extremely inexpensive stuff like seeds to random US/overseas addresses and launder the shipping receipt into a fake review for something more expensive.
This sounds fake. Why send seeds, of all things? Why not some equally cheap item like electrical wire insulation off-cuts, a piece of scrap bubble wrap or just a note (or just nothing)? Seeds are likely to set off alarm bells for biosecurity at many borders for no benefit.
I've seen countless interviews of Trump supporters who believe that China is the one paying for it. Which I can completely understand because if it is a cost on them it would be typically be called a tax.
That said the overwhelmingly majority are shocked but believe it's all just a negotiating tactic:
Some Chinese exporters are definitely splitting the cost of these tariffs with their American importer counterparts. While this isn't as significant as "China pays all the tariffs", it's also not "Americans pay all the tariffs".
Though, I haven't seen any analysis on how common this is, so the effect might be negligible in terms of how much "the Chinese" are paying for these tariffs.
I've come across some other comments on Chinese forums. Some importers buy products for 10 RMB from China and then sell them in the U.S. for 10 USD. Later, they use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices to 15-20 USD. They couldn't care less whether you impose 100% or even 200% tariffs – they'd still profit unless the tariffs reach 1000%.
Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.
Why is that the case? If an item (from every manufacturer) costs $5, and there's a new tax on it, making it cost $10, why would this be split between buyer and seller? The seller needs to make a certain margin on it, and it's not like the competition can sell any cheaper, or they already would have been.
If demand is elastic, then the seller has to lower prices (and their margin), otherwise people don’t buy their stuff (because they can do without). In this situation, the seller eats the tariffs, That’s the case for nice-to-have things like luxury goods and entertainment. If the seller cannot do that, e.g. because their margins become negative, they will just stop doing business (in the US or entirely).
The other end of the spectrum is stuff people cannot do without, in which case the seller has no incentive to lower their margins because their customers don’t have a choice. Then, tariffs are entirely paid by the buyer.
In reality, everything is in between and accurately estimating how much everyone will be paying is very difficult. What we can predict with certainty is that prices can only go up, and that some businesses will fold because they cannot absorb the loss.
> Wow I’m genuinely surprised that’s not getting more press
It's hard reporting on the current administration, it's the classic Russian flood style messaging, where you just flood as much (mis)information as you can, and people just can't follow.
Truth be told, the status quo, with 5-dollar packages clogging the USPS, was a DoS on-going thing in real life/physical form, there had been many posts in here detailing that. Yes, it will most probably negatively affect a lot of people who were relying on that DoS thing to carry on, and, yes, most probably the proposed charges are too high, but it was obvious that something needed to change.
I don't agree with Tariffs, but the discounts some countries get on postage is BS. It should not be cheaper to have a parcel delivered from overseas than interstate in your own country.
How long will it take him to change his mind again? He has already exempted a bunch of stuff from tariffs, coincidentally the same stuff that is likely to be imported because the US doesn't make much of its own of.
That’s all true, but you are leaving out an important piece of information that, at least for AliExpress, the VAT is already included in the price and there’s no additional customs processing fee.
Yeah, you have to try real hard to get a customs processing fee on a package from AliExpress. Customs literally can't keep up with the fire-hose of packages coming in from China, so the current deal is that they, AliExpress, charge and pay VAT and the packages just come through unscathed.
Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
Any business outside the EU can register for the EU One Stop Shop scheme and charge the VAT directly and avoid fees. Many small time US sellers probably just don’t want to bother, but big platforms like AliExpress centralize it https://skat.dk/en-us/businesses/vat/vat-on-international-tr...
"Dont want to be stuck in the morass of EU red tape" is more like it.
Not that US red tape is any better, mind you, but suffice to say that unless you have massive scale, registration schemes will make you ROI negative unless you are making >100k in sales per month from the country in question.
Some even require registration by region. For example GER vs UK vs FR and rest a while back, all needed separate registration. And the paperwork is usually in the home coun try official language. Ha joke is on you when you start getting tax authority messages. They arent saying bonjour!
It’s all about the VAT collection. I order frequently from Amazon Japan. They add the 25% VAT directly at the moment of purchase and deliver by DHL to Denmark without any extra handling fees. So it’s not about china, but about the company doing the paperwork required for the VAT collection instead of you doing.
I get stuff delivered from the UK to the EU very regularly and all competent sellers handle VAT and duties just fine without additional processing fees. Smaller companies don’t always bother, though, but most of the time I don’t have to pay customs because everything is declared properly.
> But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
It depends on who you are buying from. This is the order of magnitude of the fee if you let the shipping company handle it. It is extortionate and they do it because at this point buyers don’t have a choice if they want their stuff.
Companies that are used to dealing with foreign customers handle taxes themselves and don’t charge processing fees.
One positive that could still come out of the tariffs is the US consuming less junk.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
Germany is definitely top-tier on reducing waste. Before I left the UK it had got to the point where actual landfill-bound unrecyclable trash was a tiny portion of the waste output.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
I live in Germany. One reason the toters can be smaller is because there places to dispose of your recyclable goods (free) on almost every corner. The toters are just for compost and regular trash.
Aliexpress my impression is you can get "useful" stuff that are odd but usable. But I've had the impression that temu and shein was all "direct to garbage" devices, was this not the case?
They sell the same stuff in my experience. I would describe Temu as selling the top 10% of AliExpress that's the most popular, with faster and more reliable shipping since they use huge centralized fulfillment warehouses, similar to Amazon warehouses.
Aliexpress also changed a lot there. I'm not sure if it goes for all vendors, but my last purchases have been very fast. Some even shipped from Europe, but even if from China the wait time of several weeks did not happen anymore.
I've only used Temu a few times, but in my limited experience it is just Aliexpress but with a slick gamified interface on top. Alibaba sellers supplies the same stuff to Aliexpress, Temu, a ton of the Instagram ads and even a lot of the cheap Amazon stuff.
You can't lump shein and temu in the same bucket. My wife is an avid shein user and from what I can tell the quality so far is really good for what you pay.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes. And they do this like, always.
There's no "Summer" or "Winter" season clothes. They just update them continually.
> Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes.
Few years ago there was a trend in online ads showing t-shirts and hoodies with "realistic" print ons of animals, optical illusions, mazes, etc. Realistic only on photos or rather renderings. Felt like some form of brainrot. It was all Chinese clone shops or outright scams. Luckily the trend is dead now.
They all are. That doesn't mean they don't tell their vendors what to produce at what price. That's the business model of Chinese fast fashion after all.
I'm sorry for your convenience loss, but I'm happy for the environment.
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
The resistors to your local store have to go through logistics as well. And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
Who would have thought that Trump would bring in a policy that would benefit the environment? Also, who would have guessed that right wing governments would start buying Tesla's? Quite a plot twist ..
I bought a bunch of off-brand Lego kits usually with Chinese themes (pagodas, nine-tailed foxes) from Temu. What I thought was hilarious about Temu was that the size of things was usually different from you had in mind. Most of the time Temu items were smaller than I imagined but once in a while you'd get something much bigger.
> Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
There is a minimum fee for packages, yes. At this point I've lost track of all the changes but at one point I remember seeing $100 or $150 per package under some conditions.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
That there is a minimum fee doesn't necessarily mean the customer pays it on arrival. It could also be charged to the sender in advance, and if they don't pay, the package is simply not delivered at all.
If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
Yet that’s exactly how it works. Each package will have $100 tacked on and in June that goes up to $200. They are basically making small packages impossible, so individuals / hobby buyers will be cut out completely, and a lot of small businesses will lose their supply lines. Big businesses will just raise prices to compensate… or bite the bullet long enough to put everyone else out of business. I suspect this is Walmarts plan.
> If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
You can just refuse to accept the item, and it'll be returned to the sender or destroyed.
After the inavsion of Ukraine and sanctions were put on Russia every western company laundered their goods through Kazakhstan and into Russia. Im sure we will see a similar situation whith chinese goods finding their way into the country via vietnam.
realistically speaking, it is likely not possible to deliver envelop from China at 75c cost, its likely someone else is paying for your 75c envelops (like taxpayers through subsidies).
I enjoy the cheap shipping (from Aliexpress China warehouses to Germany), but I really wish this would be improved. It just seems nonsensical. There should be a closer relation to actual cost, but paying 4-5€ for a national shipment, versus essentially nothing for Chinese shipments, is mad.
It gets even weirder when you consider the prices of shipping even within the EU. Within Germany? €3,50 if the seller has a good deal with DHL, within the Netherlands? €4,50 with PostNL. As a normal consumer shipping something the price goes up, and when you want to ship from the Netherlands to Germany or vice versa? €9,50 at least. Vinted seems to be the exception because of their deal with Mondial Relay, so I can order something from Italy for just €5 (but they currently exclude Germany for that feature for some reason).
…meanwhile a couple of I²C light sensors, some brass book screws, a router bit or two? Free shipping because of the (whatever) deal or Ali Choice shipping, and just as fast too.
Of course with Shein and Temu this isn't about cheap electronics, parts, and tools any more, but wholesale environmental destruction by fast-fashion. It wouldn't get much worse if the Chinese fashion manufacturers just shipped their wares directly to the Atacama desert.
Enjoy this while it lasts Nachbar, no tariffs there for us just yet.
I remember paying 25 euro to ship a bottle of wine to somebody in Belgium while living 30 minutes away from the border (just for weight and destination, wine itself had no extra taxes).
And then stuff from China appears at my doorstep almost for free?
I would love to buy more from European sellers, but unless you're a serious company with deals shipping is just too expensive.
Our invisible borders are quite real when it comes to shipping. It's only the really big ones like Amazon which seem to be able to negotiate lower prices across the block, and that's just depressing.
It's the same for us in the US honestly, the shipping companies are ridiculous with this. Someone in my company sent me a hoodie, in a soft package, cost on it said $14.50.
Ridiculous! And they don't even discount you for bringing the package to their dropbox or to a store, it's the same price for home pickup. There's just no way to economically ship things as an individual.
Yeah, this gets even worse within EU, I luckily am probably less affected by that than you (thanks to country size differences), but when it hits me, it surely is bad.
Fast fashion is what consumers want. It's just that China has a state of the art supply chain that can do it and they blew everyone else out of the water.
I don't think the price of those small shipments from China is necessarily crazy.
Looking at flights for people: you can get a return flight to China from the UK for less than £350, which means less than £175 one way.
Let's say that's about 100kg (person plus luggage) then this means that flying 100g from China to the UK costs less than 17.5p or 20c in euros.
I expect that cargo will be cheaper than passenger plane, so shipping small stuff from China to Europe can indeed be very cheap. It's about volume and efficiency.
Air freight rates vary wildly by demand/bulk discounts/route/etc but $2-8/kg is typical, with a median around $4/kg. Commercial flights are often cheaper, and especially when you consider the weight of seats/water/food/crew/etc.
The plane itself isn’t the only cost of shipping. Even sending a letter is more expensive, and there’s no plane involved. You have to pick it up, bring it to the airport, and deliver it to the door from the destination airport.
Here in Australia I can order a $10 (AUD) item from aliexpress and get free shipping from China. But as a consumer or small busines, if I want to send anything bigger than a letter within Australia it's likely to cost me way more than $10 just for the postage.
It doesn't make sense and it must distort retail trade in China's favour. I'm honestly not surprised the US withdrew from that treaty, I think it needs reworking.
If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement. If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
>If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement. If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included,
Because those low shipping prices are being subsidized by taxes and the rates other shippers pay which make their way back to him because he shares an economy with them.
Just because the specific source of the subsidy is complex and can't be accounted for by the consumer doesn't mean it's not paid.
> If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement.
You misunderstand my point a little - As a consumer, I want access to that pricing! Why does it cost me tens of dollars to post something across my own country? But it costs someone in China almost nothing to post much further, including the part in this country?
And the answer is that treaties mean that we're all paying for it in other ways. In fact my expensive parcel may be directly subsidising the cheap parcels from overseas. I'm not a fan of this idea.
> If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
My partner briefly tried to sell handmade items within Australia. The postage cost more or less killed the idea as it added 50% or more to the price of a small-ish item. Yes, a mass-produced item from China would likely cost about 10% as much and be shippable for nearly free, but the audience is different. AFAICT it's largely other people who make stuff, and some who just value handmade and want to support local. They don't want the thing from China and are a little less price sensitive, but still within limits.
For items that are directly equivalent, I would prefer to buy from an Australian company, not least because of the consumer protections. Market distortions that favour overseas sales over domestic seem like a bad plan all round.
If I order a $2 item from aliexpress with free shipping, like some baseball caps I just found, nobody is paying the $10 postage fee it would cost just on shipping to send one within Australia, in China or anywhere else. Let alone the $25 it would cost to send the item the other way, back to China.
The treaty distorts the cost of delivery massively in favour of countries with low internal post costs, and ends up creating absurd situations like this.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
It does not work. You have to declare the real source of the merchandise. Or it has to go through "substantial transformation" so that is called "Made in France".
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
And nobody ever lied on those Chinese envelopes with the value declaration. ;)
Also, I can tell you that the country of origin field has one of the lowest entry qualities of all fields. People just don't bother, and customs don't have the capacity. Also, depending on your warehousing, there is a good chance you simply don't know. If something in your item bucket came from either China, Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines, what are you gonna write?
I've seen a few headlines in our local news here in Australia about how nobody knows what amount of Chinese ingredients will result in the final product being hit with Chinese tariffs, even though the products are assembled here.
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!
Why would you offer some low quality shit from Temu for a birthday? 99 items out of 100 self destruct within weeks of use.
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.
Reading this thread is mind-boggling. People complaining that cheap garbage from Temu is falling apart. People proudly proclaiming that they order Chinese crap almost daily. An argument about whether one crap peddler is better than another one.
Am I taking crazy pills? Am I the only one who buys things a few times per year? This rampant consumerism is depressing.
It isn’t all or nothing, products from Temu/Shein/AliExpress are not all “crap”; (and the idea that Chinese products are crap is also seriously outdated). Yes, there’s a lot of shovelware on those websites, but if you know how to navigate them you can get the same products that you’d get from Amazon for a third of the price. I’ve bought bags, tools, hobby equipment etc from aliexpress that has lasted me years and saved literally 50% on average.
So many people are clueless to this. So many products we buy in the US are the made in the same Chinese factory line and 200-400%+ marked up as a 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.
I keep hearing stuff like this and I kind of fully expect someone to tell me you have to pay Monster cable prices to get something that's not junk.
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.
Buy item X from Amazon, which is effectively a Temu product+ a 50% markup.
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.
Our neighbours have Prime vans as well as unmarked white delivery vans dropping stuff off almost daily, mostly small items. I have sometimes wondered where it all goes, until I see their overflowing garbage and recycling bins.
I don’t buy things online too often (about once a month, I would say), but regularly I buy on AliExpress things that I cannot find elsewhere at a decent price or at all (mostly electronics and specialised hobbyist stuff). On the other hand, yes, Temi is cheap garbage, and so is much of AliExpress. And Amazon as well, to be honest. Real life leaves room for a lot of nuance.
No, I had the exact same thoughts. I personally find it crazy to think that you'd buy something (that isn't an explicit perishable or consumable) and intentionally buy something shoddy or discard it after only a few weeks.
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.
I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.
I used to buy a lot from Temu. Till I got a product that fell apart after three months. I tried to leave a bad review, but Temu wouldn't allow it. If you're trying to leave 3 star rating or below, they redirect you to customer service. But since customer service only dealt with items under 45 days (as far as I remember), they would just tell me something like "too bad, you're out of luck".
So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.
This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
Ebay do something similar too. You can immediately provide positive feedback, but you have to wait 7 days to add negative feedback. This is ostensibly to encourage sellers to address issues to retain reputation. Sellers can also get negative feedback removed after the fact by doing refunds, etc.
This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly.
A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.
Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing. 2 out of 3 items fit and 1 out of 3 is decent quality. That's still cheaper, depending on what tariffs your country is charging.
I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.
Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.
The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
> The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies.
Not just better value for money, I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.
A recent example: I was looking for something to balance the 3rd axis on my telescope, There are very few products on the market from mainstream brands and none were what I needed. On Ali I easily found several options. These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.
Same goes for storage bags and cases. You can often find a bag or case specifically made for your device, while there isn’t anything for sale locally.
> I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.
I recently needed some bearings for a project. I wanted them quickly, so AliExpress would take too long. I visited 5 local stores and none of them sold the bearings I needed. AliExpress had 200 sellers selling them in every possible type for a decent price.
Ended up buying AliExpress quality from Amazon for a higher price because they shipped faster.
Obviously YMMV, but I bought some Amazon MTB pedals rated 4.7 starts @ 9k ratings. One suffered a catastrophic failure, shearing off at the crank and I was pitched over the bars.
Design and manufacturing is obviously a major part of the equation with this product sector, and no doubt the Chinese can do that as good as, or even better than domestic brands in many respects. What they don't do as well, as far as I'm aware, is any significant destructive testing.
The bonus is I can now spend even more absurd amounts of money on bike components, which is the true dream of any true cycling enthusiast.
Amazon is just not a good place to go, you're going to be buying something very low cost that someone is drop-shipping as a way to maximise their profit, not provide a good product.
You need to know the brands to buy (Trace Velo, Peak Torque and China Cycling helps here) and buy directly from their Ali Express store, or from their website.
Amazon is only if you need a cheap bike maintenance tool within a couple of days that you're happy only using a few times before you have to throw it out. Not for components.
useless to know the brand.
Amazon will change the seller every time you see an item, and pretend the reviews apply. then the new seller will ship you counterfeits while selling under the good brand and reviews. after a few sales, seller bestbikesbrooklin7456, is banned and you are offered bestevercyclesocal888 and the cycle restart.
> Obviously YMMV, but I bought some Amazon MTB pedals rated 4.7 starts @ 9k ratings.
Every site is different, no? Amazon isn't AliExpress. Though lately Amazon if flooded with marked-up AliExpress stuff. I'm not fond of Amazon, their customer service is more of a hit and miss since various years.
That said, I've been watching Trace Velo. He reviews a lot of AliExpress cycling things. It's often bad after prolonged use. Meaning, yeah, their testing is lacking. But some brand do seem to be trying to become a trusted brand. E.g. Ugreen nowadays is often trusted. It used to be one of the many things listed on AliExpress.
Except the brands I'm talking about sell directly - the stuff you're buying on Amazon is the cheapest drop shipped products on Ali marked up ridiculously to extract the maximum profit.
> For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
Their products can also be bought either directly or from other bike-specialized shops, they don't sell exclusively through Aliexpress.
> For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
Do you follow Trace Velo on YouTube? Any others you recommend (aside from China Cycling)?
AliExpress is great for electronics. Not the „I need a phone“ stuff (although for that it’s fine too, I think), but more the „I need an ESP-32 module“.
This. People buying a laptop there for ten bucks then receiving the photo of one have indeed all the rights to complain, but common sense should suggest them before the purchase the old saying that if something looks too good to be true... And this can happen everywhere there's no strict quality control or accountability. Aliexpress is great for small modules, SBCs, diy electronics in general, however I wouldn't ever buy semiconductors, batteries or memory modules there, as the risk of fakes or low quality clones is close to 100%.
Yeah especially as in places like London there have been many explosions and house fires originaying from cheap foreign e-bike batteries.
Some Chinese companies care about a long-term brand and place high standards on themselves but it's not true that anything online has passed safety standards. It's hard to differentiate the two due to the amount of fake reviews also.
Yes,also beware of power strips and electrical wires in general: those coming from there are increasingly made of coated iron instead of copper or brass in contacts. The side effect is a much higher resistance that makes the wire dissipate a lot more power than it should, even to the point it can overheat and catch fire if under serious load (heaters, ovens etc.). Their exceptionally bad insulation and usually smaller size than advertised make the problem even worse. Such bad cables can be used for breadboarding where small lengths and low currents mitigate the effects, but they shouldn't be considered for anything serious. I've learned to ditch almost every bundled cable coming from there after multiple bad experiences. Surplus is a good source of top notch cables that can last decades.
Crappy cables can be checked using a magnet: pure copper ones won't stick. There are also reports of junk coated aluminium cables that wouldn't stick as well to a magnet, but they're rare as aluminium, at least good quality one, is not cheap.
It's basically McMaster with slow shipping for my hobby projects. I don't need the $1000 quality and warranty of a McMaster ball screw and linear guideways, the $80 BSTMOTION brand(?) stuff has been working for me for years and is plenty accurate.
You can get the base ESP-32 modules for example, but not most of the Dev Boards. They have some, but much more expensive than AliExpress. And then you also have to pay shipping.
If you actually read the article you see this garment lacked a "flammable" label. It's not the flammability that wouldn't happen, it's just a tiny warning.
This article is outrage bait, especially obvious given the incredibly graphic pictures and the high focus on emotional statements combined with the low amount of actually important detail (what went wrong? It's not what you or the article are implying, which is the fire risk).
> Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?
Seller-side here. Amazon combine my author page, with that of A.A. Milne. Some of my products show up under the deceased author, some of his under mine. Reviews for one particular product are combined.
My seller ID is separate, my last name is also Milne, but my first is James.
He wrote a book called "The Red House Mystery", I wrote an homage to it because I am related to the man, called "Red House". Different products, with different ISBNs.
Combined reviews. [0]
That's not exactly a fair process for customers - and no, I can't get them uncombined. I've been trying for years. But if the seller can't get rid of something completely misleading, that seems to have been caused by a very badly automated process, then there are processes at Amazon that cause problems.
I've only ever left one bad review on Amazon. Chopsticks, they came bound together with some sticky tape. Sticky tape left a very sticky area just where your hands go that I was unable to get off despite a lot of effort scrubbing, washing, and so on. I left a polite constructive review saying they were good chopsticks but watch out for this stickiness issue. My review was declined by Amazon on the grounds it didn't meet their "community guidelines" (without elaborating further on which rule I'd supposedly broken).
Ok, well I've left nine 1-star and many other 2 or more star reviews and none of them have been removed for any reason, so I would say you got unlucky and that I stand by my comment that Amazon don't do anything like automatically redirecting all 1-star reviews to customer service.
I bought one to get sticker residue off my windshield, but it's proven useful many times since.
Mind, considering how well it removes glue, I wouldn't stick anything that was touched by it in my mouth... but may be okay for the hand end of your chopsticks.
Orange oil works wonders. It's explicitly not food safe, but you get that stuff on your hand every time you peel an orange and it's also present in juice. Just rinse them afterwards and wear gloves.
I recommend isopropyl alcohol. It’s cheap, versatile and works like a charm for most of your cleaning jobs. Way safer and cheaper than sprays and "super-do-that-thing-4000". No offense to the sprayers.
The community guidelines rejection is such BS. I've done thousands of Amazon reviews and get about 1% rejection rate, and it's always baffling as to the cause. You develop superstition over time over what is the cause. I avoid certain words (sexual, violence, mention of other brands), blur our barcodes, etc. "Sticky" would trigger my "uh oh, sounds sexual" alarm and I'd word it something like "tape around chopsticks left adhesive residue". Like I said, superstition.
Amazon is known for suppressing negative reviews, there are many reports about it. Not sure why the grandparent comment is claiming the contrary - not doing the automatic redirect maybe, but they do remove or just not accept negative reviews.
They absolutely do, it's personally happened to me. My review was rejected because I simply listed what items were included in the box, one of them being a card that offered a bribe for a positive review.
Every review I left for Amazon products (Amazon EU) got rejected until it was diluted into nothing. The explanation was always vague, listing a dozen possible reasons, none of which fit what I wrote.
On non-Amazon products it's a coin toss for negative reviews. Many are published, some are not. Can't explain why.
Google is not better, negative reviews I leave on Maps are published very selectively. Maybe big-tech found a way to monetize this too. I know sites like Yelp are more or less an extortion business where you pay to get negative reviews wiped.
Neither does Temu. They're misrepresenting what Temu does, at least in my experience.
If you choose a star rating below five, Temu asks if you'd like to request a refund or seek other assistance. The one time I said yes -- it was a keyboard where a shift key wouldn't trigger consistently at the peculiar angle that my typing style hit it at -- it immediately gave me a 100% refund and said just keep it.
But I've left other low-star rating without trouble. The refund/assistance suggestion is an entirely optional sidetrack.
I've never (to my knowledge) had a review on Amazon rejected, and I've left very some negative reviews, including when I received counterfeit items.
I always thought the review scams on Amazon were more driven by the third-party sellers doing stuff like listing takeover, astroturfing reviews, bribing customers for good reviews, etc., but maybe I'm wrong. I have personally received multiple offers from third-party sellers of incentives to leave good reviews.
I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
Amazon took down one of my reviews because I included a picture of the item's manual which had a page offering to pay for Amazon reviews (the item had unanimous 5 star reviews). To me that seemed like valuable info and legitimate context to include in a review but even after I appealed they disagreed because my picture was "irrelevant".
You're supposed to report review manipulation offers to Amazon. Reviews are for the product itself, not the seller (in theory multiple sellers can offer the same product, but for alphabet soup brands that's never the case).
The review manipulation offer was boxed up in the shrinkwrapped package so from my POV that made it part of the product. If the seller is altering the product then IMO its fair game to review. If a seller removed the batteries or put a sticker on the product I'd consider that an alteration to be part of the product itself... as opposed to when reviews complain about stuff like the seller's shipping speed which is orthogonal to what's in the box being shipped.
How convenient that the information only goes to Amazon, who can choose to do nothing, and isn't allowed to go out to other customers to help them make a purchasing decision.
Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
>They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
> Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
> While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.
Some people treat it like an adventure or a gamble or are just too curious, they know it's hit or miss but it's cheap and usually you can return it easily. See Atomic Shrimp channel for example. I don't get those people but I don't judge
Building common goods is one thing. Free labor for a corporation (that can at any time decide to throw it away if it's not profitable enough) is another thing.
You really expect that kind of support from something ahipped across the globe for peanuts? Ali/Temu and the kind serve specific purposes and they do it well.
I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.
The "kind of support" they say they expect is the ability to leave a negative review. That doesn't seem too extreme of an expectation honestly. The only reason support came into the picture is that Temu redirected them to support.
We have gotten to the point where you can't leave a bad review on aggregation sellers (like Temu/Ali/Amazon) because if you could, your competitor will for sure buy some farm in Taiwan/wherever and destroy your reputation.
The closest thing to Amazon made in Latin America is almost the same thing, I'm talking of course about Mercadolibre.com, you can ask a refund for a product but if you do you cannot leave a review at all, and the products with bad scores have their scores and their reviews hidden, that's why is impossible to find a single product with less than 4 stars, and they have millions of them, it's as shady as it gets.
Whats the goal here? Like, with amazon they don't own most of the products they sell, so presumably leaving a bad review doesn't bother amazon much, but what about temu?
Temu is about offering a convenient hyper fast shopping channel to Chinese manufacturers with customers worldwide, primarily for clothing. A product which sells for months/years and gathers reviews is not part of their vision. Their customers don't need reviews (sales numbers is everything), but the users expect them, so they are there.
Shopee has even worse behavior around reviews. You can't even leave a review past the first few days, and they bribe you with shopee points to leave a review.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
I use shopee and find the reviews fair. Like everything else, you have to learn how to take the most out of a limited system.
My experience so far has been good. Negative reviews seem fair, and give a good indication of what to expect (maybe I've lowered my expectations from the start).
I just checked and I cannot edit any old ratings. Maybe it's something you can only do through the app?
I can't install the app because I travel between countries and they block my Google account from installing the local app. I'm sure there's ways around that but I'd rather just use the website.
They have a 30 day time frame to leave a review. That's why so many reviews just say "Everything arrived on time" and none of them say "this thing broke after 31 days".
AliExpress highly encourages leaving a review. They also encourage taking pictures. As a result, loads of random pictures in reviews.
You can do an additional remarks later, but I often don't bother. It's drowned out anyway.
What I often do is read the reviews. What's usually done is a critical review and still 5 stars. The fake reviews are pretty easily spotted. It shouldn't be this way, but in my experience it's still better than Amazon. With Amazon more effort is made to fake a review.
Do you buy anything based on reviews there? They're obviously silly and exchanged for discounts and "coins" so I just ignore them in a way I don't elsewhere.
I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
No, I treat AE reviews as written by the manufacturer. Sometimes I'll look to see if a legitimate user has posted something wrong with the product, or a caveat, but I never pay attention to the rating.
I've had almost solely good experiences with AE, but it does take experience to shop there (never trust the photos, if the price is too cheap it's a scam, batteries are always fake, etc).
Amen, and resilience. It's a combative UX, trying to force you into bundles instead of single purchases, Choice items rather than cheaper with regular p&p, not advertising that some things (eg bare lithium cells) will be shipped seemingly by sailors chucking corked glass bottles into the sea and hoping they get to you within three business years.
I've not had too much of a problem with outright scams. Some things have been smaller than expected (photo issues - description accurate) and if it's delicate (eg plywood robot models, larger foam planes) they will find a way to grind it into dust before delivery. Both those examples got a refund the next day.
But it's cheap when it works but the central company appears to be honest and helpful when you contact them.
I did have one or two items being scams, eg a mosquito bite pen that ended up being empty inside, or a 2TB USB disk that actually just had a trashy MicroSD card inside, but both cost $3 so I knew they were scams when I got them (I was just curious).
IMO Temu and Aliexpress/Alibaba market themselves in a very different way. In many ways I consider Aliexpress to be more reputable just because they don't try to pull the wool over your eyes with their products. With Temu they try to make it seem like the products are just as good as what you get at Walmart. With Aliexpress at least they just straight up tell you they are a "front" for all the factories in Shenzhen.
I found Aliexpress to be great for retro gaming consoles, for anyone interested and willing to wait, you can get an "R36S" which can play all the old gameboy games and other retro games for ~$30.
The other advantage with Alibaba is you can interact directly with the companies doing the manufacturing.
Several years ago, I was frustrated with the insane costs of hockey sticks. I'd been going through sticks at about a 6-8 month clip since high school and having to buy $300 hockey sticks every six months was not something I was happy about.
I got on Alibaba, sent out several emails saying I was an equipment manager for a US based hockey team. The team was looking to get some stock sticks for backups since players were going through sticks like crazy.
I emailed two companies who did carbon fiber manufacturing. One company made one-piece composite sticks that were blank. You could tell them what length, flex, lie and blade pattern you wanted and then if you wanted 12K or 14K carbon fibre. I got two 12K blanks. They were impressively durable and lasted for well over a year. Almost twice as long as my expensive retail sticks. They were a little more whippy than I was used to, but it was easy getting used to it.
The other company was a bit shady. The first email I got back was someone asking me how many top of the line Bauer sticks I needed. I asked him how that was possible and he just said he had access and just give him the specs and they'll send them out. I ordered two of those to boot thinking it was a pretty big gamble. Turns out they were legit. My buddies who used the same retail model couldn't tell the difference. We went over the graphics and couldn't see any difference either. Ironically, I still have one of these Bauer 1X Lite sticks that I use when I get down to a single stick and I'm waiting for the newer ones to ship.
Interestingly enough, by the time I had gone through three of the sticks, suddenly there were several companies popping up offering "blank" sticks for a fraction of the cost of the retail sticks. Effectively doing the same thing I did, but now as legit hockey companies trying to save players some money. All told, I think I spent around $500 for the 4 sticks I bought. A fraction of what retail sticks would've cost. I haven't gone back and ordered more sticks, just because there's so many pro stock stuff out there and so many other companies selling these blanks now.
Compared to everything else it feels pretty minor but I'm fairly worried about the handheld retro gaming market. I really enjoy it as a hobby but it seems like almost all of those devices will no longer be profitable / worth buying if the tariffs are enforced on them.
I've been really enjoying my recent Anbernic RG 406V and it can play pretty much all the systems I want it to so I guess I'll just stick to that if the handheld market collapses.
The "de minimis" exemption, which previously allowed low-value packages (under $800) from China to enter the U.S. duty-free, is being phased out. This change, announced by the White House, will impact popular e-commerce platforms like Temu and Shein, potentially leading to higher prices for consumers. The de minimis exemption is being ended because it's being seen as a trade loophole that allows low-value goods to enter the country without paying import duties. The change is expected to take effect on May 2, with a new system in place to collect duties on small-value packages.
Well you have until May 2nd to order tarrif free fyi. Most people dont realuze this.
There's a different cost vs. shipping tradeoff between the two. I use Temu for little electronic things (OLED panels with breakout header pins, microcontroller boards, breadboards, etc). For that purpose, Temu's prices are much better than any domestic seller, for a product that is exactly the same for my purposes. And, unlike Aliexpress, it won't take a fiscal quarter for your stuff to arrive.
I have ordered loads of stuff off Aliexpress, in the exact category you described. Never taken more than ~1 week to reach. Aliexpress shipping is actually quicker than Amazon if you don't have Prime.
Part of my AliExpress purchasing workflow is checking reviews for the item I'm about to buy on Amazon, as they're (usually) higher quality than the "just received item, 5 stars" reviews on AliExpress.
The idea that Temu is gonna end is nonsense. First of all, the US is just one market for them. They're red hot in many countries in latin America, Asia, Africa and so many others. Moreover, I guess they'll eventually find other ways to sell products in the USA, in one way or another.
Temu has direct access to producers of the items they sell. They know what categories are profitable, having incredible logistics directly tied to Chinese industry. Wish, from what I can getter, was just an American middle man.
Temu vs. AliExpress is usually a shipment speed vs. cost tradeoff. Their catalogues also differ quite a bit in some areas, so sometimes one has to use one or the other.
I feel like AliExpress has improved in this area though, likely due to pressure from Temu.
A few months ago, I had an AliExpress order beat an Amazon order to my house. I wasn't using Prime, but the AliExpress order did ship from China. It took about a week.
I've had so much good luck with AliExpress. I wouldn't order anything I might need to return. But I've never received something that needed that. I can't begin to describe how disappointing these tariffs are going to be for me. It's not as if I can or ever will be able to buy these things locally.
It probably varies based on item price and how obvious the issue is. I had two sub-$10 items arrive visibly broken recently and got refunds in under 5 minutes.
You have to call their bluff when they try to pull that, they don't want you to ship stuff back either. I got a full refund after a few back and forths of "are you sure you want to ship that back for a refund??".
Hmm, with one exception, every time I've had an issue it was resolved with a full refund within 5 minutes. They do make you give them a picture of the issue.
Whoever's doing the "design" on Temu and Ali seems to think all Americans want to feel like they're in Vegas while shopping. It's very obnoxious, to the point that people have created plug-ins to clean things up (e.g. AliTools Shopping Assistant, AliRadar).
Thanks for pointing that out. Several times I’ve seen adapters or tools I could use only to click them and it sends me to a sale list I can’t find the original product in. How hard is it to have a grid of clickable jpegs
Aren't Temu/Shein considered to be ultra-low-quality garbage, mostly? Don't people haul their items in order to promote their useless Instagram/TikTok, so their followers will buy the same ultra-low-quality garbage?
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of direct access to overseas markets, rather than local distributors slapping 200% margin on Chinese sourced/produced items that you can buy from AliExpress. But I'm not in favor of flooding the market with cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap that ends up in landfill in a few weeks or days.
I don't get this argument. All the cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap will still exist, it's just going to be sold on Amazon with 1-day shipping. Consumers want these products and the market just fills the demand. The deregulation that will take place under this administration will lead to even more, toxic, unsafe crap flooding the market, except it'll just be manufactured in the U.S.
The same item on Amazon will cost x2/3 times than Temu, if you will be able to find the same item at all, meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.
The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
>meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.
No. Really not much at all.
The US cut 330 million or so people out of a market of billions setting it up so the rest of the world starts getting a competitive advantage over the US.
>it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
LOLOLOL. You do not think like a capitalist. They didn't go "oh no I have to cut corners". They saw they could cut corners on costs decades ago. China has been building your name brand products for as long half the people on HN have been alive. If you look at Tiktok now, they are out right showing the factories building products you are paying hundreds/thousands for in the US for 20-50 dollars.
The US screwed itself with huge consolidations and rent seeking behaviors. We are paying huge amounts for products and not getting the value we deserve.
No idea about Temu, but I've been told that some clothes from Shein are better and cheaper than what we sometimes find in the cheaper local stores (UK).
I hope temu and the other Chinese companies in that segment stop selling overseas. Their model is just incredibly destructive to the environment, they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
You will find the exact same items on Amazon, except usually more expensive.
There are many items sold on Aliexpress that are of decent quality.
I think the point is to buy what you really need, and focus on quality, rather than impulse buying cheap stuff that ends up in the garbage after a month.
Our consumerism is hooked onto cheap crap, the factories producing it are only fulfilling the demand.
It's just a natural byproduct of poverty and a shrinking middle class in the United States. HN readers are not the target customers of Temu. It's those people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford quality goods whatsoever. It's the same as the low quality garbage found in predatory dollar stores in poor neighborhoods.
I did an experiment for my blog awhile back that never got written up (lack of time, mostly), but it is was just me ordering about $30US of stuff from Temu to see why they were so aggressively marketing themselves, the app auto-installing on my Samsung smartphone I have for work, etc.
The experience left me feeling very, very dirty.
The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar portable power banks, and two small canvas backpacks. Each arrived in separate packages on different days, all shipped from what appeared to be the same CA facility, so right off the bat, we're two strikes against environmental friendliness.
The items were, as you'd expect, utter trash.
- Fire Sicks: these are those magnesium bars shaped like a little key that you strike with a piece of metal to create a spark, this allowing you to maybe start a fire. Now, I've been starting camp fires without flame for most of my life (probably the only thing I took away from my time in the Boy Scouts), so I've seen plenty of junk products that claim to do the same, but these take the cake. The actual "magnesium" bar was coated in a thick black paint for some reason? And the striking tool is a flimsy piece of aluminum coated in orange paint. Useless. I had to use a bit of sandpaper to remove the paint, giving access to the metal parts of both tools, and even then, the spark created was barely hot enough to catch a pile of dead leaves on fire. I don't know what they actually used to make these, but don't assume they will save your butt in a survival situation
- "Solar" Battery Bank: these are just regular USB power banks with a an extremely inefficient photovoltaic panel glued on. It is only capable of powering the green "charging" LED but definitely does not recharge the power bank itself. After I discharged them to see how long it would take to recharge with the solar panel, they sat in direct sunlight for 3 full days before I gave up with no additional power stored. However, they're not a total loss. They still work as you'd expect a regular USB power bank would, rechargeable with a typical micro-USB cord with two outputs to charge your devices. Didn't notice any weird voltages when charging my stuff, either. At the very least, they will not end up in a landfill because I can make use of them on camping trips.
- Canvas Backpack: the stitching is a joke, so don't expect to put anything heavy in these. My wife sews as a hobby, ended up deconstructing them and reinforcing them with some proper canvas material that made them way more rugged and able to hold gear (I use one for fishing magnet crap and the other for rock-hounding tools) but we could not help but wonder just how little the workers were paid to paid these garbage bags and what those conditions are like.
Their business model is built entirely on selling you garbage you do not need that will likely just be thrown away after a few (if any) uses unless you are more diy, willing to try to find ways to make things work or repurpose them. The entire shopping experience is gamified with spinning wheels and lightning deals, coupons falling from the sky, etc, to the point where it was ridiculous and intrusively preventing from searching for things I wanted to order. It felt like their target audience was the old ladies I see spending 8 hours a day glue to the chair of a slot machine in the local casinos. It was so absurd I felt like was in a cartoon about consumerism and actually experienced guilt for having conducted the experiment.
I personally am always weary of cheap power banks. Given the rest of the corners cut on the device, how sure are you that the circuitry and the batteries themselves are of acceptable safety standards.
Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.
Paying more =/= quality, unfortunately. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. Don't be afraid to open up those battery banks now and then if you want to be sure, put a meter on them and scope them if you know how, but you'll find what I typically find; a lot of the same cheap components all wrapped in a pretty package. But because one came from China and one was "made" in the USA, you'll pay a lot more for one than you will the other. You can probably guess which.
I say that as someone who works in manufacturing as a controls and repair tech for industrial IoT and electromechanical integrations (I wear a lot of hats, long story). Trusted brands like Rockwell, Siemens, etc aren't really doing anything that much different than their cheaper competitors and they know it. It's a big part of the reason why their business model includes aggressive pushes to keep their customer "in their world," so to speak, trying to be a one-stop-shop for all their control needs when good number of applications really don't need anything beyond a Koyo Click PLC you can get used for $50 on eBay instead of the $1200 A/B unit. Heck, I've seen automation cells that could have the PLC swapped out with a $20 Arduino and nobody would know the difference except the controls guy. I'd love to say this over-priced cult-like hooey is restricted to the automation industry, but it's definitely not, and bleeds all over a variety of consumer industries, especially those of personal electronics. We are getting ripped off left and right, but if there's a fruit logo or some inventor's name we recognize on the packaging, we're okay taking out a second mortgage to afford it.
In the end, the quality standards in many cases are just a lot of hot air, CYA statements and sales BS. Price is really dictated by the customer's perception of the product, and when you create that trust, legitimate or not, you get to price your product much higher than your competitor, regardless if your product is _actually_ better than theirs. They get away with this because, for the most part, customers don't take the screws out and actually look inside.
Now, that is not to say my experience is always true. There are plenty of companies that make their quality standards and testing pretty transparent so the consumer can review them at their leisure and make a choice. I'm just saying most do not, which creates a lot of shadowy areas where many companies can get away with things simply because they know nobody is looking and taking their word at face value.
Do you really believe that the same safety standards apply to all products?
I bought an Anker Battery bank, which got recalled for some safety issue. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that some random Chinese seller would not have bothered with any of that. Likely such a safety issue would have never come to light.
Battery production is in China anyways. Do you believe that all Chinese companies adhere to the same standards and that companies who are trying to get some kind of brand reputation in the west would still choose the complete bottom end of battery production?
I understand it was an experiment but camping supplies are the very last thing I’d order from a site whose entire purpose is to peddle low quality garbage.
It's really interesting to see people being ignorant, and proud of their ignorance. Imagine someone saying "All American products are garbage. And I obviously never bought anything American, why on Earth would I buy garbage?"
It is really interesting to see people making up stuff in their heads. Nowhere did I talk about "all", obviously Chinese factories can produce extremely high quality products. E.g. iPhones.
Temu is a trash distributor, the race to the bottom needs to be stopped. Their entire business model is being cheap and shipping trash.
It’s amazing how not only can you decide what others can and should buy, you can also decide the quality of that item for them sight unseen. You should reach out to TV producers - this skill would be very entertaining in a show!
Yes, I am very intelligent for figuring out that products, made under near slavery conditions with the sole goal of making them as cheaply as possible by companies who have exactly zero reputation and whose customers have no way to retaliate are in fact bad. This was an extremely complex deduction on my part and in no way totally obvious.
Also, things that are very bad for the environment should be banned. Not by me, but by the government.
I guess, like the rest of the positive comments, they conflate quantity of choice with quality of choice. I stopped buying stuff online mostly a few years back, covid completely destroyed my trust in online retailers, especially ones with China backed products.
I don't get the desire to pollute some other country just so one can have a hobby, go volunteer at a shelter or something useful.
Externalizing our negativity got the US pretty far, and if walking that back sucks for most people because they're used to buying literal land fill, then that's too bad.
I am a troll, because I believe that shipping cheap trash from China is harmful for the environment and that the quality is low?
How deluded are you to believe that this is some kind of disingenuous belief that I hold. Do you think that environmentalism in general is also another troll operation, as I am sure that any person who cared a lot about the environment would agree with me, at least in part.
Why would I argue with you, if I know that your opinion is so backwards it's unsalvageable? If you met someone who genuinely believes that Earth is flat despite all the evidence to the contrary, how would you approach a discussion with them?
> create so much pollution and waste in the process
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
But maybe bought from a salesman with a Humvee and a artisan that spends every last cent on overseas travel
The issue is that trying to analyse the breakdown of $ by environmental outcomes is hard.
There is a lot of propoganda about how to be environmentally sound. We tend to pick one dimension like trash output. We lack the information to be able to make better balanced decisions, for example sometimes the throwaway thing is better for the environment.
> expensive shelfs
I think that example is selection bias. I'm sure you can think of plenty of expensively wasteful examples too (it's easiest to look at other people to find that).
Counter-factual: I made some shelves from waste-stream offcuts, and other shelves were going to be thrown out. Plus costs to paint them (much much less than even the cheapest of new shelves).
Interesting dynamic here with echoes of the .com bubble where there is a huge web of industries all dependent on the current setup continuing and money being available for consumer spending and ads - when that dries up it will impact not just those selling goods imported from China, but everyone in the US.
Disrupting US trade quickly with massive global tariffs will cause all sorts of secondary effects like a massive downturn in ad spending - directly affecting companies like Meta and Google who look insulated right now because they don't sell physical products.
So generally speaking, advertising is not resilient to downturn.
In 2008, there was an expectation of revenue loss. But because Google "direct advertising" directly affects sales... it was more like "sales" than traditional "marketing" in this respect.
In 2025, it may be different. We shall see.
I don't think much online ad revenue is related to physical products. The margin available for ad spend on physical goods is much slimmer. But... it's hard to predict 3rd order effects.
Advertising on the whole is not recession proof[1], although in the last two dips Google showed growth in ad revenue[2], and Meta was relatively stable[3].
The first thing that gets cut is 'new channels' and experiments (read: channels that have bad measurable ROI). Pinterest, X, Snap.
After that it's the most 'wasteful' brand spending/high cost per reach broadcast media that gets cut. Cinema, local TV, and increasingly nationwide TV.
Then when the economy comes back to growth there's a broader recalibration of budgets.
Because Google search has a very simple, easy to understand impact on sales they actually grew faster in recessions. Then when the recession ends brands don't see any reason to cut that spending.
Google search (and online direct marketing broadly) have pretty direct impact on sales. It's true that they held up well, relative to "traditional advertising" in recent downturn.
However... there are a lot of money losing campaigns out there. A lot of that relates to economic buoyancy. Startups showing growth for the next round. But also established companies getting into new sectors, defending market share, etc.
We are still, I think, in a "greed mode" economy. Fear hasn't really shown it's face yet. If that switch flips... I suspect meta/alphabet will be impacted this time.
I do agree, Google and probably Meta even more so are likely to be impacted now just because they've become so overwhelmingly dominant. There's nowhere else left to cut for a lot of brands.
What will be more interesting though is if that money comes back to Meta or Google, or if people will find new, better opportunities while they pull back (eg. what happened to TV in 08).
I think your point about dominance is a main player. I can make a dozen cases for LLMs as world of opportunity and compliments for both of these companies.
It takes a lot of opportunity/gain to hedge against the risk of losing 20% of search or social media revenue.
If you already have the whole market, losing share is easier than gaining.
But to a dominant incumbent..."threat" just tends to come with bigger multiplier.
Not sure experiences from the covid recession tell us anything. That was a very short sharp shock followed by massive bailouts and stimulus for companies and individuals. The figures for that time period are not useful as comparators.
Good riddance. I'd rather have fewer things I care more about. If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices. And when we do need to buy things, we'll be either supporting local workers or friendly nations.
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices.
I can't believe how many people are trying to put a positive spin on the government imposing massive taxation on people's right to buy things from other countries.
It's easy to sneer at junk fashion from Temu or whatever, but access to cheap tools and parts was the lifeblood of hobbyists and experimenters across the country.
It's not just cheap clothes from Temu. This administration just took away your right to buy anything cheaply internationally. That's not a good thing.
I think two things can be true at the same time: these taxes are ridiculous, and ordering a 75-cents part from the other side of the planet is a massive waste of resources.
> ordering a 75-cents part from the other side of the planet is a massive waste of resources
Is it really that bad? Is it better to package the part in retail packaging, ship them in bulk to international warehouses, ahead of time, store them for months, then put them in a new package when someone orders them, and mail them through a local postal service.
Versus just stuffing the part in a tiny envelope and sending it directly to the customer? No re-packaging and storage required.
I genuinely can't tell; it's a good question. If the sellers on AliExpress could ever be arsed to use recyclable packaging instead of four layers of plastic baggies and wrap it would be even more interesting.
Yes, and it created an actual problem that (knowingly or not) Trump was responding to - America essentially was getting further and further in debt to enable such high consumption.
I think we'll find that quite a bit of "American Exceptionalism" has been low interest borrowing. I'm not sure to what level, but I think anyone who relies on the S&P 500 as their only investment is going to be disappointed in the future decades of returns.
So destroying the economy is worth making a few people feel better about minimizing their life? Because that's what is happening. How about people exercise some common sense and not buy things they don't need as opposed to millions of people becoming homeless and military aggression between the USA and China getting much more likely
Some people may feel that their economy was already destroyed when manufacturing was moved to China. Ever drive around Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, etc? So many dead towns, thanks to jobs moving elsewhere.
I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.
I was one of those people who always purchased American when things were being off shored, and I still do as often as I can, especially tools.
Do you know who made the Chinese made goods thing a reality? People from Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana etc. People went into a store, saw the cheaper item, often inferior Chinese item on the shelf and bought it instead of the domestically produced item, even the stuff that said "Designed in America, Made in China". They did this because it was cheaper.
I think you're mistaken if you think some external force "did this to us".
We all do it, some items are just not worth the exuberant price tag, especially if you're only going to use something occasionally.
At least from my observation, the balance was actually not so bad in the last 5 years or so, plenty of good American options available and cheaper Chinese stuff when that was appropriate. I think America will be worse off from this because the cost of so many things will be way higher now, DIY for example will be off the table for a lot of people. The cost of a drill will become ridiculous, for example.
I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.
There would've been other ways to go about solving the environmental impacts of Temu than this. In my opinion.
Temu is pure junk, Im glad it’s on its way out. However, im more worried about the economy at a grand scale and with tarrif wars it’s not looking too good for anyone.
So throwing society into chaos with a sudden opium ban is worth making a few self righteous officials feel better about controlling everyone's lives? Because that's what this crackdown is bringing. How about people exercise some willpower and moderation with the pipe, instead of driving the entire opium trade underground, creating violence between smugglers, ruining the livelihoods of countless ordinary people caught in the middle, and practically begging the Western powers to escalate their military actions against us when their precious trade is disrupted?
I doubt anyone is seriously arguing the tariffs as implemented are the solution.
On the other hand, if you're thinking all opposition to the tariffs need to agree then you're deluding yourself (not trying to be antagonistic here, but it's dangerous to be blind to alternatives.)
For instance, a smaller tariff on completed Luxury goods and a removal of the Temu exception could've easily been the play and potentially could've been done without much fanfare (by someone who wasn't Trump obviously)
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier
If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
This is what will happen, it's why Americans and American got into the cheaper, Chinese made goods thing in the first place, there was a LOT of demand for cheaper stuff.
People will just do less, become more poor and have less opportunities or work around the system by smuggling things from Canada or something.
Maybe there was more demand for cheaper stuff in the US because wages had been rather stagnant in relation to production efficiency for decades?
I mean you're entire premise is not great at all. Capitalistic markets require competition to work. The US itself has mostly given up on 'competitive product' competition and instead fight each other with buyouts and other financial funding means.
Kicking China out of the market will just make our goods more expensive and people will do less and become more poor while the investor class gets a little bit richer.
Maybe there was more demand for cheaper stuff in the US because wages had been rather stagnant in relation to production efficiency for decades?
There is absolutely no way people with money just choose to pay more for goods, it just doesn't happen. People with money are shrewd.
People choose to buy cheaper because they can get more with their money. It's really as simple as that.
I personally buy Patagonia clothing for all sorts of reasons, but I could still get a somewhat comparable jacket for 1/5th or less of their stuff. Most people just buy a down jacket from uniqlo even though they could afford to buy from Patagonia.
While I like the joke, Russia is actually making its own original microcontrollers, for example see K1921VG015 (RISC-V 32/50 MHz/1M flash/256K SRAM/square 100-pin package). The $6 price tag seems a little bit expensive to me but well the developers want to eat something too. There are also ARM-based microcontrollers (much more expensive), and of course (even more expensive) famous Elbrus CPUs with unique VLIW architecture.
I'm no hardware guy so no clue how easy it's to move from 28nm TSMC process to some other 28nm process that China supposedly might soon have according to the news.
But honestly I doubt China would just enable Russia develop and produce own CPUs. When it's comes to chinese everything they never localized production in Russia: heavy machinery, cars, electronics, etc. They are main benefactors of Russia not having own anything.
Good for you, but it's not all about rabid consumption. My girlfriend has been into jewelry making and ordered a lot of stuff off temu, which she gave away the end product to friends and family. That'll most likely be prohibitively expensive at this point
Temu has notoriously low standards when it comes to jewelry and other jewelry related items. Reddit threads are full of horror stories about toxic materials being used for these items. Be careful what you give out to friends and family.
Reddit is full of horror stories about everything. Mostly because it gets eyeballs. I’m open—almost receptive—to the claim that Temu jewellery contains significant quantities of toxic materials. But we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than Reddit comments.
I haven't seen the Reddit posts.
But I've seen the same in Articles in the Norwegian press, where they bought a bunch of random Temu stuff and sent it for safety testing.
The result where not great and the results for the jewelry was really scary.
For many products, domestically manufactured substitutes still have some inputs that come from international suppliers.
Could be some raw materials, the machines that make it, or the packaging. Now everything is going to be massively more expensive and it's going to have impacts even on domestically manufactured goods.
There's also the substitution effect, where heavy tariffs on one thing will increase demand on substitutes and therefore raise their prices.
It's really bad policy all around. Nobody who has any familiarity with manufacturing thinks it's going to encourage more domestic manufacturing because the tariffs suddenly restricted your ability to buy inputs and machines at reasonable prices. You're better off building a factory in another country to service global demand.
I have a friend who started a snowboard factory recently, in the USA, he was able to do this because of Chinese made CNC machines and presses that were half the price and had great support.
Now everything he needs from them to keep his factory going is going to be ridiculously more expensive, probably screwing over his business as well.
This factory wouldn't have got off the ground if it wasn't for Chinese made machines.
Tariffs lower the quality and increase the prices of domestic substitutes. There is no competition. Tariffs are how business is done in third-world countries like India. Production of everything is banned/controlled, except for the few buddies of the government in power.
Either you will pay more for domestic producers or (more likely) you will not pay at all since either domestic production will not ramp up for niche things, or you will not be willing to pay hikes domestic prices for the same utility.
This isn’t true, because the subsidized stuff from China drove medium-quality choices out of the market.
Try to buy some nicer jeans or T-shirts. The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t, and actual quality clothes at 15x the price of the cheapest stuff. Most of the US clothing manufacturers have pivoted to the high-end just to survive or moved production overseas and are coasting along on their brand reputation.
Try buying a decent toaster, I've found exactly the same. $20, $30, and $50 options all using the same internal mechanism with a different style of shell and minor changes to the control circuit, or $200-$1k models that are mostly marketed for commercial kitchens/hospitality use. Not a whole lot in between.
>The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t
How are the tariffs going to change this? The incentive for the US clothing manufacturers now is to offer the lowest quality possible, at a similar but slightly lower prices than the tariffed prices.
Well, from outside it seems that the list of friendly nations keep getting smaller and smaller… and good luck replacing the vast majority of your supply chain with local workers. Just look where all the products you currently have were made.
Ads was THE thing that our tech industry was exporting to the world. I was astonished with the people who thought that tech would be not affected by the tariffs.
The world is still consuming. Even if the US tariffs everyone else, they still trade amongst themselves. The real risk to our economy is that the rest of the world stops paying for our services and cultural exports.
Sometimes, one stands up to the bully even if its not the most convenient thing to do, something about morals and culture. Bully thinks this is some arab market with standalone greedy participants just like himself, while the game is anything but that.
Bipolar bully on top just generates random chaos, the best course is to cut oneself off as much as possible as quickly as possible, which is clearly happening behind the curtains
I first learned about Temu when someone I barely knew messaged me saying they needed me to sign up to Temu under some referral code so they could get bonus points to shop more. They were addicted to shopping, and Temu was the most addictive thing on the internet. Like the Dollar Store, Amazon, slots, and a pyramid scheme, rolled into one.
I'm relatively happy whenever I see negative news about Temu. Call it a bias, though my limited data[0] (itself biased) supports whatever negative perceptions I have towards Temu. The only brand to get 0/100? Why does human exploitation always have to pair with the absolute cheapest prices sourced from developing countries?
App store ranking is based on installs. Ads drive people to install the app. Less ads -> less installs -> lower ranking. Seems like a logical consequence.
I don't know about quid pro quo but those ads are content on the internet so I would assume that would drop SEO and new installs.
One of the strange patterns with Google is that quid pro quo is hard to even filter out as in some cases it is actually a natural part of the system. Probably a bad thing.
Could the two have a common cause? What if Temu stopped buying ads and consumers stopped installing the Temu app for one and the same reason, namely that trade barriers are being erected that will make Temu unpalatable for many users, something widely publicized and known both to Temu and consumers?
Yes. Your spending is a far more powerful vote than any democratic process. Your society is what it spends on. A society addicted to cheap trash is going to be precisely that.
These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.
I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.
Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.
The dollar store moves into neighborhoods that are impoverished as part of their strategy, and push out family owned businesses and would be competition through extreme saturation.
Speaking of, anyone else has encountered issues while browsing temu? I'm facing captcha's most of the time. I mean the "slide to move piece into a position" which most of the times fails, after which I'm facing a more "difficult" pick object of color repeated etc. The site also after a while of browsing not logged in pushes me into login page. So I wonder if it's my browser and various adblocking extensions or it's a common thing?
Damn, I forgot about cross-domain tracking. I'm either browsing or shopping on every platform in private mode - perhaps that also rolls me onto... the great captcha wall.
If you use the PPP adjusted per capita GDP as a comparison metric the US stands about 37% higher than the EU. Considering the baseline tariff of 10% and the substantially higher tariffs for important trading partners the US targets, it may actually even out.
But GDP (PPP) is not the same as purchasing power, no? I don't know of any actual data but you can imagine two countries, both with the same GDP (PPP), same population size, shared currency (so the PPP doesn't factor in). One has organized its production and labor force in such a way that everyone has a relatively equal share of the pie, and the other one consists of a massive wage slave class getting by on poverty wages and a privileged few who reap the benefits of production. Surely the first of these two countries is more interesting to global ecommerce companies from a sales perspective.
Tariffs in the US affect the whole world, not just US or EU - every single GDP goes down, the question is how much. EU gets hit less than the US is more or less a given, but error bars are significant.
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud.
While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares.
There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
They may not be toast, but I suspect there are many panicked planning meetings happening now. (Unless they were clever and had a plan ready for a while)
They did have a plan. Temu/Shein used to ship directly from China, handling the shipping themselves for the sellers on their platforms.
Since a year or two ago (or even earlier), they started accepting (and encouraging) sellers to handle the shipping themselves (while still maintaining a fast shipping time) by giving those sellers more traffic.
In order to have fast shipping time, it basically mean the sellers need to have warehouses (or 3rd party warehouses) in the USA. It's easier for the sellers to workaround the tariffs when they are shipping in bulk to the USA.
The prices will be higher for sure, but it will be a lot lower than people are expecting.
Not sure how well the plan will work. Just what I heard from people working in the industry.
Temu's whole grift was subsidized products and subsided shipping and both of those things are no longer available why would they continue to worry about the US?
I already buy a lot of clothes at least partially made in OECD states. Even with that “partially” doing a lot of work and my avoiding paying extra for “fancy” brand names… I don’t think Americans earning closer to median household income are gonna be happy about paying the kind of prices I pay.
I'm not certain, but I suspect this'll work out better for Monoprice than it does for individuals.
I _think_ Monoprice will pay the couple of hundred dollars "per package" fees for the pallet or container full of cables they bring in, amortising that cost over thousands of items. They'll still get charged the 145% tariff though, but they'll probably cost something like 3x rather than 10x. (Until they work out that they no longer compete with individuals buying from AliExpress/Temu/Shein, or probably even with side hustle Fulfilment by Amazon micro-importers).
Tangent. I got into building hi-fi tube amplifiers some years back. Part of it was a kind of nostalgia for the days of Heath-Kit which I am only just old enough to remember the company's sunsetting years.
It was a fun few years deep-diving into the various amplifier topologies, buying NOS vacuum tubes on eBay, looking through electronics flea markets for parts. I made several amps, tried different tubes, topologies.... Eventually I settled on a small stereo amp and designed a PCB for it, created a small kit even.
Using a drill press in the garage, a table saw to cut aluminum sheet stock down, even learning to powder-coat parts in a toaster-oven I picked up from Walmart, I made increasingly nicer looking amps. With two large output transformers and an even large power transformer they were fairly heavy beasts.
Nonetheless, though I built them a decade or more ago, every one of the amplifiers I built are still in use today. The music I am listening to at this moment is coming from one. Another is down in my "lab". I have given several away to friends, co-workers in the past.
I guess the reason for the tangent was to say that I did indeed find that when you have (or make) a thing of real quality it can last … perhaps a life time?
And thinking again a little nostalgically, I like that too about electronics just up to the post-modern era: a new electronics purchase might have cost you a paycheck or two, but you got I think more mileage out of that device.
EDIT: come to think of it, the heavy iron transformers are from the U.S., the tubes NOS from U.S. WWII bombers. I didn't built them of course with tariffs in mind, but surprisingly they are not so cost-dependent on overseas suppliers.
And here's a photo of the finished amp (from when I once considered selling the kits): https://imgur.com/PBKOQMk
Thanks for sharing, that’s really cool and something I wish I had the time/skill/patience for. The amp looks great and love the name - might have to dust off the tools for a “Now and Then” model.
I don't think so. There is an argument for -individuals- buying too much electronics and they should revisit that, but it's not anyone's business other those people. Tanking the economy and destroying lives "just becuz consumers" is a really really bad way to run the country. Just giving back and going back to horse and buggy while China eats your lunch is not a good thing, because soon you will be making "cheap trinkets" for them
Too bad that’s not the argument being made by people pushing the current policies, instead of the idea that this will magically lead to us having more and better things.
It sure is funny how the party that has spent 2 decades screaming at anyone they could that "climate change isn't real" and "the people saying we should output less carbon are REALLY just degrowth cultists and we can consume everything forever with no issues" are outright, willfully, destroying the American economy in such a way that average americans WILL have to consume less
the thing is that life is about freedom of choice, I didn't buy they cheap junk, I'm fairly normal. I might be the occasional hobby board off alibaba express a couple times a year. Choice is good, not bad.
The market does what people want. Fast fashion is exactly what people want because fashion has always been changing fast and about the "new thing" and people like to be able to buy new stuff all the time.
Proper jeans aren't really washed more than once a month or at all. Especially every day. They also will last for years therefore buying 1-3 pairs a year means your wardrobe will have plenty.
Maybe local production will get cheaper once more people start keeping their money in local communities. Sending it to China is just awful for your country/region and kills local businesses.
Disclaimer: from Europe so I don't care about USA at all. It's still having the same effect here
> Maybe local production will get cheaper once more people start keeping their money in local communities.
Is the thinking here that increased scale would allow production to get cheaper? How would this account for the fact that production was scaled here, but was not cost-competitive when it was operating at scale? What's different now?
Let's say currently it costs $15 to make thing 1m units of X in China and $50 to make 10k of them in the USA. USA could be scaled to make 50k of them for $40 and 100k for $30. 1m could cost like $25. There are people for who are ready to pay more for local products so the current production volume makes sense, but majority of people will go for cheaper option when given the chance so it doesn't make sense to scale up the production currently. If the import cost of the item goes above local production cost and there is still enough demand for the item, it can make sense to scale up that production even if you cannot compete with the China made things internationally.
Of course that assumes your own costs (like raw materials) do not increase at least on the same scale and that you can rely on the situation being long-term thing (i.e. will last years rather than weeks) as costs include your CapEx on things like new machines.
> say currently it costs $15 to make thing 1m units of X in China and $50 to make 10k of them in the USA. USA could be scaled to make 50k of them for $40 and 100k for $30. 1m could cost like $25.
So here we are assuming that we could get a 50% reduction in cost by scaling to 1m units of a thing. The problem with this logic is that many product categories currently made overseas were produced domestically at scale until relatively recently.
This assumption also appears to imply that the goods in question either have a very low labor input or are produced using automation that is not available to Chinese manufacturers.
Reframing my initial question, what advantages would a US manufacturer have today that they didn't have in e.g. 1990 that would allow them to manufacture for only 66% more than the same manufacturing in China?
> Proper jeans aren't really washed more than once a month or at all.
I've had a lot of people say this to me. I've known their policy on washing jeans without them ever having to tell me, though.
People become noseblind to their own stench. Unfortunately, it's not easy to ignore the stench of someone else wearing pants with a month of sweat and fecal bacteria soaked into them. I know lots of people also only wash their coats once a year, and trust me, being more resistant to stinking isn't the same as being completely immune to stinking.
Wash your clothes. The idea of not washing them is a meme and it's incredible how many people have fallen for it lately.
I don't know about you but it feels icky to me to wear dirty pants. I could probably get by wearing them two days in a row. If I have one paid of jeans, im washing them at least every other day. If I have 7 pairs of jeans im washing at least half of them once a week. I'd rather have 7 pairs of jeans. They last long enough for me(a few years). Maybe its just because I dont have to taken them to the laverie (as the french would say) but clean clothes just feel better.
The business-to-consumer businesses, which take the largest markup, employ the most people and pay the highest wages in the supply chain, have thrived under this system.
It's not the customers that demand products be made in China, it's these "local" businesses.
Well, given how many of their products come from China, right? How many of the products on sale on Amazon are partly or entirely produced in China? Those will have 125% (145? How mush is it today?) import duty on them, unless they're electronics.
I'm surprised the Chinese sellers are able to compete for fast fashion. Clothes are the one thing I don't really buy online because getting sizing right is already hard even when you're not dealing with Temu-style "well actually we said there's a +- 25 tolerance in the fine print and this is within tolerance" bullshit.
AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
No idea about Shein, but I was shocked how easy/good Temu return policy was. My wife bought some rugs and some prints and they were not as described/pictured.
Took a minute in the app to generate a qr code, then I had it to the post shop the same day and they refunded within 3 days.
I wouldn't (personally) buy clothes to wear normally from them, but something like beach shoes or a poncho for a festival I'd maybe get there.
TIL Temu has a return policy. I thought the return policy was "throw it in the trash and be out the money (albeit 1/10th of what you would have paid in a regular store)".
It's not fast-fashion they are competing with — they invented ultra-fast-fashion. Their platforms (Shein and Temu) are fully geared towards allowing manufacturers to jump on board the latest hypes and trends and have a saleable product on there within a week or so, to sell for a few weeks until it is no longer trending.
They need to get their priorities straight - stop directing trade policy towards tech companies employing 1000's of workers on $250,000 a year and start building factories employing 100's or people on 25c an hour.
International shipping from China to the US is subsidized by USPS under the Universal Postal Union rules since China is classified as a developing country. Terminal dues to the US have been increasing over the last 5 years to compensate for this.
It's still crazy to me that we classify the second largest economy as a developing country. Especially when said "developing" country is trying to flex it's muscles over the world stage and attack its neighbors.
China can either remain a developing country subject to rules imposed by developed countries. Or it can join the developed countries and shape those rules. It can't do both.
That would probably require that they receive federal funding to subsidize postage rates, which is unfortunately not going to happen (especially not under DeJoy).
Yes, perhaps the government should subsidize (or allow states to subsidize) the fixed costs of mail, just as we subsidize the fixed costs of roads, so that our business can be competitive. Is this what China does domestically, or what the US does when we charge for international shipping? Point is, we should at least list all the ways that we can be more competitive, rather than cheering isolationism that makes us all worse off.
I wonder if we can look forward to the end of the letter soup brands on Amazon, it's ridiculously difficult finding real brands in between them.
That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.
It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some do not sell through Amazon.
Being born before the internet existed, I started ordering products delivered by mail in the catalog era. I am biased toward locating "real brands" that have built reputations for high quality. I miss these brands. I loved the transition from catalogs to websites, but it seems like in the last 10-15 years fake "brands" that can offer no promises whatsoever have been killing off the motivation for having real ones that guarantee high quality.
When I went to Shenzhen I found some of these brands with stalls in their vast malls. They're real places. As you walk through you navigate around an obstacle course of dollies, hear endless packing tape and occasionally point out, "oh look, there's Owawuwo, I got a cheap projector from them".
Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via the regular MTR. Don't take the HSR, they do not offer it there and you will be turned away. You Must go to the office at Louhu station, it is the only way. It's easy, just take the metro.
Anyways, at LoWu it takes about 45 minutes after doing the paper work. It was very easy. Visa approval for Americans this exact way is estimated to be north of 98%. Exchange your HKD at the government run forex up stairs in the mall after entering China, it's a 1.5% commission, best I've ever seen. Then pay in cash - your Western credit cards Will Not Work. It is a fairly easy day trip - about 45min from Kowloon by rail. The 5-day Visa is a Single Entry.
To go to the trading district take Luobao line (#1) to Huaqianglu (3 stops). It's a 10 minute train trip or a fairly uneventful hour walk if you're up to it. English at the trading district and the border mall is ok. Everywhere else, not so much.
Recommended. The place is absolutely bonkers.
They have this wildly intricate culture of price bargaining. If you're looking to actually buy stuff, you can get amazing deals. But I just went as a tourist.
I went a decade ago (on a standard tourist visa, was easy to get but I had to plan far ahead ). It was neat, but I wouldn’t say it’s a must visit, or a top 5 Chinese destination.
The one cool thing was seeing new products at Shenzen, and then a couple months later starting to see those products in American retailers. Seeing the markup and the flow this way really opened my eyes to how the American consumer is exploited.
Sure but if you happen to be in Hong Kong, which you can just fly into as an American with a standard passport, and you want to go to Real China and didn't bother with the Visa interview, then you actually can with this "one weird trick"!
It's certainly a hard border, Shenzhen is as China as Tijuana is Mexico. So if you're in HK and have a day to travel around, give it a go, it's a fun adventure.
Sounds like Akihabara in the nineties.
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/backnum.html
For example AMD Athlon. Official announcement June 23 1999, official shipping date August 17, 1999. A week after announcement reservations started at Akihabara https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/p_cpu.ht... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/price.ht...
>"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."
>"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."
A week before official AMD shipping date retail Athlons arrive in Japan https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813.html
>"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem....
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at...
US 4 days later on August 17 Alienware was merely teasing pictures of Athlon system https://www.shacknews.com/article/1019/wheres-my-athlon According to Anand "OEMs will start advertising Athlon based systems starting August 16, 1999" https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24
Golden Computer Centre in Sham Shui Po in HK itself is a fun destination too.
> It's easy to find "real brands" if one looks outside of Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
You have to be careful, though. There are a shocking number of legit-looking brands with their own sites that are just drop-shipping the same stuff, at an enormous markup. My wife found a piece of clothing she liked for $60; a quick image search found it (with the exact same images) for $8 on Shein. Nice hustle, if you can make it work.
Buy American. False Made in USA claims are subject to fines exceeding $40k per violation.
Good luck enforcing those on a Chinese drop shipper.
You haven't been following the FTC's enforcement?
e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/owner-conservative-appa...
> The company is based in Salt Lake City.
Chinese drop shippers aren't dumb enough to pull the scam from within the FTC's juridsiction.
> after he posted a video on social media titled "MADE IN AMERICA!" in which he said "he could conceal the fact that his shirts are made in China by ripping out the original tags and replacing them with tags stating that the merchandise was made in the United States".
Or to openly advertise it.
wow, i guess this is where the "made in america" rubber hits the road...
I've found I buy fewer things in general, and also the things I do buy are of higher quality when I do it in person. Might even get some useful advice if it's something like a tool. Also it's just more fun, especially if it's a nice bike ride, walk, or trip on transit.
> And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut
My girlfriend needed a humidifier last week. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and Lowe's had mostly the same 2-3 brands of single-room humidifiers, most of which were no-name companies that apparently "specialize" in humidifiers (i.e. were spun up to be a shell for selling cheap humidifiers). We found one Honeywell branded one on sale and went with that since it's a legit brand; it was defective (lots of reviews online having the same issue), so we had to return it and make a decision between Walmart's Equate brand and one of the no-name ones from Target. She wasn't sure if she wanted a larger or smaller version of the no-name one, but we ended up not having an option because the Target shelf was empty of the smaller ones. Home Depot had the same model for $10 more, but we were at Target anyway because they at least had her second choice for color, while Home Depot only had her third.
In-person shopping has become just as crappy as online shopping, with a lot of the same problems regarding quality and brand control. The only difference ends up being less options (which could make the experience less stressful, except the options are usually presented in some form anyway, they're just not available, which makes it frustrating). It's largely thanks to big-box stores, but it's not like someone can just up and start a small shop to sell a particular niche of product (let alone all products) with higher quality as easily as you could with a website.
Big consumer brands haven't meant anything for a long time. Honeywell and GE among those. They all sell their name to other manufacturers and have been doing so for decades. The best thing you can do is keep the receipt and make sure you follow up on returning it or getting warranty service if it breaks in those timeframes. It's really not worth even trying to do the research on things that are less than a hundred bucks. Buy something that looks nice, tape the receipt to it, and return it/warranty claim it if it acts up.
On the flip side, I cant find an ice scraper or a pair of snow / ski pants in December in Wisconsin in any store so the only avenue I have left is order on amazon since the other marketplaces are far more expensive. Depends on what you're buying I believe.
As far as tools or other general hardware - the stores like mom and pop 100 year old hardware stores are amazing and have things you probably cant find online sitting on some shelf and the owner knows exactly what box its in. I love that experience.
This is why I have a bunch of stock in Shopify. It's slowly started rolling out discovery features in its Shop app that federates its stores. I try to limit my use on Amazon to things I know can't be faked and things that are so much cheaper that I can deal with it being fake. My purchasing trends have definitely moved toward the edges - aliexpress for chinese stuff (that would normally be on Amazon) and Shopify for "buy it for life" stuff.
Is there a Shopify store? Their website is catered to the business they do, which is to setup shop for businesses. How do you shop on Shopify?
https://shop.app is their federated retail platform
I'm going to genuinely miss the bicycle headlight I have bought under like 4 different brand names. I won't miss the 36 other grotesqueries sold as alternatives and produced by the same business and manufacturing environment, but I'm also not excited about having to choose between 6 $50 lights of similar quality that are locked to a GPS company's equipment. It would be great if in 10 years I could get a similar light for 25% more than the current price adjusted for future inflation. But there's no reason to believe that tariffs are going to make American products better, just that it makes the cheap products American. And there's nothing else about Trump's (or for that matter his Democratic counterparts'-) industrial policy to encourage that either.
I hate the letter soup brands but also not willing to pay $200 for an LL Bean branded windbreaker or such.
Maybe just spoiled from the early days of Walmart and now Amazon.
That’s a lot more true in USA than Canada. Probably the case in other places too.
15 different variants of the same product, all obviously cheaply made from the same factory, with varying degrees of quality control and reviews strewn about the various “brands” of the product so that it’s much harder to have a negative review everywhere.
Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s just more profitable for them not to
There are flecks of gold in the midst of all that dirt.
I needed to make a 3/4" hole in a 1/8" thick mild steel angle to repair a cart. Didn't have a drill bit that size and quickly realized that a hole saw would be a better choice. Off to Amazon. After some browsing, found the same 3/4" carbide-tipped holesaw from a million resellers. Found a package of two for $13. Following the logic of "even if they only last for one hole, it's still cheaper than buying a good drill bit that I'll never use again", I ordered it. Item arrived and it looked as cheaply made as the photo!
But what do I have to lose? For $13, it's worth a shot.
Chucked up the holesaw, dripped some cutting oil on the metal and went to work. Fricking thing went through the steel like it wasn't even there. I was fully expecting that the teeth would chip off and go flying about halfway through, or it wouldn't do crap and the metal would work-harden, making my job even harder or worst case, the entire flimsy-looking thing would shatter (I have excellent safety glasses BTW). No, about 1 minute later I had a nice clean 3/4" hole with perfect edges that didn't even need deburring.
That led to the first Amazon review that I ever wrote: I was that shocked at how well it performed. Turned on my (Amazon-bought) stick welder and finished the repair.
I think the key is to have a sort of risk framework. Things that handle data, are a fire risk or are direct knockoffs avoid.
Otherwise it’s often a good value, and sometimes the “brand” name is really the knockoff with a trademark on the box.
The carburetor on my leaf blower failed and needed a rebuild. The “name brand” kits were $40-60 at Home Depot and Lowe’s. I got some random kit on Amazon that was the same main part, with a different (and better) kit of tubes, etc than the retail one.
Same thing with clothes. I’ve had great luck with workout clothes, my girlfriend did well with dresses and other stuff. Just be smart about it — $10 jeans are gonna be garbage.
I ended up drastically cutting back on Amazon purchases when they started getting flooded with brands like that.
Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
If the quality sucks (or at least doesn't match expectations), return it. Shipping is fast and returns are easy. The vendor takes the consequence of the return. Rarely do I buy product that has subpar quality that I need to return it. Just do your research.
This is why I still buy from Amazon.
Hah, well easy may be in the eye of the beholder. The closest dropoff for Amazon returns is about a 20 minute drive, its a CVS that has lost one return I tried to send back. I often don't leave our farm more than once a week, mailing off a few returns a year isn't a big deal but I don't want to make a habit of it.
My research, and experience with Amazon, just left me avoiding it when I can. That's not always possible and there's plenty of good stuff to buy on Amazon as well, but 2 day delivery can mean a week here and returns aren't as simple as dropping it off a block from an office in the city.
Returns aren't easy when Amazon threaten to ban you for returning too many items.
I love it in terms of consumer experience. I like several products from AliExpress and the like, but sometimes find they're available for the same price or cheaper and faster with better customer service from Amazon. I don't care that they have generic brand names in either case
I'm with you. I don't really understand the complaints, since Amazon's return policy means that you aren't really taking a risk when you buy, even from randomly-named brands.
Not all harms of using inadequately QC’d or deceptively marketed products are adequately remedied by a reasonably easy return and refund policy.
Especially when those retuns usually go to landfill instead of being restocked
I was thinking more of from the individual consumer perspective rather than diffuse externalities, but that's a good point as well.
That rather depends on your ability to evaluate what you get. I have no qualms telling non-technical people "buy USB-C chargers from the Apple Store", knowing perfectly well what quality I will get. However, you can't even guarantee you'll get something genuine from Amazon anymore even if you select that exact same product.
Exactly. And most people think, "well, I'm super technical, so I'll know," but that only works for your own field. I can tell if a USB-C charger is genuine or not, but I know that I don't know enough about clothing irons or magazine sleeves or a hundred other items to tell if it's crap or not within the return period. Sometimes, I may never know if I don't try a different one for an extended period of time.
An easy example of the harm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=1688s
I'll just return the fuses to Amazon after my family burns up I guess.
Now expand that to people buying supplements, bolts holding things in place that can harm people, etc from Amazon.
There are negative externalities caused by buying and returning stuff.
> Amazon's return policy means that you aren't really taking a risk
Depends how much you buy. If you end up returning too much stuff, Amazon will ban you.
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It only shows what people are buying, not what they want to buy. Cheap crap might sell a ton because it's cheap and listed at the top of the search results. Which then feeds into it being kept at the top of the search results. A lot of times if the item is cheap enough people don't bother with returns and rather just throw the item out, something that will go completely unseen by the metrics.
Ratings are also not very helpful because they are manipulated in a variety of ways. Things like bots/mechanical turks, putting offers in the package to give people money back if they rate the item 5 stars, or hijacking a well rated product listing by changing it later or taking advantage of item variants system.
So, I very much don't trust any of their data myself.
> putting offers in the package to give people money back if they rate the item 5 stars,
I had something similar but more convoluted happen with the car mount I got for my phone. The box included a card stating to email them to sign up for their warranty. Emailing them signed me up for their loyalty emails, which are infrequent enough that I actually didn't mind them. The loyalty emails frequently included offers of "free gifts." One day, I actually replied to one asking for it, and they explained I'd be buying it from them on Amazon and then they'd pay me back for it-- in exchange for a review, of course.
I'd had similar things offered to me as a YouTuber with companies wanting "reviews" but making me do the purchase myself (I've done one or two of them). The fact that it's just being offered to mainstream consumers now is ridiculous. It means you can't trust any of the reviews (or at least the positive ones; I normally look for negative ones with photos these days).
I don't think its so easy to pull apart what people are buying and what they want to buy.
Amazon has a pretty crippling hold on the online retail industry, and they collect massive amounts of data to decide what to put in front of people.
Targeted marketing and the partnership between marketing and psychology is nothing new, it has gotten stronger though. I have a hard time looking at a market run like that as a roughly free market where the successful products indicate what buyers actually want rather than what they were best coerced (or "nudged") into buying.
I would say there are other viable platforms people could offer on but Amazon actively punishes people for trying to work out of their ecosystem by penalizing them for offering lower prices than on Amazon
It's an optimization loop where one part of the cycle (showing people stuff and seeing if they buy it) is very fast, and one part (product development) is very slow. This is sure to find local, rather than global maxima.
> Amazon’s relentless quantitative focus
It’s 2025 and I still get the “I see you bought a stapler, what you obviously desire is twenty-five more staplers” treatment from Amazon.
ROFLMAO
Yeah, and it's not even necessarily a problem with the product itself. Sometimes I do want something cheap and disposable. The problem is that you have roughly zero information about the retailer, and manufacturer, and anyone in between. If one product listing gets bad reviews, someone can spin up 5 more listings with slightly different metadata. It's effectively a Sybil attack against the reputation system of the market.
It's all just the same crap you'd find sold by a "proper" retailer. Where do you think they get their stuff from?
I'll gladly take the cheaper alternatives instead of being charged 2 or 3 times the amount I'd pay if I import it myself.
All of them made out of balsa wood yet have 10,000 5-star reviews. It’s a joke
> I was very pleased with my "[brand name, if applicable] toilet seat, (2-pack), premium pure white, toolless installation", that I purchased for my family. Would definitely recommend it to friends and family. It arrived promptly and was in perfect condition. You exceeded your current quota please check your plan and billing details.
The above is similar to recent reviews I've seen.
It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon. A great example of why competition is necessary, and not just from one other entity equally interested in allowing the others existing to avoid being a "monopoly"
I got one of those "leave us a 5 star review for a coupon" and I had just enough of it. I left a 1 star review indicating that they offered a coupon for a good review.
Amazon took my review down.
https://www.fakespot.com/
> It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon.
Have they removed reviews you report? I've only ever heard of them removing legitimate negative reviews.
“I bought this product for my husband and he loves it.”
My favorite is all these letter-soup Firewire-to-USB convertors which are just glue and random wires inside and are either completely inert or disastrously damaging to your peripherals:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=firewire+to+usb+adapter
It's fascinating to me that every letter-soup brand is competing on a product that is literally fraud.
I literally got a Firewire to USB converter yesterday to try and pull video off a DV Camcorder. A video capture card in the same price range had worked great for letting me stream VHS tapes through OBS Studio.
There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't show at all. Fortunately, nothing seems damaged on either side.
I've only got 6 tapes so I'm sending them off to a service and sending the adapter back to Amazon.
It’s not even possible to convert between USB and FireWire without active electronics, as the signals are not compatible in the slightest.
You may get rid of that, but it's still Amazon. Just recently, they fuzzed all their search results further, so when you search for something, it will give you lots of stuff you didn't search for. Similar to how Facebook Marketplace does.
I think the only way to avoid disappointment is to avoid Amazon altogether. Their customer experience is extremely deceptive and engineered to make you spend the most money. From the featured searches all the way to how it charges you paid shipping instead of free at checkout.
We should all feel burned enough at this point and stop rewarding them. Bezos purchased the Washington Post for all this money, and he won't stop there.
From your lips to Jassy's ears
Yeah. I just go to Best Buy. You pay more. Their website works pretty well.
Worth mentioning though, that BestBuy's website also has the same garbage "marketplace" problem as Amazon
You can filter them out. For now..
I mean maybe, but the product will still be made in china.
What’s worse, many real brands you recognize sold off their brand name a while ago so you’re not even getting the product quality you might expect.
The article is about Temu. Amazon is not mentioned.
Maybe you should read the article before commenting? Section:"Why we care"
You are right, I did read the article but I missed the parenthetical (assuming the article was not updated, imagine). My point was that the commenter was complaining about Amazon "alphabet soup" names which is not relevant to this. There is a very specific reason those names are used. It's a very interesting story about follow on effects.
it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
What zamalek describes isn't just that China manufactures cheap products. The complain is more about retailers or marketplaces (particularly online ones) that encourage essentially anonymous, zero-cost seller accounts and product listings.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
Right. There's always been a range of products from cheap to quality. But "cheap" used to mean something that wouldn't last as long or that had limited features, but that could still be worth the lower price. Now "cheap" can mean something that will break the first time you use it, at which point is any price low enough?
I bought a garden hose sprayer at Dollar General for $1, and it leaked immediately. $1 is so little now that it was basically free, but even for free it wouldn't have been worth it, and I'm not going to make a trip to get a $1 refund. At some point, "cheap" is so bad that it has negative value, as it only adds clutter and waste.
Do you mean this is the point of a carefully planned, deliberated, executed, and announced tariff rollout, or do you mean that's the whole point of tariffs as they are currently being implemented in the United States?
The tariffs that were announced during the campaign - the same way Ross Perot did - and the reasoning was to bring us manufacturing back to the US and reduce the tax burden on US citizens? Such as writing off car payments if the car is American?
People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US. People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
I really have to wonder how important this Chinese junk is. They make so much junk for the US, that the EU, including Von der Lyon, had to make a plan to deal with Chinese companies wanting to, and I quote here, "dump" all their exports on to the EU market.
The EU is very protectionist over their countries' economic outputs and manufacturing. But if the US does that...
> People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US.
The "reciprocal" tariffs are based on not the tariff duties foreign countries imposed on US goods, but the trade deficit the US has with said foreign country. There's a lot of idiocy in the tariffs, but this was one of the loudest complaints people had with them.
> People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
Because the list of "countries" being charged made it clear that it wasn't being based on a list of countries as people understand them. Uninhabited islands and islands consisting only of US military bases being on the list were strong signs of the lack of competence in the planning for the tariffs.
And really, that's why people are complaining so hard: it is abundantly clear that tariffs are being rolled out in a botched manner by incompetent people for inane reasons, so whatever positive effect they might have is completely ruined and all of their negative effects are intensely amplified.
Its abundantly clear that narrative is being driven. Its much less clear why, or by who.
The Heard and McDonald Islands debacle was poorly reported on.
It does have its own customs zone, it doesn’t fall under Australia.
Some years, the World Bank has reported imports from the island: https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Yea...
I assure you the US did not import $1.3M worth of machinery from an uninhabited island.
It's a data error. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
I don’t think anyone is claiming there’s secret industry on the islands. But a “data error” is probably understating it, that is what did actually appear on the bills of lading. Whether it was a bizarre innocent mistake or sort of some kind of financial scheme is unclear.
My strong suspicion is someone misclicked a select box in a form somewhere.
Maybe. That’s clearly the likely case for Norfolk.
Do you know if tariffs are assessed based on the country of origin in the bill of lading? The Guardian article doesn’t answer that question. I’d suspect so since that’s how everyone is counting imports and exports, but the Guardian article isn’t clear.
...and nobody bothered checking?
You've never mislabeled a package or letter?
The postal/shipping/logistics service will almost certainly have gone "that's not right..." and quietly fixed it.
The USA and the EU more or less have had even import duties. The USA averaging out at 1.47 % and the EU at 1.39 %. [1]
The EU has been advocating for a free-trade agreement, the TTIP, with the USA from 2013 on. It was buried in 2016 by the 45th president of the USA, who somehow thought it unfair. The EU has proposed a free-trade agreement only a few weeks ago. [2]
You may believe what you want, but at least in dealings with the USA the EU has always promoted free trade. Even Fox News acknowledges that ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...
[2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/european-union-ready-neg...
Hold on now. For consumers, the only thing that's mattered as far as we're concerned is the fact the US had de minimis, which effectively meant no duties paid on all relevant goods a US consumer might want.
The EU, on the other hand, has made buying goods from the US, for consumers, horrifically expensive, including reducing the value of non-duty paid goods to essentially zero and leaving it up to EU member countries to decide if they then wanted to charge an additional "inspection fee" often more than the value of the goods themselves. Spoiler: those countries did.
So, your point isn't really relevant from a consumer point of view. The EU and its member states have tried every dirty trick in the book to make it as awful as possible to buy anything from the US.
If readers believe I am making false claims, please engage with me. I live in Denmark, as a Dane, and this is what I and any Dane who has bought goods from the US, has experienced directly.
The actual, lived experience is far different than whatever any bloc or country may claim (such as being in favor of free trade). The EU has always been economically protectionist, since its birth.
Hey, thanks for pointing de minimis out.
For those not in the know (and too lazy to look it up ;)), de minimis rules for customs duties set a threshold below which no import duties are applied. The de minimis threshold for the USA used to be 800 US$ (and for now continues to be for all but imports from China), the de minimis threshold of the EU is 150 EUR. In other words, if you import goods worth less than 800 US$ into the USA from the EU no duties are applied. If you import goods worth less than 150 EUR from the USA into the EU, no duties are applied.
There is also a tax de minimis, which is a threshold when you have to pay sales and possibly other taxes, e.g. luxury, alcohol and so on. Obviously those taxes differ from country to country in the USA and the EU, and, for example, importing bourbon whiskey into Denmark would be more expensive than into Germany because of the way alcohol is taxed. But the de minimis determines when those taxes even apply. The USA leverages those taxes from a threshold of 800 US$ (again, not any longer for imports from China), while most EU nations set this de minimis threshold to 0.
Merchants usually combine all these costs (duties, taxes, fees, insurances, shipping, etc.) into something called the "landed costs" [0]. Relevant taxes and fees are higher in EU nations than in the USA, which explains most of the differences, but you are quite right, the WTO considers the USA's landing costs fairer than those of most EU nations (Germany is especially bad.) I have no special insights but I guess this is because Intra-EU trading is devoid of duties, fees and taxes (it is a free trade zone after all).
If you want to poke around a little in the various trading nations of the globe, [1] has a nice database available.
So, I do not agree with your conclusion that the EU is a protective lock box, but could improve. Thank you for pointing this aspect out. It is easy to forget about nuance and how complicated and convoluted some of these things can be.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/landed_cost
[1] https://zonos.com/
You've done a good job of explaining the relevant de minimis rules, but you've deflected or minimized the EU's fault.
Inspection fees, duties and taxes make it so functionally no Danish consumer bothers to purchase goods shipped from the US. For Americans to then come rushing to our aid when us poor Europeans are getting a dose of what we've been giving for decades is ironic, to say the least.
When i wanted a DVD player, the cheapest near-mint one on ebay, including shipping, that had digital audio out was shipped from the UK, to the US west coast. This was ~25 years ago.
I ended up trading it for a Volkswagen Jetta. unrelated, but quirky.
The weird thing about Heard Island is that it was specifically called out in a list that did not even include every country.
It wasn't that a flat 10% tariff implies that even non-populated islands have a 10% tariff.
> reduce the tax burden on US citizens
Do you consider the tariffs to be a (tax) burden on US citizens?
Only on those who buy imports.
This seems to assume that everything can be imported or acquired domestically. But tariffs implemented in other countries are much more specific. It makes sense to use tariffs when you have the capability to meet your domestic demand with domestic supply. Indiscriminate tariffs catch things where demand far exceeds domestic production, whether that's raw materials, specific foods, or things that will take a long time to ramp up production domestically.
Ultimately, lots of things manufactured domestically will still increase in price because of the raw materials they require.
Please do explain how one can purchase coffee beans from anywhere but a country close to the equator?
https://kauaicoffee.com/products/medium-roast-100-hawaiian
well to be fair to parent, the tariffs weren't exactly rolled out in a sane fashion and a lot of credibility was lost along the way, though it certainly was entertaining if you're a sicko like me.
The tariffs were announced with no plan to bolster on-shore manufacturing.
Yes, that's because they are a consumption tax intended to replace income tax. the talk of US manufacturing is not completely on-the-level.
The main purpose of tariffs is to change behavior for both the consumer and the manufacturers.
Auto manufacturers have been doing this for decades when the US started imposing tariffs on Japanese manufacturers back in the 1970's. To get around the tariffs and still get access to the US markets, they would simply assemble the parts of the cars here and bypass the rules of the tariffs. Many companies then started doing the same.
This effectively changed the behavior of the companies to avoid the tariffs. The end result was more manufacturing and assembly plants here - even though most of the big production tasks of the vehicles were still done overseas.
Also, there's already been several announcements of companies moving their manufacturing to the US in order to avoid getting hit with tariffs:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-commits-500-billion-to...
Nvidia (NVDA) on Monday said it will produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the US within the next four years as the tech industry looks to bolster its domestic manufacturing footprint in the face of Trump's approach to trade policy and desire to onshore more US heavy industry.
Also, Ford made some moves to avoid both US and European tariffs:
Less than a week after the White House announced its comprehensive set of tariffs, the Dearborn automaker exclusively revealed to Ford Authority its comprehensive plan to relocate all of its assembly plants to Hawaii. The move will be made possible by state of the art 3D printing technology and has the support of the United Auto Workers.
In any event, Ford envisions Hawaii as an export hub for markets outside North America and a key pillar of the company’s domestic production capabilities. Ford will utilize an obscure maritime law from World War II as a way to get completely around European and Asian tariffs, as the original intent of the legislation enabled private companies to avoid punitive trade measures to get badly needed supplies to the Allies at the height of the conflict.
You’re missing a link for the Ford news. Dare I ask when you read about Ford moving production to Hawaii? Was it in early April by chance?
https://fordauthority.com/2025/04/ford-will-avoid-trump-tari...
> We’ll have more on this never, because this was our final April Fools’ article for 2025. We hope you enjoyed all of them!
Ooooof. They got me. Ironically, this is the first article in many different search results with several other articles about how Ford will deal with the tariffs. With another article from Ford Authority on the same topic:
https://fordauthority.com/2025/03/ford-taking-broad-steps-to...
In addition to scrutinizing its supply chain, Ford is also in the process of stocking up on parts that comply with the current U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and it’s also taking a second look at its operations in those countries, according to Automotive News. Ford is “strategically stockpiling components where it is cost-effective and parts that are not pending engineering changes,” supply chain chief Liz Door told suppliers in a recent memo.
This is what got me. They had this article talking about looking at its operations in those countries and then the April Fools article which essentially described them doing just that.
Although I already knew Ford does most of its manufacturing in the US, I should've known better.
Thanks for the heads up regardless.
The Donald tariffs certainly changed my behavior as a Canadian consumer.
For example, i stopped buying US wine, US orange juice and I keep an eye open for any US made thing I could remove from my environment.
Instead of the US government spending away on overcapacity so Canadians can have cheap products, that money should go to public housing and healthcare subsidies. I think this is better for the US long term because agriculture is heavily subsidized and competes with housing and other industries for land and labor.
Oh yeah the money from the tariffs are definitely going to go to help average Americans. Oh wait be did this last time and 90% of the tariffs went to propping up all the industries that went to shit due to reciprocal tariffs (soy beans and others) and we never recovered. So many countries moved away from us and never came back. That's exactly what's going to happen this time, alienating is from our allies, almost like it's the point to cause chaos and alienation but wait why would trump do that hes always been on the up and up before
I don't expect an insurrectionist to do good for Americans.
I also think government spending on overcapacity so we can export food is a waste of money and bad for the economy and the environment. How many millions of acres of soy bean crops do we actually need?
If the market for exported soy suffers because of who people voted for, let's reduce the subsidies by n%, farmers will plant less won't be able to keep all their land and we can return that land to Native Americans. This is disruption we need (but won't get because murica).
Nice, you found Canadian wine and orange juice?
The former is very much a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_wine
Impressive scale actually, didn't realize there were over 500 Canadian wineries.
But he doesn't need Canadian, only not from the USA.
They can substitute US products with those from plenty of nations plowing money into overcapacity and dumping their exports on the international market.
The tariffs were definitely part of the campaign, described in detail in Project 2025 and will eventually replace higher brackets of the income tax.
This consumption tax is tax policy, not trade policy. That was evident when there was not even any discussion about excepting manufacturing inputs (neither this time nor the 45th administration).
Wouldn't it be fairer to remove the lowest tax bracket, or move all tax brackets higher?
> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
after 50 years of de-industrialization in US, it's a sad fact that US can no longer produce most of those items, yes it's totally gone. It will take a few decades to rebuild, if possible at all. For now, whatever those junks are at Amazon, there are not many options to procure them elsewhere.
You want the US to spend the next few decades retooling to ... build junk?
Build essential stuff locally, not junk of course. Or else the virtual economy can not sustain forever based on borrowing money while producing very little locally.
What is "essential stuff" to you?
well, produce own steel. Own processors, own drug precursors...
This weird demoralization has to stop. We went to the moon in less than 10 years from beginning the Apollo program. It’s less than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant on average. We deployed the COVID vaccine worldwide in less than one year. Manufacturing is not that hard. If we want to do it, we can do it and we can do it quickly.
True. The biggest impediment to increased manufacturing is the pile of onerous regulations, many of which were created by the stroke of a pen since 2008, and which can be removed by another stroke of the pen.
Do you have any substantiation for either the point that onerous regulations are the primary impediment or that most of these have been created since 2008 (by fiat or otherwise)?
It's always going to be cheaper to make things in places where labor costs and environmental responsibility expectations are low.
> It's always going to be cheaper to make things in places where labor costs and environmental responsibility expectations are low.
Yeah, offshoring was mostly about driving down costs by laundering labor and environmental law.
That's why the manufacturing companies did it. The politicians allowed it because it was meant to make the world more peaceful and prosperous. Which it did, really.
The biggest impediment is the misallocation of capital and the lack of regulations controlling corporations.
I can see how hitting the EU with tariffs is going to improve human rights ... oh wait.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
Not sure why the sarcasm. Do we keep picking up the tab until they're trampling the entire Bill of Rights?
The whole point of the tariffs is to cause chaos and if you think they have an actual plan boy do I have a bridge to sell you
I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. Mostly little electronics parts and specialized tools for my workshop. Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much. Obviously it's over now. Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package, even a 75 cent envelope will be charged +$75. I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet. I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks.
> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years.
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
To clarify, I'm not defending the tariffs or the way this whole thing is implemented. I'm sure it puts a lot of people in trouble.
I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of. Sure at the individual level we can find advantages to it, but I'm arguing that we're collectively worst off.
> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.
You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.
There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
There is no dissonance here, workers being put in competition with much cheaper ones on the other side of the planet is absolutely going to drive their wages down. They got 30 years of that... and many of us in Europe did too.
Wages may have to go higher at the lower end, but consumption also needs to change. Most of the price of "food" is packaging, transport and marketing, not farmers' wages. Here in France people buy on average 50 items of clothing a year, 50! The amount of items has increased by 50% in the last 15 years.
Yeah pretty funny to see mostly the same people calling for a $20+/hr "minimum wage" on one hand, and bemoaning the tarrifs on the other hand. They will tell you that if you can't pay your employees that much, then you don't have a viable business. But they will turn around and whine about how their cheap Chinese crap purchases are now going to cost what a "viable" domestic producer would have to charge.
It's easy to look at the internet at large see people with these contradictory takes. But 1) these groups may consist of entirely different people who are vocal about different topics, or 2) the wide brush obscures critical context.
I support a $20 minimum wage AND
I think tariffs can be justified, especially when we use free trade to ignore the external costs to the environment and the arbitrage of exploitative labor AND
I have a problem with implementing tariffs in such a shotgun, ill-considered, shoddy way lacking clear strategy or intent
Most people bemoaning the tariffs are doing so because they understand that production will not actually come back to the US. It's not that these people hate Americans and don't want domestic manufacturing (or to pay for it), it's that they can see the reality that this isn't what's actually going to happen. Instead, the price of goods will just rise.
A lot of these people too have been saying "buy local!" or "support black businesses!" for a while now. They're not the same people bemoaning the lost of hyper consumerist plastic junk.
I'm pretty far to the left, and I'm actually fine with tariffs on China in principle for exactly the reason that you mention. Tangentially, I don't think that "free trade" can ever be meaningfully free when goods flow freely but workers can't move to where the high-paying jobs are - it's a recipe to create market inefficiencies that companies can profit from.
However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.
I'm a lefty lib and, like lots of us, I've wanted restricted trade with China since we granted them MFN status in the '90s. I think that was a bad idea in the first place.
Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected".
Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so much. And it makes working against Chinese trade far less effective and more-costly.
Claiming these aren't a tax on Americans? That's just a lie. Chaotically switching your message and actual policies day to day? That's not how you foster investment in factories that'll take years to be net-profitable. Working against the CHIPS act? What the literal fuck, that's exactly the kind of thing you [edit: the "you" here is the administration and their boosters, not necessarily "you", the poster] claim to want! That was a really good idea!
So, I agree with a tiny amount of the overall policy, while finding its implementation incompetent, and the other parts to work so strongly against the effects of the part-I-like that I find desirable, that I doubt my motivations for wanting to reduce trade with developing authoritarian states and the administration's are even the same.
If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as well, in order to prevent evasion by trans-shipping (until and unless they restrict Chinese imports as well).
Canada has been laundering Chinese aluminum and steel, Malaysia has been laundering Chinese ‘honey’, etc.
There were way cheaper and more-effective ways to achieve that. And that's not why the administration says they're doing this, anyway. It's because we have trade deficits, period. Or it's because of fentanyl, since that was the justification for the invocation of emergency powers that're letting the executive impose tariffs at all.
>If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as wel
A good strategy would be not to impose tariffs all goods, just the more important ones, and you would do it WITH your allies. Threaten the same tariffs on allies as China if they do not get on board. You could even use the leverage to get China to increase domestic consumption so they aren't exporting so hard.
Trump's policies aren't going to achieve what he thinks they will.
This is a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but you've hooked me with your predicament: Can you allow for preorders or "Expressed interest" at a new price point? (or at a hand-wavy price point to assess interest re: overhead/bulk/etc.) If tariffs come down, you can refund/credit, but for customers who wanted this, something-at-some-price may be better than nothing-at-any-price.
> I personally feel bad for the environment
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
I am bugged more by local environmental impacts.
Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.
That stuff is all over Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County actually has one of the most if not the most EPA superfund sites. It's the leftover legacy of chip manufacturing. When you rent in the Bay Area, the landlord does not have to disclose TCE contamination to you. TCE can cause birth defects and low birth weight in weeks if breathed in by pregnant women. If you're renting in the Bay Area, Google the address and make sure the property is not over a TCE contamination area.
> Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries
This was the logic under Deng, and the reason China is now a peer state. Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs.
"If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs."
This argument is absolutely accurate and somewhere between two and six decades late depending on who you feel like blaming for offshoring. Present day all we're doing is poking inflation with a stick, threatening the bond market (and eventually the dollar reserve), and encouraging economic partners to look elsewhere for stability. 3 guesses how all that ends.
The thing that really annoys me is tariffs could have been used SO much more intelligently. For example a 24 month increasing schedule. That gives business the kind of incentive to affect manufacturing and something they can plan against.
But now we have a dumpster fire and tariffs will have an even worse reputation.
It might have been better reputation-wise than the current game of chicken, but tariffs will always sour economic partnerships, which in turn leads to bolstering alternative economic partnerships...
This is objectively untrue, tariffs exist all around the world and countries are still trading.
That tariffs are in use is not proof that it is untrue. Even with the current dumpster fire we still trade with the US, but that obviously does not mean there has been no harm.
For countries, tariffs is not something that is just shrugged off as it impacts their economy, there will always be political countermeasures to strongly discourage that tariffs are applied that harms them. Retaliatory tariffs, impact on other negotiations and relationships, etc.
For companies, tariffs harm profits and fair competition on both supply chain and consumer side, depending on where the tariffs are located. The company would strategize for maximum profit margins, circumventing tariffs, remove countries from their supply chain, and focusing on more profitable markets.
It wouldn't be a boycott the same way it is now of course. It would be a slower process. But tariffs is a way to force the market and always have wide negative effects. One just hopes that certain long-term side-effects (like high import cost causing focus on driving down local supply cost) is worth the impact (local cost of living increase, drop in investments, drop in friendly reputation).
The tricky part is the goal is another tax cut.
Right now, after all of the other tax cuts, our budget deficit is slightly larger than the US discretionary budget.
Which means that, even if DOGE cut everything, there's still no way to close the deficit without raising taxes.
Enter the tariffs.
Why tariffs on Madagascar?
Maybe he’s not a fan of vanilla ice cream
>Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
But poverty has dropped and income has risen under the CCP? You can argue that the CCP doesn't actually care about "individuals moving out of poverty", and all they care about is staying in power, but this is the sort of accusation that could be levied against governments in the west as well.
Apparently the CCP does suppress wages in various ways to keep export goods manufactured cheaply/competitively. It's probably more of an economic strategy than an expression of collectivism but I can't be sure.
I fully agree on the environmental part. Shipping all this stuff individually is incredibly wasteful. Even the combined packages from AliExpress someone else mentioned this is the case, since there's a ton of unnecessary packaging wasting space and resources.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
I don't think it's the packaging -- I'd you're buying one thing a day a ton of it is just going to pure waste, eventually to the landfill.
You remind me of Chamath Palihapitiya. He's this billionaire who likes to call things "cheap low quality junk" too, but for him it's anything is under like $5000, or not made in Milan or the French riviera. He's hamming it up for the audience but the point is the same. Every strata of wealth has the luxury of not buying the "cheap low quality junk" of the strata below it. To you, they are temu possessions, but to another person they are just their possessions. Everyone would love to be wealthy enough to never check a pricetag. And even then, plenty of products last just as long no matter what you spend on them. Many things are literally identical and just marked up 10x by the middleman who imported it to your local store.
Those people are not helped by loosing customers and there is no plan to help them.
They would be helped by better job opportunities where they live, by more governmental protections for workers where they live etc.
But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
> But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
It is exactly what harms them.
With that logic one can defend keeping children in tantalum mines in the supply chain of an iPhone. That's not an acceptable status quo...
Removing the market for immoral exploitation of beings and the environment is a necessary step. The size of the market for things made fairly needs to grow.
There are kids in Congo that are claiming to be older than they are so they can get work in mines to feed themselves and their families. If they don’t work they and their families starve, but if they do work they are encouraging immoral child labor. I don’t understand why many people think the answer is easy and straightforward in that case, this sounds like the trolley problem to me.
The people involved in international aid in particular know fine well that it's not an easy problem to solve... Exploitation and corruption is at every level here. For a children in Congo it may be a better option if the only alternative is to starve, but let's not pretend that everyone from the mine owner to the smartphone buyer is not profiting from that situation.
As a consumer one of the few immediate means of action we have is to at least refuse these products when we can... Then yeah, vote, donate, get involved for these kids to live decently.
Let’s say we boycott the Congo because they allow child labor (or turn a blind eye to it), and they see our “fix” (disallow it, let them starve) as barbaric because they have nowhere near enough resources to just make the starving problem go away (or to consider that as a possible solution). Did we make progress on anything by cutting the Congo off economically? We already know that if the country became richer the problem would probably go away naturally, but making it poorer instead, why?
I kind of understand why China invests in Africa the way it does vs how the west seems to just throw charity and morality at it. Development would solve the problem naturally (a richer society will stop sending their kids to the mines, or having their schools organize them to make fireworks, a sad state of affairs that happened less than two decades ago in China but now is unthinkable).
*losing
Environment protection in the EU
good:
- replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
questionable:
- limit nicotine products to 10ml, so now instead of buying one bottle (200ml for example) of nicotine you have to buy 20 bottles 10ml each - ???
The nicotine bottle size constraint is a safety concern. Spilling a 200ml bottle of nicotine easily has the potential to cause lethality or morbidity through skin absorption, particularly in children. A 10ml bottle can still cause injury, but it is way more likely to be survivable.
In this case, the safety concerns outweigh the environmental concerns.
> good:
> - replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
This belongs at least in "questionable" if not just "bad"
I'm so out of the vice loop. What nicotine products do you buy in a bottle?
I don't use them, but I'd assume vape juice.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet.
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
It's not that complicated.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
The person you are replying to isn't claiming that the seller pays the tariffs, they are saying that it's not in the seller's interest to notify buyers of the tariff charge because it's essentially free anti-tariff messaging once buyers are hit with the sudden fees.
but in the process all their customers will have been burned buying something from Temu and many will be wary of buying in the future even if the tariff situation improves etc?
That's certainly how it worked out in Europe, where the processing fee was much less (€5-10 usually).
Since 2021 foreign merchants can send the goods tax paid, they collect the VAT and send it to to EU country, so there's no fees at customs. It works perfectly fine, but many people don't realize it or don't trust this.
Yep, this is my experience here in Greece. I'd randomly get maybe 5% of packages having a 3 € "customs fee" on top, but everything else was much cheaper. Now I have to pay VAT and import duties on everything, nothing gets extra fees but everything costs 50% more.
I guess the intent was to let local shops compete with AE, and they succeeded, because the prices are much more in line with the local market, I just miss all the cheap stuff :P
This is the Australian system as well. A lot cheaper for the government to collect with the tradeoff that small no name Chinese sellers can pretty much ignore it without penalty.
You're overthinking it.
They're not deliberately plotting some anti-tariff surprise campaign. They're just doing business as usual.
But the person receiving the package doesn't receive the package until they've paid the tariff.
You don't have to pay it -- if you don't, the package gets returned to sender or destroyed.
The post office delivers you a slip with information to go to your local post office to pay it and pick up the package. With UPS and FedEx you get a notice to pay online, and they deliver it once you do, as far as I know.
I've never heard of something being delivered without the tariff already having been paid, and then it going to collections. Has anyone ever experienced that personally? I don't see how that would be legal, or why a delivery service would expose themselves to risk of nonpayment.
The only time I've received an item that had a fee, FedEx delivered it and then a week later I got a bill from Fedex in the mail.
It depends on the carrier. As multiple other commenters have explained, you can absolutely be hit with a tariff fee after receiving the package.
They do not care if you didn't want to pay the tariff. They don't want to deal with warehousing it, offloading it, or returning it to sender. They want to get it into your hands and deal with the logistics later.
This is literally false. My wife paid for a jacket from Ireland. Ireland jacket arrives. Weeks later, tariff shit comes in the mail.
That is not normal. Even a recent article explains:
> US customers who placed orders on shopping websites like the popular Chinese fast-fashion platform Shein have been particularly impacted, even if they made their purchases long before the tariffs were announced. They are now forced to either pay hefty fees—in some cases, more than the value of the items inside — or have their packages sent back.
> They show Love’s order was put on hold for several hours, during which she received the notice asking her to pay the import duties. DHL also noted the package would be returned in five days if she declined to do so.
https://www.wired.com/story/tariffs-china-prices-fees-shein-...
I can find a few anecdotes online about FedEx delivering first and then charging later. I can also find people saying they called FedEx and refused to pay, and FedEx waived the amount. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how FedEx can hold you responsible for payment when you didn't engage in business with them -- you didn't purchase anything from them and you didn't sign any contract with them. If they paid the tariff before delivering to you, then that's on them.
> I don't see how FedEx can hold you responsible for payment when you didn't engage in business with them
Literally the first thing I thought. You want to send me to collections? Fine. Now let the collection agency prove that I owe the debt.
So if I wanted to mess with someone I can just send them tons of cheap crap from Temu and they'll be forced to pay tariffs for items they never asked for?
> send you to collections if you don't pay it That doesn't make sense. So can I cause troubles to someone by ordering an unwanted $1 temu item to their house, and thereby summon a collection agency to them (if they don't pay the $75 fee)?
You ordered the package, so you have to pay the fees. If you gift the package to someone, that is nice of you but they do not become involved in your purchase by that.
The GP meant if I maliciously order a $1 in your name, specifically to cause you to pay.
wow i see a variation of SWAT'ing someone. Just flood your unliked neighbour with aliexpress packages. It costs you 0.5$ ant 75$ for him. real life DoS attack.
Ordering pizzas cash-on-delivery to someone’s house is already a fairly common form of online harassment (sometimes also a precursor to swatting).
And because they aren't morons, Pizza places will generally deny an order of 20 pizzas, pay on delivery, to an address they don't have an existing relationship with.
Cops haven't seemed to figure out that way of reducing abuse. Maybe if we pay them what we pay pizza delivery workers they will figure out how not to swat people.
Pizza places figured out not to do that because it's more profitable not to do that. Cops don't care because they still get to play with their toys and they generally have qualified immunity for civil violations that occur during the swatting.
You can not deliver a pizza based on a 2% chance of fraud. If there's a chance of bomb, shooting etc the same threshold doesn't apply. So the police have completely different criteria.
they'll just refuse the item and thus the import fee.
Kind of. People can always refuse to pay it and charge back. I'd imagine the US is about to have a massive amount of unclaimed parcels to deal with.
I assume we'll see backups on both sides. Containers backed up in Chinese ports and a huge backlog of unclaimed packages and delayed tariff bills waiting for USPS/UPS/FedEx to process them.
I doubt credit card purchases will be an option once we start seeing a lot of chargebacks. They are an absolute pita to deal with for the vendor and processor. I expect your payment options will be limited to those that don’t allow chargebacks.
In the EU they do care (or rather the advertised price already included all fees, tariffs and VAT).
I think they also send everything from EU warehouses because that loophole was closed years ago.
The parent comment is joking that everyone should look for disgruntled Temu users and ask if they have few minutes to talk about laws and tariffs.
No offense to guys talking about other topics on those occasions.
> They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does.
How does that work? I am assuming it’s not US as I had never got any tariff charges or brokerage fees from the likes of FedEx or UPS.
You get a letter from your delivery company (in the UK, usually the Post Office or Royal Mail) with a link to pay import taxes. Once you pay, the delivery is scheduled.
Depending on country rules, it is sometimes possible for the sender to pay and then include the charges in their delivery fees.
Ah interesting. Sounds like a UK or EU thing. Thanks for explaining
That's not what happens. You see the price tag, you just don't buy it, is what happens.
That's not how tariffs work.
You pay the sticker price, which does not include tariffs. The package ships. It arrives at the US border, and the carrier (DHL or whoever) bills you for the import tax before it leaves the port.
Maybe this will change, but up until now when importing things, tariffs were not part of the price paid to the seller.
I see some ways this could be exploited.
Let's say I have a nemesis, I could in theory spend 100$ in packages from China, and ship it to them. And they'll have to pay 245$ in tariffs ? (245% today).
It's not exploitable in that way.
The bill received is a "you must pay this if you want the package. If you do not, we will destroy the package". It's not a contractual obligation where you get sent to collections or take a credit hit if you don't pay.
In the situation you described, the end result is that your nemesis does nothing, pays nothing, and you are out $100.
Much like brexit this will be a case of hindsight for many - people realising too late that they voted against their own interests
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Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet.
...unlike our friends on the European continent.
The UK-EU trade volume is three times larger than that between UK-US.
That's definitely not what Brexit was and is about. Go ask a fellow british about that.
> Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs
That is, of course, entirely false. In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs, and even if that would be the case, there are many downsides that don’t have anything to do with tariffs.
> and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet
The FTA with the US has been "happening soon" for about a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it. And with a protectionist American government, it would put the UK at a significant disadvantage.
> unlike our friends on the European continent
LOL. Nobody on the continent wants its country in the same position as the UK is. Brexit killed any political movement to leave the EU for a generation.
> In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs
When tariffs were applied, UK got 10%, EU got 20%. There's currently a temporary reprieve on the EU.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/02/trump-tariff...
They were not applied. Tomorrow, they can be 30% or 5.36%. If your only goal was depending on a fluke and a brain fart of a senile old man 10 years after Brexit was voted, then I don’t need to tell you how poorly thought out it was. If that is your measure of success, then Russia and Belarus welcome you.
So a couple of things:
1. The EU has that reprieve. Given the EU can bite back, it's possible that reprieve becomes permanent.
2. Last time Trump slapped tariffs on UK + EU, Biden prioritised reversing tariffs on the EU first because they're a bigger trading partner than the UK.
As the above poster pointed out, that's to say nothing of the many downsides of not being in the EU.
Brexit has been a disaster for the UK otherwise and anyone with eyes can see that
A "disaster" is a overstatement to the point of falsity. Still an unforced error and a bad idea but let's not exaggerate.
Why do you think it's an exaggeration? I mean it has measurably put them in a worse financial spot than before. I'd call the US tariffs a disaster and I'm not sure which one wiped out more from which nation's economy
> probable free trade deal
While hoping is free, the negative impact of Brexit has been extensively documented. Hell, there's even a Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_of_Brexit
I guess brexit insanity and trump insanity cancel each other out then
> probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet.
Get ready for the chlorine chicken!
Wait why would $0.75 have a $75 charge? Is there a minimum tariff that’s not as widely reported reported on? That would be a 10000% tariff. Or is this just exaggeration
There's a minimum charge, as well a percentage.
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
ref. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/trump-aga...
As far as I know, the way it works is shipping companies can do the % package value (ad valorem duty) or the flat rate per package (specific duty) but have to do the same method for all packages and can only change their method once a month.[1]
My speculation is the ad valorem duty requires more manpower to implement and so that's why there's the specific duty option. Especially because they originally temporarily halted the de minimis changes due to USPS not being able to handle it.
Executive order 14266 is the most recent rates with 120% ad valorem or $100 / $200 specific (gated by date as noted above). [2]
[1] EO 14256: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/furt...
[2] EO 14266: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/modi...
Wait, what?
So I can buy my carton of 120 iphones if I pay a $100 package fee, instead of $200,000 at the 120% rate?
Alternately: My Chinese excavator only costs $100 in tariffs?
Can someone give me pseudocode here?
Neither of those are going to be postal service packages with a De Minimis value (<$800).
Could you unpack the idea further?
There are plenty of things where Temu charges $2.00 and I would be fine paying a 120% tariff on that to bring it to $4.40, because Amazon is charging $8.99 and retailers are selling a seventy pack for $30.
But I would not be fine paying a $100 tariff to bring it to $102.
You did a great job explaining it, what more do you need to unpack?
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ?
I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clear on how the rest of this works.
In the EO language there is no "whichever is greater", the shipping company picks (note this all specifically for de minimis, <$800 value, packages).
In EO 14256:
> Transportation carriers delivering shipments to the United States from the PRC or Hong Kong sent through the international postal network must collect and remit duties to CBP under the approach outlined in either subsection (c)(i) or subsection (c)(ii) of this section. Transportation carriers must apply the same duty collection methodology to all shipments; however, transportation carriers may change their collection methodology once a month or on such other periodic timeframe as CBP determines appropriate, upon providing 24-hour notice to CBP.
(c)(i) is Ad Valorem Duty and (c)(ii) is Specific Duty
Back when the tariff was first announced I remember seeing a whitehouse.gov announcement saying it was 30% with a $25 minimum per package. I can't find that but the [newest Fact sheet](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...) dated 4/2/25 just has the vaguely worded "either / or".
Then there's [avalara.com](https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2025/02/how-to...) saying on 4/10 that it's 120% OR $100, but not clear if filer gets to choose.
The latest I can find is from today (4/15/25) from [metro.global](https://metro.global/news/new-tariffs-and-the-end-of-de-mini...) that says 120% AND $100 per package (rising to $200 June 1st).
Your question is so simply put it seems like there should be an easy answer but it seems like there's a lot of interpretations on what's going to happen. It's possible that all of these sources were true on the day they were posted but the rules are continuously changing.
Ah, I see what you're asking.
I just did some digging and cannot find an answer. Everything just says "X% or $Y flat fee".
Maybe it's up to the discretion of the administration. How much did you donate to Trump's campaign?
Wow I’m genuinely surprised that’s not getting more press. That’s absolutely going to shock the hell out of some people.
Its going to be great. I can't wait to see how MAGA explains this one away. Eventually the pain will be enough that hopefully the bubble breaks with some of them.
No it won’t. It will be either 1) good or 2) somebody else’s fault.
If what Trump says is any sign to how MAGA explains it, then the answer is: if you don't want to pay those large fees, buy local. Sure the cost will go up, and significantly so in the "short term" (however long that is ...), but in the long term we will have more local manufacturing.
disclaimer: I personally don't agree with that, so no need to argue against me. Just answering OP's question, because I feel that it is important to understand the other side.
Ok - so here's an example I can provide input on.
I have a bunch of white oak from a tree I cut down and had milled into lumber.
I wanted to make a bunch of benches for friends/family, etc. I have the lumber so all I needed was the bench ends/legs.
I looked at the domestic options and it was going to cost. I couldn't find anyone that would sell a set of legs for under $300 a piece or wanted me to "contact them for pricing." and that's all BEFORE shipping.
Keep in mind that your local bigbox store sells an almost exact replica of the made in China bench legs with crap lumber for $99. It'd be cheaper for me to buy those, junk the lumber and use my own.
I then checked alibaba and walked through the process of getting RFQ. The competent sellers who knew what I wanted and what to do were easy to work with and quick to check the various shipping costs - the per unit price would be pretty low($20ish even with my low volume order) but shipping would be $50-$70 a per set of legs due to the weight of the cast iron. BUT, now, even with tariffs, that leg would go from $~90 to $180ish AND I'd still be well below what the domestic cost is.
If I go forward at all, I'll still probably go with the Alibaba folks. I don't see how USA manufacturers will suddenly start producing these sort of bulky intermediary consumer products anytime soon.
> buy local
I suspect for many imported items there is no local manufacturing and there won't be one. Oh well we'll see soon how the voters react to that.
And its going to be fine. Amish mostly make everything they need, have no debt, no trade deficits, have lots of kids and are thriving. I'm not saying this to be snarky, all Americans can be as happy as billionaines: https://www.businessinsider.com/if-you-want-to-be-happier-sh...
"Is it possible to step off the hedonic treadmill? The best approach involves silencing our desires, restraining the insatiable appetite of our dopamine neurons. This is what the Amish have done. They have learned to live without modern consumerism. They don't use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quite permanence to heady growth. The end result is a happiness boom. The Amish turn out to be as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. Furthermore, their rates of depression are more than ten fold lower than the rest of the American population. The Amish are content because they have learned to ignore their dopaminergic pleas for more." https://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/16/happiness-wealth-...
What would happen if everyone lived like the Amish though? I’m assuming they are still profiting from modern science they wouldn’t be able to come up with, right? Or are they refusing MRI scans and Chemotherapy too?
A lot of people would starve without industrialized agriculture.
But you could build the hell out of a barn
I think the point wasn't that that specific example scales to the whole nation but more that if that specific example works as well as it does at the scale that it does than surely some middle ground between "import basically every consumer good" and "the amish" would scale to the entire nation with acceptable tradeoffs.
> Furthermore, their rates of depression are more than ten fold lower than the rest of the American population.
One wonders if this is simply due to under-diagnosis.
My theory is that all our modern junk doesn't necessarily cause depression, but it allows us to take on more chronic depression and other mental problems (distraction, dopamine hits, etc.) Like the way added safety features to cars just caused drivers to drive worse to compensate.
>under diagnosis
Telling the Amish they're depressed sounds like a wonderful business oppportunity! Think of all the follow up products and services!
"ignorance is bliss"
They'll blame Biden and Soros, as usual.
US "liberal" media is being extremely cagey about what and how it reports on this admin. They know they're in its crosshairs and are doing this clumsy balancing act of trying to retain their relatively left-leaning or centrist viewers while trying not to draw any more ire. It won't work, of course, and if we continue on this trajectory you can expect that they'll change over to apologia and ass-kissing or be dismantled.
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> At this point it's basically capitlism against authoritarianism
Ha. You say that as though those things are incompatible. Some capital is putting up token resistance to the rise of authoritarianism, but it can't be a strong counterforce because that would risk retribution. Instead more and more capitalists bend the knee in hopes of favorable treatment. That's why I say the likes of CNN and NBC will switch to bootlicking before long.
I mean, they are in the interim. I fully understand capitalists can make money on cruelty.
But we're talking about the statement made and transitions.
There's a very large political base, particularly of young people, that is more than ready for leftist politics.
It just doesn't get any funding from the millionaires who fund the DNC or the billionaires who fund the GOP. And money is how political organizations run. We have too much wealth inequality to effectively enfranchise most of the population; Capitalism ate democracy, film at 11.
There's so much chaos being flooded out all at once that things that massively impact normal people don't have time to gain traction in the news. And the moment things do make the news, there's an even larger flood of people everywhere saying, "Fake news. Didn't happen." followed by "So what? How does this affect you personally?" and then ending with "This is actually a great thing and you're suspicious if you're against this."
"Firehose of falsehood" in action. :/
I am going to miss getting free seeds from China.
Free seeds?
Sites like Amazon and probably aliexpress/temu require a documented shipment before you can write a review. Shippers sometimes send extremely inexpensive stuff like seeds to random US/overseas addresses and launder the shipping receipt into a fake review for something more expensive.
This sounds fake. Why send seeds, of all things? Why not some equally cheap item like electrical wire insulation off-cuts, a piece of scrap bubble wrap or just a note (or just nothing)? Seeds are likely to set off alarm bells for biosecurity at many borders for no benefit.
It is real, it's called brushing:
https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam
They send all sorts of things but there was a big wave of seeds that got a lot of news coverage because of biosecurity fears.
I've seen countless interviews of Trump supporters who believe that China is the one paying for it. Which I can completely understand because if it is a cost on them it would be typically be called a tax.
That said the overwhelmingly majority are shocked but believe it's all just a negotiating tactic:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-trump-tariffs-13-04-2025/
Some Chinese exporters are definitely splitting the cost of these tariffs with their American importer counterparts. While this isn't as significant as "China pays all the tariffs", it's also not "Americans pay all the tariffs".
Though, I haven't seen any analysis on how common this is, so the effect might be negligible in terms of how much "the Chinese" are paying for these tariffs.
I've come across some other comments on Chinese forums. Some importers buy products for 10 RMB from China and then sell them in the U.S. for 10 USD. Later, they use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices to 15-20 USD. They couldn't care less whether you impose 100% or even 200% tariffs – they'd still profit unless the tariffs reach 1000%.
Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCS-LS4LUXk
Every tax, and tariff a tax, is shared between producer and consumer depending on elasticity of demand for the goods
+1 I feel like this point really doesn't get mentioned enough if at all unless someone did some level of economics at high school/uni.
The tariffs are not paid for by the foreign producer and domestic consumer alone unless PED=0 or PES is extremely large.
Why is that the case? If an item (from every manufacturer) costs $5, and there's a new tax on it, making it cost $10, why would this be split between buyer and seller? The seller needs to make a certain margin on it, and it's not like the competition can sell any cheaper, or they already would have been.
If demand is elastic, then the seller has to lower prices (and their margin), otherwise people don’t buy their stuff (because they can do without). In this situation, the seller eats the tariffs, That’s the case for nice-to-have things like luxury goods and entertainment. If the seller cannot do that, e.g. because their margins become negative, they will just stop doing business (in the US or entirely).
The other end of the spectrum is stuff people cannot do without, in which case the seller has no incentive to lower their margins because their customers don’t have a choice. Then, tariffs are entirely paid by the buyer.
In reality, everything is in between and accurately estimating how much everyone will be paying is very difficult. What we can predict with certainty is that prices can only go up, and that some businesses will fold because they cannot absorb the loss.
Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense about the elastic demand.
The seller doesn't "need" to make any margin on it. Margins are set by the free market, and they are what they are, no more, no less.
Prices go down when demand goes down, right? Why's that, don't sellers need to make a certain margin?
A bunch of potential customers will buy at 5$ but not at 15$ so the seller will lose sales and hence money
> Wow I’m genuinely surprised that’s not getting more press
It's hard reporting on the current administration, it's the classic Russian flood style messaging, where you just flood as much (mis)information as you can, and people just can't follow.
Truth be told, the status quo, with 5-dollar packages clogging the USPS, was a DoS on-going thing in real life/physical form, there had been many posts in here detailing that. Yes, it will most probably negatively affect a lot of people who were relying on that DoS thing to carry on, and, yes, most probably the proposed charges are too high, but it was obvious that something needed to change.
I don't agree with Tariffs, but the discounts some countries get on postage is BS. It should not be cheaper to have a parcel delivered from overseas than interstate in your own country.
https://www.ft.com/content/876bc3ec-aadb-11e8-8253-48106866c...
How long will it take him to change his mind again? He has already exempted a bunch of stuff from tariffs, coincidentally the same stuff that is likely to be imported because the US doesn't make much of its own of.
In Denmark imports have to pay vat (25%), regardless of tariffs (goods made in Denmark also charge vat).
But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
So when possible I always shop within the EU, or maybe the US.
That’s all true, but you are leaving out an important piece of information that, at least for AliExpress, the VAT is already included in the price and there’s no additional customs processing fee.
Yeah, you have to try real hard to get a customs processing fee on a package from AliExpress. Customs literally can't keep up with the fire-hose of packages coming in from China, so the current deal is that they, AliExpress, charge and pay VAT and the packages just come through unscathed.
Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
Any business outside the EU can register for the EU One Stop Shop scheme and charge the VAT directly and avoid fees. Many small time US sellers probably just don’t want to bother, but big platforms like AliExpress centralize it https://skat.dk/en-us/businesses/vat/vat-on-international-tr...
"Dont want to bother" is generous.
"Dont want to be stuck in the morass of EU red tape" is more like it. Not that US red tape is any better, mind you, but suffice to say that unless you have massive scale, registration schemes will make you ROI negative unless you are making >100k in sales per month from the country in question.
Some even require registration by region. For example GER vs UK vs FR and rest a while back, all needed separate registration. And the paperwork is usually in the home coun try official language. Ha joke is on you when you start getting tax authority messages. They arent saying bonjour!
Source: i did this for my company.
It’s all about the VAT collection. I order frequently from Amazon Japan. They add the 25% VAT directly at the moment of purchase and deliver by DHL to Denmark without any extra handling fees. So it’s not about china, but about the company doing the paperwork required for the VAT collection instead of you doing.
And by you I mean PostNord in the case of Denmark
> From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto.
I get stuff delivered from the UK to the EU very regularly and all competent sellers handle VAT and duties just fine without additional processing fees. Smaller companies don’t always bother, though, but most of the time I don’t have to pay customs because everything is declared properly.
> But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
It depends on who you are buying from. This is the order of magnitude of the fee if you let the shipping company handle it. It is extortionate and they do it because at this point buyers don’t have a choice if they want their stuff.
Companies that are used to dealing with foreign customers handle taxes themselves and don’t charge processing fees.
I think the issue is related to postal charges, and the reduction (or elimination?) of the "de minimis" exemption plus the tarrifs.
One positive that could still come out of the tariffs is the US consuming less junk.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
Germany is definitely top-tier on reducing waste. Before I left the UK it had got to the point where actual landfill-bound unrecyclable trash was a tiny portion of the waste output.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
I live in Germany. One reason the toters can be smaller is because there places to dispose of your recyclable goods (free) on almost every corner. The toters are just for compost and regular trash.
Aliexpress my impression is you can get "useful" stuff that are odd but usable. But I've had the impression that temu and shein was all "direct to garbage" devices, was this not the case?
They sell the same stuff in my experience. I would describe Temu as selling the top 10% of AliExpress that's the most popular, with faster and more reliable shipping since they use huge centralized fulfillment warehouses, similar to Amazon warehouses.
Aliexpress also changed a lot there. I'm not sure if it goes for all vendors, but my last purchases have been very fast. Some even shipped from Europe, but even if from China the wait time of several weeks did not happen anymore.
I assume they made a similar change.
I've only used Temu a few times, but in my limited experience it is just Aliexpress but with a slick gamified interface on top. Alibaba sellers supplies the same stuff to Aliexpress, Temu, a ton of the Instagram ads and even a lot of the cheap Amazon stuff.
They are all different frontends for the same backend - amazon is also a frontend to the same thing but with prices 2-3x'd.
You can't lump shein and temu in the same bucket. My wife is an avid shein user and from what I can tell the quality so far is really good for what you pay.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes. And they do this like, always.
There's no "Summer" or "Winter" season clothes. They just update them continually.
> Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes.
Few years ago there was a trend in online ads showing t-shirts and hoodies with "realistic" print ons of animals, optical illusions, mazes, etc. Realistic only on photos or rather renderings. Felt like some form of brainrot. It was all Chinese clone shops or outright scams. Luckily the trend is dead now.
So, the same as Temu.
Temu "produces" their own clothes, etc? I was under the impression that it was just a marketplace.
They all are. That doesn't mean they don't tell their vendors what to produce at what price. That's the business model of Chinese fast fashion after all.
I'm sorry for your convenience loss, but I'm happy for the environment.
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
The resistors to your local store have to go through logistics as well. And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
>And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
How do you figure?
One guy driving a route between 100 places is probably more efficient than 100 people all driving to and from a place.
Ah, you're assuming the customer is driving a car. That had skipped my mind, but this story is about the USA so it's probably a valid assumption.
Who would have thought that Trump would bring in a policy that would benefit the environment? Also, who would have guessed that right wing governments would start buying Tesla's? Quite a plot twist ..
It’s random dice throw. On average Trump has shot US in both feet unnecessarily.
I bought a bunch of off-brand Lego kits usually with Chinese themes (pagodas, nine-tailed foxes) from Temu. What I thought was hilarious about Temu was that the size of things was usually different from you had in mind. Most of the time Temu items were smaller than I imagined but once in a while you'd get something much bigger.
>Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package
Not "anyone"; only the 4% of humanity that lives in the USA.
~20% of AliExpress and Temu packages is probably the more pertinent number.
> Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
Are you saying a consumer will pay $75 later if they order a package from China now and it comes in May?
There is a minimum fee for packages, yes. At this point I've lost track of all the changes but at one point I remember seeing $100 or $150 per package under some conditions.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
That there is a minimum fee doesn't necessarily mean the customer pays it on arrival. It could also be charged to the sender in advance, and if they don't pay, the package is simply not delivered at all.
If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
Yet that’s exactly how it works. Each package will have $100 tacked on and in June that goes up to $200. They are basically making small packages impossible, so individuals / hobby buyers will be cut out completely, and a lot of small businesses will lose their supply lines. Big businesses will just raise prices to compensate… or bite the bullet long enough to put everyone else out of business. I suspect this is Walmarts plan.
> If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
You can just refuse to accept the item, and it'll be returned to the sender or destroyed.
> the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard
Speak for yourself. I am in this world but I am not in USA and I won't be subject to your stupid tariffs. Good luck to you.
It doesn't matter when it was ordered, only when it goes through customs.
After the inavsion of Ukraine and sanctions were put on Russia every western company laundered their goods through Kazakhstan and into Russia. Im sure we will see a similar situation whith chinese goods finding their way into the country via vietnam.
realistically speaking, it is likely not possible to deliver envelop from China at 75c cost, its likely someone else is paying for your 75c envelops (like taxpayers through subsidies).
You've been downvoted, but you are 100% correct. It is the result of the UPU treaty: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/10/us-withdrawing-144-y...
I enjoy the cheap shipping (from Aliexpress China warehouses to Germany), but I really wish this would be improved. It just seems nonsensical. There should be a closer relation to actual cost, but paying 4-5€ for a national shipment, versus essentially nothing for Chinese shipments, is mad.
It gets even weirder when you consider the prices of shipping even within the EU. Within Germany? €3,50 if the seller has a good deal with DHL, within the Netherlands? €4,50 with PostNL. As a normal consumer shipping something the price goes up, and when you want to ship from the Netherlands to Germany or vice versa? €9,50 at least. Vinted seems to be the exception because of their deal with Mondial Relay, so I can order something from Italy for just €5 (but they currently exclude Germany for that feature for some reason).
…meanwhile a couple of I²C light sensors, some brass book screws, a router bit or two? Free shipping because of the (whatever) deal or Ali Choice shipping, and just as fast too.
Of course with Shein and Temu this isn't about cheap electronics, parts, and tools any more, but wholesale environmental destruction by fast-fashion. It wouldn't get much worse if the Chinese fashion manufacturers just shipped their wares directly to the Atacama desert.
Enjoy this while it lasts Nachbar, no tariffs there for us just yet.
I remember paying 25 euro to ship a bottle of wine to somebody in Belgium while living 30 minutes away from the border (just for weight and destination, wine itself had no extra taxes).
And then stuff from China appears at my doorstep almost for free?
I would love to buy more from European sellers, but unless you're a serious company with deals shipping is just too expensive.
Our invisible borders are quite real when it comes to shipping. It's only the really big ones like Amazon which seem to be able to negotiate lower prices across the block, and that's just depressing.
It's the same for us in the US honestly, the shipping companies are ridiculous with this. Someone in my company sent me a hoodie, in a soft package, cost on it said $14.50.
Ridiculous! And they don't even discount you for bringing the package to their dropbox or to a store, it's the same price for home pickup. There's just no way to economically ship things as an individual.
Yeah, this gets even worse within EU, I luckily am probably less affected by that than you (thanks to country size differences), but when it hits me, it surely is bad.
The EU was supposed to be working on improving this, to facilitate trade.
It looks like they are hoping the market will improve by itself.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/postal-se...
Fast fashion is what consumers want. It's just that China has a state of the art supply chain that can do it and they blew everyone else out of the water.
I don't think the price of those small shipments from China is necessarily crazy.
Looking at flights for people: you can get a return flight to China from the UK for less than £350, which means less than £175 one way.
Let's say that's about 100kg (person plus luggage) then this means that flying 100g from China to the UK costs less than 17.5p or 20c in euros.
I expect that cargo will be cheaper than passenger plane, so shipping small stuff from China to Europe can indeed be very cheap. It's about volume and efficiency.
Air freight rates vary wildly by demand/bulk discounts/route/etc but $2-8/kg is typical, with a median around $4/kg. Commercial flights are often cheaper, and especially when you consider the weight of seats/water/food/crew/etc.
The plane itself isn’t the only cost of shipping. Even sending a letter is more expensive, and there’s no plane involved. You have to pick it up, bring it to the airport, and deliver it to the door from the destination airport.
Obviously. This is just to illustrate that what the "real cost" is is not as obvious as what some comments suggest and that it is likely much lower.
Yeah the outcomes here are insane -
Here in Australia I can order a $10 (AUD) item from aliexpress and get free shipping from China. But as a consumer or small busines, if I want to send anything bigger than a letter within Australia it's likely to cost me way more than $10 just for the postage.
It doesn't make sense and it must distort retail trade in China's favour. I'm honestly not surprised the US withdrew from that treaty, I think it needs reworking.
If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement. If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
>If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement. If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included,
Because those low shipping prices are being subsidized by taxes and the rates other shippers pay which make their way back to him because he shares an economy with them.
Just because the specific source of the subsidy is complex and can't be accounted for by the consumer doesn't mean it's not paid.
> If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement.
You misunderstand my point a little - As a consumer, I want access to that pricing! Why does it cost me tens of dollars to post something across my own country? But it costs someone in China almost nothing to post much further, including the part in this country?
And the answer is that treaties mean that we're all paying for it in other ways. In fact my expensive parcel may be directly subsidising the cheap parcels from overseas. I'm not a fan of this idea.
> If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
My partner briefly tried to sell handmade items within Australia. The postage cost more or less killed the idea as it added 50% or more to the price of a small-ish item. Yes, a mass-produced item from China would likely cost about 10% as much and be shippable for nearly free, but the audience is different. AFAICT it's largely other people who make stuff, and some who just value handmade and want to support local. They don't want the thing from China and are a little less price sensitive, but still within limits.
For items that are directly equivalent, I would prefer to buy from an Australian company, not least because of the consumer protections. Market distortions that favour overseas sales over domestic seem like a bad plan all round.
So how are they able to deliver at such low rates and why can’t other work it out and use that as well
Because it's subsidised or effectively subsidised by treaty - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
AFAICT it means that postal costs are only paid in the originating country, and receiving countries are still obliged to deliver.
But the postal costs still have to be paid, even if it is in China (wow, 4 2-letter words starting with an "i").
Not really, no. Not at the same level.
If I order a $2 item from aliexpress with free shipping, like some baseball caps I just found, nobody is paying the $10 postage fee it would cost just on shipping to send one within Australia, in China or anywhere else. Let alone the $25 it would cost to send the item the other way, back to China.
The treaty distorts the cost of delivery massively in favour of countries with low internal post costs, and ends up creating absurd situations like this.
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> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
White label goods.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
What a great day to be European.
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
According to this report (https://www.earnestanalytics.com/insights/temu-growing-faste...), Temu is growing fastest among high income earners. Would be interesting from which countries most customers come from.
I'm in France, maybe I should open a proxy. You order through me, I reexpedite to the US, with a French stamp lol.
Somebody absolutely should and will open this business. Versions of it already exist in Northern Ireland after Brexit.
A slightly greyer version: you open the box, add a ribbon to every item, repackage it, mark it "final assembly in France".
Unfortunately for you, your business probably gets outcompeted by the guy who has the same idea in Canada.
It does not work. You have to declare the real source of the merchandise. Or it has to go through "substantial transformation" so that is called "Made in France".
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
And nobody ever lied on those Chinese envelopes with the value declaration. ;)
Also, I can tell you that the country of origin field has one of the lowest entry qualities of all fields. People just don't bother, and customs don't have the capacity. Also, depending on your warehousing, there is a good chance you simply don't know. If something in your item bucket came from either China, Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines, what are you gonna write?
I bought an instrument cluster for my car for 700$ a year or two ago and they totally put something like "broken car parts - 20$" on the declaration.
How does what you say not make it work though? Are you aware that people lie for financial gains?
Sure, but then it's less of a fun side business and just becomes straight up smuggling.
A reputable business might not be interested in smuggling, but if you have incentivized smuggling, it will definitely occur
145% tariffs are practically designed to encourage smuggling.
I've seen a few headlines in our local news here in Australia about how nobody knows what amount of Chinese ingredients will result in the final product being hit with Chinese tariffs, even though the products are assembled here.
Russia has 0% tariffs, so they're probably going to ship through there.
China is 'best friends' with Russia, Russia is best friends with Trump. Huge piles of cash for everyone on the inside there.
That’s already happening.
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!
Why would you offer some low quality shit from Temu for a birthday? 99 items out of 100 self destruct within weeks of use.
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.
Reading this thread is mind-boggling. People complaining that cheap garbage from Temu is falling apart. People proudly proclaiming that they order Chinese crap almost daily. An argument about whether one crap peddler is better than another one.
Am I taking crazy pills? Am I the only one who buys things a few times per year? This rampant consumerism is depressing.
It isn’t all or nothing, products from Temu/Shein/AliExpress are not all “crap”; (and the idea that Chinese products are crap is also seriously outdated). Yes, there’s a lot of shovelware on those websites, but if you know how to navigate them you can get the same products that you’d get from Amazon for a third of the price. I’ve bought bags, tools, hobby equipment etc from aliexpress that has lasted me years and saved literally 50% on average.
So many people are clueless to this. So many products we buy in the US are the made in the same Chinese factory line and 200-400%+ marked up as a 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.
Comparing with Amazon is flawed as most of the stuff you find on Amazon is also pure junk/waste.
I keep hearing stuff like this and I kind of fully expect someone to tell me you have to pay Monster cable prices to get something that's not junk.
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.
I also got some decent stuff I bought from aliexpress but it is really a tiny fraction of what is offered.
Buy item X from Amazon, which is effectively a Temu product+ a 50% markup.
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.
Don’t you have more than those two options where you live?
Our neighbours have Prime vans as well as unmarked white delivery vans dropping stuff off almost daily, mostly small items. I have sometimes wondered where it all goes, until I see their overflowing garbage and recycling bins.
I don’t buy things online too often (about once a month, I would say), but regularly I buy on AliExpress things that I cannot find elsewhere at a decent price or at all (mostly electronics and specialised hobbyist stuff). On the other hand, yes, Temi is cheap garbage, and so is much of AliExpress. And Amazon as well, to be honest. Real life leaves room for a lot of nuance.
There is also 'cheap' stuff from Temu that doesn't fall apart.
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.
No, I had the exact same thoughts. I personally find it crazy to think that you'd buy something (that isn't an explicit perishable or consumable) and intentionally buy something shoddy or discard it after only a few weeks.
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.
I make maybe 5 Amazon purchases a year. There are a lot of shopping addicts out there! Gotta get your dopamine fix somehow I suppose.
"exagerrating a bit" ? I've bought a few things off Temu and Shein, and the quality's been perfectly acceptable.
Very easy if your bar is already at rock bottom (amazon).
I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.
As long as they arrive before may 2nd.
I used to buy a lot from Temu. Till I got a product that fell apart after three months. I tried to leave a bad review, but Temu wouldn't allow it. If you're trying to leave 3 star rating or below, they redirect you to customer service. But since customer service only dealt with items under 45 days (as far as I remember), they would just tell me something like "too bad, you're out of luck".
So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.
This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
Ebay do something similar too. You can immediately provide positive feedback, but you have to wait 7 days to add negative feedback. This is ostensibly to encourage sellers to address issues to retain reputation. Sellers can also get negative feedback removed after the fact by doing refunds, etc.
This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly. A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.
Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing. 2 out of 3 items fit and 1 out of 3 is decent quality. That's still cheaper, depending on what tariffs your country is charging.
I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.
Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
Not entirely.
For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.
The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
> The idea that AliExpress is just for cheap tat is less and less true, and products in certain sectors coming out of China are just much better value for money (and often, as good as, or better quality) than you'd find from homegrown companies.
Not just better value for money, I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.
A recent example: I was looking for something to balance the 3rd axis on my telescope, There are very few products on the market from mainstream brands and none were what I needed. On Ali I easily found several options. These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.
Same goes for storage bags and cases. You can often find a bag or case specifically made for your device, while there isn’t anything for sale locally.
> I often find that AliExpress sells things I simply cannot find anywhere else.
I recently needed some bearings for a project. I wanted them quickly, so AliExpress would take too long. I visited 5 local stores and none of them sold the bearings I needed. AliExpress had 200 sellers selling them in every possible type for a decent price.
Ended up buying AliExpress quality from Amazon for a higher price because they shipped faster.
>These are basically just machined pieces of metal so not really anything than can break.
Nothing can break but the metal can be alloyed with lead to make it easier to machine or coated in something toxic.
Yeah, there are loads of cables, converters etc. that I can't get even from Amazon. Aliex has been the only place.
Obviously YMMV, but I bought some Amazon MTB pedals rated 4.7 starts @ 9k ratings. One suffered a catastrophic failure, shearing off at the crank and I was pitched over the bars.
Design and manufacturing is obviously a major part of the equation with this product sector, and no doubt the Chinese can do that as good as, or even better than domestic brands in many respects. What they don't do as well, as far as I'm aware, is any significant destructive testing.
The bonus is I can now spend even more absurd amounts of money on bike components, which is the true dream of any true cycling enthusiast.
Amazon is just not a good place to go, you're going to be buying something very low cost that someone is drop-shipping as a way to maximise their profit, not provide a good product.
You need to know the brands to buy (Trace Velo, Peak Torque and China Cycling helps here) and buy directly from their Ali Express store, or from their website.
Amazon is only if you need a cheap bike maintenance tool within a couple of days that you're happy only using a few times before you have to throw it out. Not for components.
useless to know the brand. Amazon will change the seller every time you see an item, and pretend the reviews apply. then the new seller will ship you counterfeits while selling under the good brand and reviews. after a few sales, seller bestbikesbrooklin7456, is banned and you are offered bestevercyclesocal888 and the cycle restart.
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> Obviously YMMV, but I bought some Amazon MTB pedals rated 4.7 starts @ 9k ratings.
Every site is different, no? Amazon isn't AliExpress. Though lately Amazon if flooded with marked-up AliExpress stuff. I'm not fond of Amazon, their customer service is more of a hit and miss since various years.
That said, I've been watching Trace Velo. He reviews a lot of AliExpress cycling things. It's often bad after prolonged use. Meaning, yeah, their testing is lacking. But some brand do seem to be trying to become a trusted brand. E.g. Ugreen nowadays is often trusted. It used to be one of the many things listed on AliExpress.
Amazon is AliExpress with onshore warehousing.
Except the brands I'm talking about sell directly - the stuff you're buying on Amazon is the cheapest drop shipped products on Ali marked up ridiculously to extract the maximum profit.
Amazon is AliExpress without the free market.
> For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
Their products can also be bought either directly or from other bike-specialized shops, they don't sell exclusively through Aliexpress.
Yes, that's very true - they also sell outside AliExpress D2C on their own sites.
It tends to work out cheaper with the various AliExpress deals you can stack together to buy from there though.
Likewise in trail running, Aonijie is building a decent reputation for accessories.
> For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
Do you follow Trace Velo on YouTube? Any others you recommend (aside from China Cycling)?
I do!
I also follow Peak Torque, who is very hot on engineering. Hambini is ok, but pretty brash and abrasive.
AliExpress is great for electronics. Not the „I need a phone“ stuff (although for that it’s fine too, I think), but more the „I need an ESP-32 module“.
This. People buying a laptop there for ten bucks then receiving the photo of one have indeed all the rights to complain, but common sense should suggest them before the purchase the old saying that if something looks too good to be true... And this can happen everywhere there's no strict quality control or accountability. Aliexpress is great for small modules, SBCs, diy electronics in general, however I wouldn't ever buy semiconductors, batteries or memory modules there, as the risk of fakes or low quality clones is close to 100%.
Yeah especially as in places like London there have been many explosions and house fires originaying from cheap foreign e-bike batteries.
Some Chinese companies care about a long-term brand and place high standards on themselves but it's not true that anything online has passed safety standards. It's hard to differentiate the two due to the amount of fake reviews also.
Yes, I would never buy something grid-powered from AliExpress, and I would be very careful with larger batteries.
Yes,also beware of power strips and electrical wires in general: those coming from there are increasingly made of coated iron instead of copper or brass in contacts. The side effect is a much higher resistance that makes the wire dissipate a lot more power than it should, even to the point it can overheat and catch fire if under serious load (heaters, ovens etc.). Their exceptionally bad insulation and usually smaller size than advertised make the problem even worse. Such bad cables can be used for breadboarding where small lengths and low currents mitigate the effects, but they shouldn't be considered for anything serious. I've learned to ditch almost every bundled cable coming from there after multiple bad experiences. Surplus is a good source of top notch cables that can last decades. Crappy cables can be checked using a magnet: pure copper ones won't stick. There are also reports of junk coated aluminium cables that wouldn't stick as well to a magnet, but they're rare as aluminium, at least good quality one, is not cheap.
It's basically McMaster with slow shipping for my hobby projects. I don't need the $1000 quality and warranty of a McMaster ball screw and linear guideways, the $80 BSTMOTION brand(?) stuff has been working for me for years and is plenty accurate.
Mouser/Farnell etc don't have those? Or i guess not as many options.
I got my last esp-32 from Mouser iirc. In Europe. They finally sorted out EU fulfillment warehouses.
You can get the base ESP-32 modules for example, but not most of the Dev Boards. They have some, but much more expensive than AliExpress. And then you also have to pay shipping.
> And then you also have to pay shipping.
Spoiled americans :) I've always had to pay shipping from anywhere outside my country.
Concur. Even a planetary, cycloidal or strain wave reducers. To be honest, I don't know, where else I could find such diverse product catalog.
> Temu/Aliexpress/etc are for buying very cheap clothing.
As long as you don't value safety.[1]
[1]: https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/skin-melted...
If you actually read the article you see this garment lacked a "flammable" label. It's not the flammability that wouldn't happen, it's just a tiny warning.
This article is outrage bait, especially obvious given the incredibly graphic pictures and the high focus on emotional statements combined with the low amount of actually important detail (what went wrong? It's not what you or the article are implying, which is the fire risk).
> Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?
My experience (with Aliexpress) is that you usually get what you pay for.
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I had bad reviews been supressed by amazon several as well, so at this point I'm assuming any review system is theater.
Amazon definitely don't do anything like this.
Seller-side here. Amazon combine my author page, with that of A.A. Milne. Some of my products show up under the deceased author, some of his under mine. Reviews for one particular product are combined.
My seller ID is separate, my last name is also Milne, but my first is James.
He wrote a book called "The Red House Mystery", I wrote an homage to it because I am related to the man, called "Red House". Different products, with different ISBNs.
Combined reviews. [0]
That's not exactly a fair process for customers - and no, I can't get them uncombined. I've been trying for years. But if the seller can't get rid of something completely misleading, that seems to have been caused by a very badly automated process, then there are processes at Amazon that cause problems.
[0] https://www.amazon.com.au/Red-House-James-Milne-ebook/dp/B0C...
I've only ever left one bad review on Amazon. Chopsticks, they came bound together with some sticky tape. Sticky tape left a very sticky area just where your hands go that I was unable to get off despite a lot of effort scrubbing, washing, and so on. I left a polite constructive review saying they were good chopsticks but watch out for this stickiness issue. My review was declined by Amazon on the grounds it didn't meet their "community guidelines" (without elaborating further on which rule I'd supposedly broken).
Ok, well I've left nine 1-star and many other 2 or more star reviews and none of them have been removed for any reason, so I would say you got unlucky and that I stand by my comment that Amazon don't do anything like automatically redirecting all 1-star reviews to customer service.
You don't have a glue removal spray? :)
I bought one to get sticker residue off my windshield, but it's proven useful many times since.
Mind, considering how well it removes glue, I wouldn't stick anything that was touched by it in my mouth... but may be okay for the hand end of your chopsticks.
Can you recommend your glue removal spray which is food safe? Because the entirety of cutlery needs to remain food safe, not just the pointy end.
Just wash the cutlery afterwards? Dish soap isn't food safe either for that matter.
Orange oil works wonders. It's explicitly not food safe, but you get that stuff on your hand every time you peel an orange and it's also present in juice. Just rinse them afterwards and wear gloves.
My mother swears by "Goo Gone": https://googone.com/
Of course, after you use it, I would recommend to wash the cutlery.
Here are the ingredients:
I would probably use some lens cleaning ether without perfume.Paste made from sodium bicarbonate and vegetable oil is good at getting sticky label residue off glass jars.
I recommend isopropyl alcohol. It’s cheap, versatile and works like a charm for most of your cleaning jobs. Way safer and cheaper than sprays and "super-do-that-thing-4000". No offense to the sprayers.
Not for Austrian road tax stickers. That's specifically what made me get the spray.
The community guidelines rejection is such BS. I've done thousands of Amazon reviews and get about 1% rejection rate, and it's always baffling as to the cause. You develop superstition over time over what is the cause. I avoid certain words (sexual, violence, mention of other brands), blur our barcodes, etc. "Sticky" would trigger my "uh oh, sounds sexual" alarm and I'd word it something like "tape around chopsticks left adhesive residue". Like I said, superstition.
They must have thought it was a bad dad joke.
Amazon is known for suppressing negative reviews, there are many reports about it. Not sure why the grandparent comment is claiming the contrary - not doing the automatic redirect maybe, but they do remove or just not accept negative reviews.
They absolutely do, it's personally happened to me. My review was rejected because I simply listed what items were included in the box, one of them being a card that offered a bribe for a positive review.
Every review I left for Amazon products (Amazon EU) got rejected until it was diluted into nothing. The explanation was always vague, listing a dozen possible reasons, none of which fit what I wrote.
On non-Amazon products it's a coin toss for negative reviews. Many are published, some are not. Can't explain why.
Google is not better, negative reviews I leave on Maps are published very selectively. Maybe big-tech found a way to monetize this too. I know sites like Yelp are more or less an extortion business where you pay to get negative reviews wiped.
Neither does Temu. They're misrepresenting what Temu does, at least in my experience.
If you choose a star rating below five, Temu asks if you'd like to request a refund or seek other assistance. The one time I said yes -- it was a keyboard where a shift key wouldn't trigger consistently at the peculiar angle that my typing style hit it at -- it immediately gave me a 100% refund and said just keep it.
But I've left other low-star rating without trouble. The refund/assistance suggestion is an entirely optional sidetrack.
I've never (to my knowledge) had a review on Amazon rejected, and I've left very some negative reviews, including when I received counterfeit items.
I always thought the review scams on Amazon were more driven by the third-party sellers doing stuff like listing takeover, astroturfing reviews, bribing customers for good reviews, etc., but maybe I'm wrong. I have personally received multiple offers from third-party sellers of incentives to leave good reviews.
I bought a pcie wifi card on amazon.
It came with a "get $20 if you leave a 5 star review" card in it.
I took a picture and included it in my review.
Amazon declined to publish it.
So, they do shady shit like this for sure.
Either you've never used amazon or you are lying in bad faith.
I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon in the past year and only one got rejected, and quickly approved I corrected one thing that was out of the rules.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
Amazon took down one of my reviews because I included a picture of the item's manual which had a page offering to pay for Amazon reviews (the item had unanimous 5 star reviews). To me that seemed like valuable info and legitimate context to include in a review but even after I appealed they disagreed because my picture was "irrelevant".
You're supposed to report review manipulation offers to Amazon. Reviews are for the product itself, not the seller (in theory multiple sellers can offer the same product, but for alphabet soup brands that's never the case).
The review manipulation offer was boxed up in the shrinkwrapped package so from my POV that made it part of the product. If the seller is altering the product then IMO its fair game to review. If a seller removed the batteries or put a sticker on the product I'd consider that an alteration to be part of the product itself... as opposed to when reviews complain about stuff like the seller's shipping speed which is orthogonal to what's in the box being shipped.
How convenient that the information only goes to Amazon, who can choose to do nothing, and isn't allowed to go out to other customers to help them make a purchasing decision.
>More than 50% of those are below 3 stars.
Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
>They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
> Do you make bad purchasing decisions? How could "over 50%" of 200+ purchases be two star or fewer? Why would you still patronize Amazon if this is your experience?
I get them for free, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690563
> While I don't think they do -- Amazon, like Temu, is a marketplace of sellers, and they let the bad sellers die -- you aren't really in a position to say if they do or not. Amazon's algorithm for surfacing and/or aggregating reviews is not something we can audit in any real manner.
Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.
Some people treat it like an adventure or a gamble or are just too curious, they know it's hit or miss but it's cheap and usually you can return it easily. See Atomic Shrimp channel for example. I don't get those people but I don't judge
> I have written more than 200 reviews on Amazon
Why did you do that? Did they pay you? Or did you get the stuff for free?
You forgot to ask 'Do you live in a high-trust society?' - or maybe you didn't?
Building common goods is one thing. Free labor for a corporation (that can at any time decide to throw it away if it's not profitable enough) is another thing.
Yeah I get the items for free in exchange of honest reviews, look up Amazon Vine, it's an official Amazon program.
Note that if anything they are more stringent with the quality of the reviews we need to write, not less.
You really expect that kind of support from something ahipped across the globe for peanuts? Ali/Temu and the kind serve specific purposes and they do it well.
I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.
I suggest to sort by order number and not stars.
The "kind of support" they say they expect is the ability to leave a negative review. That doesn't seem too extreme of an expectation honestly. The only reason support came into the picture is that Temu redirected them to support.
"That kind of support" is the absolute bare minimum. If you're not even providing that then you're not fit to sell anything, at any price.
But that is unfair competition against rule-abiding vendors. Platforms like Ali and Temu should face the most strict limitations for that alone.
We have gotten to the point where you can't leave a bad review on aggregation sellers (like Temu/Ali/Amazon) because if you could, your competitor will for sure buy some farm in Taiwan/wherever and destroy your reputation.
The closest thing to Amazon made in Latin America is almost the same thing, I'm talking of course about Mercadolibre.com, you can ask a refund for a product but if you do you cannot leave a review at all, and the products with bad scores have their scores and their reviews hidden, that's why is impossible to find a single product with less than 4 stars, and they have millions of them, it's as shady as it gets.
Whats the goal here? Like, with amazon they don't own most of the products they sell, so presumably leaving a bad review doesn't bother amazon much, but what about temu?
Temu is about offering a convenient hyper fast shopping channel to Chinese manufacturers with customers worldwide, primarily for clothing. A product which sells for months/years and gathers reviews is not part of their vision. Their customers don't need reviews (sales numbers is everything), but the users expect them, so they are there.
In Brazil there's Shopee, which honestly, I find way better than Temu...
Shopee has even worse behavior around reviews. You can't even leave a review past the first few days, and they bribe you with shopee points to leave a review.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
I use shopee and find the reviews fair. Like everything else, you have to learn how to take the most out of a limited system.
My experience so far has been good. Negative reviews seem fair, and give a good indication of what to expect (maybe I've lowered my expectations from the start).
Shopee allows you to post follow-up reviews, and gives you a grace period of 45 days to post reviews.
If you want compare, at least compare with facts.
I just checked and I cannot edit any old ratings. Maybe it's something you can only do through the app?
I can't install the app because I travel between countries and they block my Google account from installing the local app. I'm sure there's ways around that but I'd rather just use the website.
Aliexpress has the same problem, quite frustrating.
I can find some bad reviews on items that have a lot of positive reviews on Aliexpress. Seems like they don't completely filter all of them.
If you read the aliexpress reviews, there are a lot of 5-stars totally bashing the product.
But they do have a time limit on leaving a review, as far as I can tell.
They have a 30 day time frame to leave a review. That's why so many reviews just say "Everything arrived on time" and none of them say "this thing broke after 31 days".
AliExpress highly encourages leaving a review. They also encourage taking pictures. As a result, loads of random pictures in reviews.
You can do an additional remarks later, but I often don't bother. It's drowned out anyway.
What I often do is read the reviews. What's usually done is a critical review and still 5 stars. The fake reviews are pretty easily spotted. It shouldn't be this way, but in my experience it's still better than Amazon. With Amazon more effort is made to fake a review.
Do you buy anything based on reviews there? They're obviously silly and exchanged for discounts and "coins" so I just ignore them in a way I don't elsewhere.
I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
No, I treat AE reviews as written by the manufacturer. Sometimes I'll look to see if a legitimate user has posted something wrong with the product, or a caveat, but I never pay attention to the rating.
I've had almost solely good experiences with AE, but it does take experience to shop there (never trust the photos, if the price is too cheap it's a scam, batteries are always fake, etc).
> it does take experience to shop there
Amen, and resilience. It's a combative UX, trying to force you into bundles instead of single purchases, Choice items rather than cheaper with regular p&p, not advertising that some things (eg bare lithium cells) will be shipped seemingly by sailors chucking corked glass bottles into the sea and hoping they get to you within three business years.
I've not had too much of a problem with outright scams. Some things have been smaller than expected (photo issues - description accurate) and if it's delicate (eg plywood robot models, larger foam planes) they will find a way to grind it into dust before delivery. Both those examples got a refund the next day.
But it's cheap when it works but the central company appears to be honest and helpful when you contact them.
I did have one or two items being scams, eg a mosquito bite pen that ended up being empty inside, or a 2TB USB disk that actually just had a trashy MicroSD card inside, but both cost $3 so I knew they were scams when I got them (I was just curious).
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Good. They're pushing overpriced low-quality junk. If you want to buy from Temu but want a better chance at reasonable prices, shop AliExpress.
IMO Temu and Aliexpress/Alibaba market themselves in a very different way. In many ways I consider Aliexpress to be more reputable just because they don't try to pull the wool over your eyes with their products. With Temu they try to make it seem like the products are just as good as what you get at Walmart. With Aliexpress at least they just straight up tell you they are a "front" for all the factories in Shenzhen.
I found Aliexpress to be great for retro gaming consoles, for anyone interested and willing to wait, you can get an "R36S" which can play all the old gameboy games and other retro games for ~$30.
The other advantage with Alibaba is you can interact directly with the companies doing the manufacturing.
Several years ago, I was frustrated with the insane costs of hockey sticks. I'd been going through sticks at about a 6-8 month clip since high school and having to buy $300 hockey sticks every six months was not something I was happy about.
I got on Alibaba, sent out several emails saying I was an equipment manager for a US based hockey team. The team was looking to get some stock sticks for backups since players were going through sticks like crazy.
I emailed two companies who did carbon fiber manufacturing. One company made one-piece composite sticks that were blank. You could tell them what length, flex, lie and blade pattern you wanted and then if you wanted 12K or 14K carbon fibre. I got two 12K blanks. They were impressively durable and lasted for well over a year. Almost twice as long as my expensive retail sticks. They were a little more whippy than I was used to, but it was easy getting used to it.
The other company was a bit shady. The first email I got back was someone asking me how many top of the line Bauer sticks I needed. I asked him how that was possible and he just said he had access and just give him the specs and they'll send them out. I ordered two of those to boot thinking it was a pretty big gamble. Turns out they were legit. My buddies who used the same retail model couldn't tell the difference. We went over the graphics and couldn't see any difference either. Ironically, I still have one of these Bauer 1X Lite sticks that I use when I get down to a single stick and I'm waiting for the newer ones to ship.
Interestingly enough, by the time I had gone through three of the sticks, suddenly there were several companies popping up offering "blank" sticks for a fraction of the cost of the retail sticks. Effectively doing the same thing I did, but now as legit hockey companies trying to save players some money. All told, I think I spent around $500 for the 4 sticks I bought. A fraction of what retail sticks would've cost. I haven't gone back and ordered more sticks, just because there's so many pro stock stuff out there and so many other companies selling these blanks now.
Compared to everything else it feels pretty minor but I'm fairly worried about the handheld retro gaming market. I really enjoy it as a hobby but it seems like almost all of those devices will no longer be profitable / worth buying if the tariffs are enforced on them.
I've been really enjoying my recent Anbernic RG 406V and it can play pretty much all the systems I want it to so I guess I'll just stick to that if the handheld market collapses.
The "de minimis" exemption, which previously allowed low-value packages (under $800) from China to enter the U.S. duty-free, is being phased out. This change, announced by the White House, will impact popular e-commerce platforms like Temu and Shein, potentially leading to higher prices for consumers. The de minimis exemption is being ended because it's being seen as a trade loophole that allows low-value goods to enter the country without paying import duties. The change is expected to take effect on May 2, with a new system in place to collect duties on small-value packages.
Well you have until May 2nd to order tarrif free fyi. Most people dont realuze this.
There's a different cost vs. shipping tradeoff between the two. I use Temu for little electronic things (OLED panels with breakout header pins, microcontroller boards, breadboards, etc). For that purpose, Temu's prices are much better than any domestic seller, for a product that is exactly the same for my purposes. And, unlike Aliexpress, it won't take a fiscal quarter for your stuff to arrive.
AliExpress shipping has gotten noticeably faster even over the five years that I've been using it. Just about everything arrives within a week now.
I'm having the same experience. On one of my packages, the sender address was a local warehouse. I suspect Ali is warehousing outside of China.
They do and they tell you where it's shipped from on the checkout page
I have ordered loads of stuff off Aliexpress, in the exact category you described. Never taken more than ~1 week to reach. Aliexpress shipping is actually quicker than Amazon if you don't have Prime.
AliExpress stuff arrives within a week nowadays. I am in the EU and often it even ships from a warehouse in the EU.
When was the last time you used it? It was definitely true a few years ago.
There's an art to buy good products from AliExpress. You must order by number of items sold. See bad reviews. See the seller rate.
They are making each time more difficult to assert the product quality. I'm super careful, but still sometimes buy from seller SHOP123456789
Part of my AliExpress purchasing workflow is checking reviews for the item I'm about to buy on Amazon, as they're (usually) higher quality than the "just received item, 5 stars" reviews on AliExpress.
Applies to eBay and Amazon too ..
The idea that Temu is gonna end is nonsense. First of all, the US is just one market for them. They're red hot in many countries in latin America, Asia, Africa and so many others. Moreover, I guess they'll eventually find other ways to sell products in the USA, in one way or another.
What's the difference between them and Wish.com then? Wish eventually failed, but Temu still seems to be trucking along.
Temu has direct access to producers of the items they sell. They know what categories are profitable, having incredible logistics directly tied to Chinese industry. Wish, from what I can getter, was just an American middle man.
Temu vs. AliExpress is usually a shipment speed vs. cost tradeoff. Their catalogues also differ quite a bit in some areas, so sometimes one has to use one or the other.
I feel like AliExpress has improved in this area though, likely due to pressure from Temu.
A few months ago, I had an AliExpress order beat an Amazon order to my house. I wasn't using Prime, but the AliExpress order did ship from China. It took about a week.
I've had so much good luck with AliExpress. I wouldn't order anything I might need to return. But I've never received something that needed that. I can't begin to describe how disappointing these tariffs are going to be for me. It's not as if I can or ever will be able to buy these things locally.
Is it any difference than shopping from Amazon, except you don't have to pay the dropshipping markup?
Worse support. Amazon usually will try and make you whole-ish, aliexpress is like lmao
That is not my experience with AliExpress. I usually just got my money back when I complained.
They just make it very hard to complain. And it always is necessary to do a lot of back and forth
It probably varies based on item price and how obvious the issue is. I had two sub-$10 items arrive visibly broken recently and got refunds in under 5 minutes.
They're more likely to only give a few dollars back rather than a full refund
You have to call their bluff when they try to pull that, they don't want you to ship stuff back either. I got a full refund after a few back and forths of "are you sure you want to ship that back for a refund??".
Hmm, with one exception, every time I've had an issue it was resolved with a full refund within 5 minutes. They do make you give them a picture of the issue.
Not only that, their ads are incredibly invasive, often taking over the majority of a page.
Whoever's doing the "design" on Temu and Ali seems to think all Americans want to feel like they're in Vegas while shopping. It's very obnoxious, to the point that people have created plug-ins to clean things up (e.g. AliTools Shopping Assistant, AliRadar).
Thanks for pointing that out. Several times I’ve seen adapters or tools I could use only to click them and it sends me to a sale list I can’t find the original product in. How hard is it to have a grid of clickable jpegs
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Aren't Temu/Shein considered to be ultra-low-quality garbage, mostly? Don't people haul their items in order to promote their useless Instagram/TikTok, so their followers will buy the same ultra-low-quality garbage?
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of direct access to overseas markets, rather than local distributors slapping 200% margin on Chinese sourced/produced items that you can buy from AliExpress. But I'm not in favor of flooding the market with cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap that ends up in landfill in a few weeks or days.
So no, I don't feel sorry for Temu.
I don't get this argument. All the cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap will still exist, it's just going to be sold on Amazon with 1-day shipping. Consumers want these products and the market just fills the demand. The deregulation that will take place under this administration will lead to even more, toxic, unsafe crap flooding the market, except it'll just be manufactured in the U.S.
The same item on Amazon will cost x2/3 times than Temu, if you will be able to find the same item at all, meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.
The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
>meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap.
No. Really not much at all.
The US cut 330 million or so people out of a market of billions setting it up so the rest of the world starts getting a competitive advantage over the US.
>it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
LOLOLOL. You do not think like a capitalist. They didn't go "oh no I have to cut corners". They saw they could cut corners on costs decades ago. China has been building your name brand products for as long half the people on HN have been alive. If you look at Tiktok now, they are out right showing the factories building products you are paying hundreds/thousands for in the US for 20-50 dollars.
The US screwed itself with huge consolidations and rent seeking behaviors. We are paying huge amounts for products and not getting the value we deserve.
No idea about Temu, but I've been told that some clothes from Shein are better and cheaper than what we sometimes find in the cheaper local stores (UK).
I hope temu and the other Chinese companies in that segment stop selling overseas. Their model is just incredibly destructive to the environment, they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
You will find the exact same items on Amazon, except usually more expensive.
There are many items sold on Aliexpress that are of decent quality.
I think the point is to buy what you really need, and focus on quality, rather than impulse buying cheap stuff that ends up in the garbage after a month.
Our consumerism is hooked onto cheap crap, the factories producing it are only fulfilling the demand.
Demand doesn't need to get fulfilled. The people profiting off this are still the other half of the problem.
It's just a natural byproduct of poverty and a shrinking middle class in the United States. HN readers are not the target customers of Temu. It's those people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and can't afford quality goods whatsoever. It's the same as the low quality garbage found in predatory dollar stores in poor neighborhoods.
If you pay peanuts obviously you’re gonna get garbage. You chose to buy garbage, why blame the producer lol.
I don't buy anything from temu, but I also want that nobody else buys stuff from temu.
Good that you're not a policy maker. I'll order something from temu today
Thanks for your help in destroying the planet I guess.
I did an experiment for my blog awhile back that never got written up (lack of time, mostly), but it is was just me ordering about $30US of stuff from Temu to see why they were so aggressively marketing themselves, the app auto-installing on my Samsung smartphone I have for work, etc.
The experience left me feeling very, very dirty.
The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar portable power banks, and two small canvas backpacks. Each arrived in separate packages on different days, all shipped from what appeared to be the same CA facility, so right off the bat, we're two strikes against environmental friendliness.
The items were, as you'd expect, utter trash.
- Fire Sicks: these are those magnesium bars shaped like a little key that you strike with a piece of metal to create a spark, this allowing you to maybe start a fire. Now, I've been starting camp fires without flame for most of my life (probably the only thing I took away from my time in the Boy Scouts), so I've seen plenty of junk products that claim to do the same, but these take the cake. The actual "magnesium" bar was coated in a thick black paint for some reason? And the striking tool is a flimsy piece of aluminum coated in orange paint. Useless. I had to use a bit of sandpaper to remove the paint, giving access to the metal parts of both tools, and even then, the spark created was barely hot enough to catch a pile of dead leaves on fire. I don't know what they actually used to make these, but don't assume they will save your butt in a survival situation
- "Solar" Battery Bank: these are just regular USB power banks with a an extremely inefficient photovoltaic panel glued on. It is only capable of powering the green "charging" LED but definitely does not recharge the power bank itself. After I discharged them to see how long it would take to recharge with the solar panel, they sat in direct sunlight for 3 full days before I gave up with no additional power stored. However, they're not a total loss. They still work as you'd expect a regular USB power bank would, rechargeable with a typical micro-USB cord with two outputs to charge your devices. Didn't notice any weird voltages when charging my stuff, either. At the very least, they will not end up in a landfill because I can make use of them on camping trips.
- Canvas Backpack: the stitching is a joke, so don't expect to put anything heavy in these. My wife sews as a hobby, ended up deconstructing them and reinforcing them with some proper canvas material that made them way more rugged and able to hold gear (I use one for fishing magnet crap and the other for rock-hounding tools) but we could not help but wonder just how little the workers were paid to paid these garbage bags and what those conditions are like.
Their business model is built entirely on selling you garbage you do not need that will likely just be thrown away after a few (if any) uses unless you are more diy, willing to try to find ways to make things work or repurpose them. The entire shopping experience is gamified with spinning wheels and lightning deals, coupons falling from the sky, etc, to the point where it was ridiculous and intrusively preventing from searching for things I wanted to order. It felt like their target audience was the old ladies I see spending 8 hours a day glue to the chair of a slot machine in the local casinos. It was so absurd I felt like was in a cartoon about consumerism and actually experienced guilt for having conducted the experiment.
I personally am always weary of cheap power banks. Given the rest of the corners cut on the device, how sure are you that the circuitry and the batteries themselves are of acceptable safety standards.
Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.
I'm weary of seeing people use weary when they mean wary
Paying more =/= quality, unfortunately. Believe me, I wish it were otherwise. Don't be afraid to open up those battery banks now and then if you want to be sure, put a meter on them and scope them if you know how, but you'll find what I typically find; a lot of the same cheap components all wrapped in a pretty package. But because one came from China and one was "made" in the USA, you'll pay a lot more for one than you will the other. You can probably guess which.
I say that as someone who works in manufacturing as a controls and repair tech for industrial IoT and electromechanical integrations (I wear a lot of hats, long story). Trusted brands like Rockwell, Siemens, etc aren't really doing anything that much different than their cheaper competitors and they know it. It's a big part of the reason why their business model includes aggressive pushes to keep their customer "in their world," so to speak, trying to be a one-stop-shop for all their control needs when good number of applications really don't need anything beyond a Koyo Click PLC you can get used for $50 on eBay instead of the $1200 A/B unit. Heck, I've seen automation cells that could have the PLC swapped out with a $20 Arduino and nobody would know the difference except the controls guy. I'd love to say this over-priced cult-like hooey is restricted to the automation industry, but it's definitely not, and bleeds all over a variety of consumer industries, especially those of personal electronics. We are getting ripped off left and right, but if there's a fruit logo or some inventor's name we recognize on the packaging, we're okay taking out a second mortgage to afford it.
In the end, the quality standards in many cases are just a lot of hot air, CYA statements and sales BS. Price is really dictated by the customer's perception of the product, and when you create that trust, legitimate or not, you get to price your product much higher than your competitor, regardless if your product is _actually_ better than theirs. They get away with this because, for the most part, customers don't take the screws out and actually look inside.
Now, that is not to say my experience is always true. There are plenty of companies that make their quality standards and testing pretty transparent so the consumer can review them at their leisure and make a choice. I'm just saying most do not, which creates a lot of shadowy areas where many companies can get away with things simply because they know nobody is looking and taking their word at face value.
Do you really believe that the same safety standards apply to all products?
I bought an Anker Battery bank, which got recalled for some safety issue. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that some random Chinese seller would not have bothered with any of that. Likely such a safety issue would have never come to light.
Battery production is in China anyways. Do you believe that all Chinese companies adhere to the same standards and that companies who are trying to get some kind of brand reputation in the west would still choose the complete bottom end of battery production?
I don't think you read my whole comment, but carry on.
I did and I agree with most of it.
It was also irrelevant to my point, which was exclusively about the dangers of very low quality batteries.
The difference is that you can sue Siemens and Rockwell if it explodes but good luck suing Temu seller. This creates a financial incentive for qa.
I understand it was an experiment but camping supplies are the very last thing I’d order from a site whose entire purpose is to peddle low quality garbage.
> they ship over the lowest quality garbage imaginable and create so much pollution and waste in the process.
Lots of words for "I ordered something on Temu once, got scammed, now the whole industry should burn down"
I have never ordered anything on temu and I never will.
It's really interesting to see people being ignorant, and proud of their ignorance. Imagine someone saying "All American products are garbage. And I obviously never bought anything American, why on Earth would I buy garbage?"
It is really interesting to see people making up stuff in their heads. Nowhere did I talk about "all", obviously Chinese factories can produce extremely high quality products. E.g. iPhones.
Temu is a trash distributor, the race to the bottom needs to be stopped. Their entire business model is being cheap and shipping trash.
> Their entire business model is being cheap and shipping trash.
[citation needed]
I spent a few thousand on items on AliExpress, and I'm satisfied with almost all of them. How come?
Because you are a consumer and someone who enjoys trash.
To be honest "consumer" is really one of the worst things to call someone, but I think it applies very well to someone like you.
It’s amazing how not only can you decide what others can and should buy, you can also decide the quality of that item for them sight unseen. You should reach out to TV producers - this skill would be very entertaining in a show!
Yes, I am very intelligent for figuring out that products, made under near slavery conditions with the sole goal of making them as cheaply as possible by companies who have exactly zero reputation and whose customers have no way to retaliate are in fact bad. This was an extremely complex deduction on my part and in no way totally obvious.
Also, things that are very bad for the environment should be banned. Not by me, but by the government.
I guess, like the rest of the positive comments, they conflate quantity of choice with quality of choice. I stopped buying stuff online mostly a few years back, covid completely destroyed my trust in online retailers, especially ones with China backed products.
I don't get the desire to pollute some other country just so one can have a hobby, go volunteer at a shelter or something useful.
Externalizing our negativity got the US pretty far, and if walking that back sucks for most people because they're used to buying literal land fill, then that's too bad.
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I am a troll, because I believe that shipping cheap trash from China is harmful for the environment and that the quality is low?
How deluded are you to believe that this is some kind of disingenuous belief that I hold. Do you think that environmentalism in general is also another troll operation, as I am sure that any person who cared a lot about the environment would agree with me, at least in part.
> How deluded are you
Very much, thank you, what about you?
?
!
Why would I argue with you, if I know that your opinion is so backwards it's unsalvageable? If you met someone who genuinely believes that Earth is flat despite all the evidence to the contrary, how would you approach a discussion with them?
> create so much pollution and waste in the process
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
>Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
> create much less landfill
But maybe bought from a salesman with a Humvee and a artisan that spends every last cent on overseas travel
The issue is that trying to analyse the breakdown of $ by environmental outcomes is hard.
There is a lot of propoganda about how to be environmentally sound. We tend to pick one dimension like trash output. We lack the information to be able to make better balanced decisions, for example sometimes the throwaway thing is better for the environment.
> expensive shelfs
I think that example is selection bias. I'm sure you can think of plenty of expensively wasteful examples too (it's easiest to look at other people to find that).
Counter-factual: I made some shelves from waste-stream offcuts, and other shelves were going to be thrown out. Plus costs to paint them (much much less than even the cheapest of new shelves).
You are speaking from the position of privilege. Not everyone is as lucky as you are in your country, let alone the world.
Interesting dynamic here with echoes of the .com bubble where there is a huge web of industries all dependent on the current setup continuing and money being available for consumer spending and ads - when that dries up it will impact not just those selling goods imported from China, but everyone in the US.
Disrupting US trade quickly with massive global tariffs will cause all sorts of secondary effects like a massive downturn in ad spending - directly affecting companies like Meta and Google who look insulated right now because they don't sell physical products.
Not a great time to be dependent on ad revenue.
Conclusion is wrong here. There’s plenty of bid for the ad inventory. Google and meta are extremely resilient to this kind of thing
I can't see how can add industry be resilient to recession. Maybe if you switch to selling ads for government propaganda?
So generally speaking, advertising is not resilient to downturn.
In 2008, there was an expectation of revenue loss. But because Google "direct advertising" directly affects sales... it was more like "sales" than traditional "marketing" in this respect.
In 2025, it may be different. We shall see.
I don't think much online ad revenue is related to physical products. The margin available for ad spend on physical goods is much slimmer. But... it's hard to predict 3rd order effects.
Advertising on the whole is not recession proof[1], although in the last two dips Google showed growth in ad revenue[2], and Meta was relatively stable[3].
The first thing that gets cut is 'new channels' and experiments (read: channels that have bad measurable ROI). Pinterest, X, Snap.
After that it's the most 'wasteful' brand spending/high cost per reach broadcast media that gets cut. Cinema, local TV, and increasingly nationwide TV.
Then when the economy comes back to growth there's a broader recalibration of budgets.
Because Google search has a very simple, easy to understand impact on sales they actually grew faster in recessions. Then when the recession ends brands don't see any reason to cut that spending.
1 - https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu... 2- https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... 3 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
Google search (and online direct marketing broadly) have pretty direct impact on sales. It's true that they held up well, relative to "traditional advertising" in recent downturn.
However... there are a lot of money losing campaigns out there. A lot of that relates to economic buoyancy. Startups showing growth for the next round. But also established companies getting into new sectors, defending market share, etc.
We are still, I think, in a "greed mode" economy. Fear hasn't really shown it's face yet. If that switch flips... I suspect meta/alphabet will be impacted this time.
It's really hard to tell though.
I do agree, Google and probably Meta even more so are likely to be impacted now just because they've become so overwhelmingly dominant. There's nowhere else left to cut for a lot of brands.
What will be more interesting though is if that money comes back to Meta or Google, or if people will find new, better opportunities while they pull back (eg. what happened to TV in 08).
Meta are concerned about this and already trying to book in bulk sales for next year with agencies which is something they've never done before https://digiday.com/media-buying/meta-moves-into-controversi...
Interesting. Preselling ads huh?
I think your point about dominance is a main player. I can make a dozen cases for LLMs as world of opportunity and compliments for both of these companies.
It takes a lot of opportunity/gain to hedge against the risk of losing 20% of search or social media revenue.
If you already have the whole market, losing share is easier than gaining.
But to a dominant incumbent..."threat" just tends to come with bigger multiplier.
Not sure experiences from the covid recession tell us anything. That was a very short sharp shock followed by massive bailouts and stimulus for companies and individuals. The figures for that time period are not useful as comparators.
Even when this kind of thing is a global recession and the end of US supremacy?
If they stick with the tariffs we’ll see I guess though it seems likely Trump will have to back down.
Good riddance. I'd rather have fewer things I care more about. If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices. And when we do need to buy things, we'll be either supporting local workers or friendly nations.
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier, need less space and spend less money even at higher prices.
I can't believe how many people are trying to put a positive spin on the government imposing massive taxation on people's right to buy things from other countries.
It's easy to sneer at junk fashion from Temu or whatever, but access to cheap tools and parts was the lifeblood of hobbyists and experimenters across the country.
It's not just cheap clothes from Temu. This administration just took away your right to buy anything cheaply internationally. That's not a good thing.
I think two things can be true at the same time: these taxes are ridiculous, and ordering a 75-cents part from the other side of the planet is a massive waste of resources.
> ordering a 75-cents part from the other side of the planet is a massive waste of resources
Is it really that bad? Is it better to package the part in retail packaging, ship them in bulk to international warehouses, ahead of time, store them for months, then put them in a new package when someone orders them, and mail them through a local postal service.
Versus just stuffing the part in a tiny envelope and sending it directly to the customer? No re-packaging and storage required.
I genuinely can't tell; it's a good question. If the sellers on AliExpress could ever be arsed to use recyclable packaging instead of four layers of plastic baggies and wrap it would be even more interesting.
And if recycling in North America wasn't so often a sham.
Yes, and it created an actual problem that (knowingly or not) Trump was responding to - America essentially was getting further and further in debt to enable such high consumption.
I think we'll find that quite a bit of "American Exceptionalism" has been low interest borrowing. I'm not sure to what level, but I think anyone who relies on the S&P 500 as their only investment is going to be disappointed in the future decades of returns.
The futures graph for S&P looks real close to the national debt graph, and both look like they're at peak bubble.
Probably doesn't mean anything.
You’re correct, but sometimes bad things accidentally have a few good things
So destroying the economy is worth making a few people feel better about minimizing their life? Because that's what is happening. How about people exercise some common sense and not buy things they don't need as opposed to millions of people becoming homeless and military aggression between the USA and China getting much more likely
Some people may feel that their economy was already destroyed when manufacturing was moved to China. Ever drive around Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, etc? So many dead towns, thanks to jobs moving elsewhere.
I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.
I was one of those people who always purchased American when things were being off shored, and I still do as often as I can, especially tools.
Do you know who made the Chinese made goods thing a reality? People from Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana etc. People went into a store, saw the cheaper item, often inferior Chinese item on the shelf and bought it instead of the domestically produced item, even the stuff that said "Designed in America, Made in China". They did this because it was cheaper.
I think you're mistaken if you think some external force "did this to us".
We all do it, some items are just not worth the exuberant price tag, especially if you're only going to use something occasionally.
At least from my observation, the balance was actually not so bad in the last 5 years or so, plenty of good American options available and cheaper Chinese stuff when that was appropriate. I think America will be worse off from this because the cost of so many things will be way higher now, DIY for example will be off the table for a lot of people. The cost of a drill will become ridiculous, for example.
I think ending the pipeline of landfill fodder from Temu is a great thing. That kind of consumerism is like eating a diet of pure sugar. Feels good for a second, but bad for the consumer, environment and economy.
There would've been other ways to go about solving the environmental impacts of Temu than this. In my opinion.
Temu is pure junk, Im glad it’s on its way out. However, im more worried about the economy at a grand scale and with tarrif wars it’s not looking too good for anyone.
Ooof, vote blue vs Temu is a dire state of politics
So throwing society into chaos with a sudden opium ban is worth making a few self righteous officials feel better about controlling everyone's lives? Because that's what this crackdown is bringing. How about people exercise some willpower and moderation with the pipe, instead of driving the entire opium trade underground, creating violence between smugglers, ruining the livelihoods of countless ordinary people caught in the middle, and practically begging the Western powers to escalate their military actions against us when their precious trade is disrupted?
I doubt anyone is seriously arguing the tariffs as implemented are the solution.
On the other hand, if you're thinking all opposition to the tariffs need to agree then you're deluding yourself (not trying to be antagonistic here, but it's dangerous to be blind to alternatives.)
For instance, a smaller tariff on completed Luxury goods and a removal of the Temu exception could've easily been the play and potentially could've been done without much fanfare (by someone who wasn't Trump obviously)
> If we rethink our consumption, we could become happier
If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
This is what will happen, it's why Americans and American got into the cheaper, Chinese made goods thing in the first place, there was a LOT of demand for cheaper stuff.
People will just do less, become more poor and have less opportunities or work around the system by smuggling things from Canada or something.
Maybe there was more demand for cheaper stuff in the US because wages had been rather stagnant in relation to production efficiency for decades?
I mean you're entire premise is not great at all. Capitalistic markets require competition to work. The US itself has mostly given up on 'competitive product' competition and instead fight each other with buyouts and other financial funding means.
Kicking China out of the market will just make our goods more expensive and people will do less and become more poor while the investor class gets a little bit richer.
Maybe there was more demand for cheaper stuff in the US because wages had been rather stagnant in relation to production efficiency for decades?
There is absolutely no way people with money just choose to pay more for goods, it just doesn't happen. People with money are shrewd.
People choose to buy cheaper because they can get more with their money. It's really as simple as that.
I personally buy Patagonia clothing for all sorts of reasons, but I could still get a somewhat comparable jacket for 1/5th or less of their stuff. Most people just buy a down jacket from uniqlo even though they could afford to buy from Patagonia.
> we'll be either supporting local workers or friendly nations
Are there any friendly nations left?
God I hope not.
What about buying some largest-in-the-world microcontrollers from Russia?
While I like the joke, Russia is actually making its own original microcontrollers, for example see K1921VG015 (RISC-V 32/50 MHz/1M flash/256K SRAM/square 100-pin package). The $6 price tag seems a little bit expensive to me but well the developers want to eat something too. There are also ARM-based microcontrollers (much more expensive), and of course (even more expensive) famous Elbrus CPUs with unique VLIW architecture.
Elbrus CPUs were produced by TSMC though. So they're dead since 2022.
Cannot they be produced in China once China develops the technology? As far as I remember, they don't use the latest process node anyway.
I'm no hardware guy so no clue how easy it's to move from 28nm TSMC process to some other 28nm process that China supposedly might soon have according to the news.
But honestly I doubt China would just enable Russia develop and produce own CPUs. When it's comes to chinese everything they never localized production in Russia: heavy machinery, cars, electronics, etc. They are main benefactors of Russia not having own anything.
so called macrocontrollers, indestructible if Ivan on that day didnt start drinking early morning
>Are there any friendly nations left?
From Trump POV: Ruzzia
Good for you, but it's not all about rabid consumption. My girlfriend has been into jewelry making and ordered a lot of stuff off temu, which she gave away the end product to friends and family. That'll most likely be prohibitively expensive at this point
Temu has notoriously low standards when it comes to jewelry and other jewelry related items. Reddit threads are full of horror stories about toxic materials being used for these items. Be careful what you give out to friends and family.
> Reddit threads are full of horror stories
Reddit is full of horror stories about everything. Mostly because it gets eyeballs. I’m open—almost receptive—to the claim that Temu jewellery contains significant quantities of toxic materials. But we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than Reddit comments.
I haven't seen the Reddit posts. But I've seen the same in Articles in the Norwegian press, where they bought a bunch of random Temu stuff and sent it for safety testing. The result where not great and the results for the jewelry was really scary.
Anything that has skin contact like rings, clothing, toys, etc. I wouldn't but form Temu/AliExpress. That's where I draw the line.
She could give cards, food items or hugs. You don't need to cover people in cheap temu stuff to show you love them.
Ah yes, replace a creative hobby with.. hugs
I think you'd be surprised at the quality
I don't think people are aware their <insert high status luxury brand> came from the same place.
The luxury brand ensures the safety of the product, and as the importer is liable if they fail to do that.
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Do tariffs raise the quality of domestic substitutions, or do we simply pay more?
For many products, domestically manufactured substitutes still have some inputs that come from international suppliers.
Could be some raw materials, the machines that make it, or the packaging. Now everything is going to be massively more expensive and it's going to have impacts even on domestically manufactured goods.
There's also the substitution effect, where heavy tariffs on one thing will increase demand on substitutes and therefore raise their prices.
It's really bad policy all around. Nobody who has any familiarity with manufacturing thinks it's going to encourage more domestic manufacturing because the tariffs suddenly restricted your ability to buy inputs and machines at reasonable prices. You're better off building a factory in another country to service global demand.
I have a friend who started a snowboard factory recently, in the USA, he was able to do this because of Chinese made CNC machines and presses that were half the price and had great support.
Now everything he needs from them to keep his factory going is going to be ridiculously more expensive, probably screwing over his business as well.
This factory wouldn't have got off the ground if it wasn't for Chinese made machines.
Tariffs lower the quality and increase the prices of domestic substitutes. There is no competition. Tariffs are how business is done in third-world countries like India. Production of everything is banned/controlled, except for the few buddies of the government in power.
Either you will pay more for domestic producers or (more likely) you will not pay at all since either domestic production will not ramp up for niche things, or you will not be willing to pay hikes domestic prices for the same utility.
lower quality, higher price.
You were always free to buy fewer things you care more about.
This isn’t true, because the subsidized stuff from China drove medium-quality choices out of the market.
Try to buy some nicer jeans or T-shirts. The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t, and actual quality clothes at 15x the price of the cheapest stuff. Most of the US clothing manufacturers have pivoted to the high-end just to survive or moved production overseas and are coasting along on their brand reputation.
Try buying a decent toaster, I've found exactly the same. $20, $30, and $50 options all using the same internal mechanism with a different style of shell and minor changes to the control circuit, or $200-$1k models that are mostly marketed for commercial kitchens/hospitality use. Not a whole lot in between.
>The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t
How are the tariffs going to change this? The incentive for the US clothing manufacturers now is to offer the lowest quality possible, at a similar but slightly lower prices than the tariffed prices.
but they are not giving them time to rethink ...
I agree. There should be a global blockade of the USA to return the standard of living to the stone age. Why stop at tariffs?
Well, from outside it seems that the list of friendly nations keep getting smaller and smaller… and good luck replacing the vast majority of your supply chain with local workers. Just look where all the products you currently have were made.
Ads was THE thing that our tech industry was exporting to the world. I was astonished with the people who thought that tech would be not affected by the tariffs.
That doesn't make sense, as ads are useless without consumption (i.e. imports). We did manage to monetize our consumption thru ads though.
The world is still consuming. Even if the US tariffs everyone else, they still trade amongst themselves. The real risk to our economy is that the rest of the world stops paying for our services and cultural exports.
Trump is going to try to pressure other countries into putting tariffs on China etc in return for a trade deal with the USA.
Several (EU, Japan and more) have said they won't agree to this.
Sometimes, one stands up to the bully even if its not the most convenient thing to do, something about morals and culture. Bully thinks this is some arab market with standalone greedy participants just like himself, while the game is anything but that.
Bipolar bully on top just generates random chaos, the best course is to cut oneself off as much as possible as quickly as possible, which is clearly happening behind the curtains
I first learned about Temu when someone I barely knew messaged me saying they needed me to sign up to Temu under some referral code so they could get bonus points to shop more. They were addicted to shopping, and Temu was the most addictive thing on the internet. Like the Dollar Store, Amazon, slots, and a pyramid scheme, rolled into one.
I'm relatively happy whenever I see negative news about Temu. Call it a bias, though my limited data[0] (itself biased) supports whatever negative perceptions I have towards Temu. The only brand to get 0/100? Why does human exploitation always have to pair with the absolute cheapest prices sourced from developing countries?
[0]: https://baptistworldaid.org.au/resources/ethical-fashion-rep...
> shut off Google Shopping ads... App Store ranking subsequently plummeting
Are they implying that app store ranking was quid pro quo for ads buys?
They directly say what they mean in the article
> The company’s inability to maintain app performance without advertising for even a single day demonstrates the fragility of its market position.
App store ranking is based on installs. Ads drive people to install the app. Less ads -> less installs -> lower ranking. Seems like a logical consequence.
I don't know about quid pro quo but those ads are content on the internet so I would assume that would drop SEO and new installs.
One of the strange patterns with Google is that quid pro quo is hard to even filter out as in some cases it is actually a natural part of the system. Probably a bad thing.
Could the two have a common cause? What if Temu stopped buying ads and consumers stopped installing the Temu app for one and the same reason, namely that trade barriers are being erected that will make Temu unpalatable for many users, something widely publicized and known both to Temu and consumers?
its also seo linkjuice as they are links
HN can't stop being HN. Scary article about a global trade war gets interpreted as "Wait, is Google actually behind this?!"
How does this make sense? Google isn't affiliated with the App Store (note the capitals), and instead it's operated by its competitor.
I take "App Store" as generic to mean any app store, like Apple's or Google's
>App Store (note the capitals)
App Store ranking is determined heavily by install volume.
The parent commenter implied something far more sinister with "quid pro quo".
Lot of "good they only sell crap" comments here. Would you guys feel the same about your neighborhood dollar store?
Yes. Your spending is a far more powerful vote than any democratic process. Your society is what it spends on. A society addicted to cheap trash is going to be precisely that.
These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.
I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.
Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.
The dollar store moves into neighborhoods that are impoverished as part of their strategy, and push out family owned businesses and would be competition through extreme saturation.
I'd love to see them go.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-oppos...
Dollar general is not a "dollar store" where everything costs a dollar. not even dollar tree is that now though...
Temu and Shein sell cheap crap.
Dollar stores sell cheap crap and destroy communities.
So no, I don't feel quite the same about them.
Speaking of, anyone else has encountered issues while browsing temu? I'm facing captcha's most of the time. I mean the "slide to move piece into a position" which most of the times fails, after which I'm facing a more "difficult" pick object of color repeated etc. The site also after a while of browsing not logged in pushes me into login page. So I wonder if it's my browser and various adblocking extensions or it's a common thing?
almost always because your adblocking extensions. They plants cookies and checks for that, and they never have to obverse gpdr.
They do cross domain requests to keep those trackers around.
adblocking extension hates cross-domain tracking.
Damn, I forgot about cross-domain tracking. I'm either browsing or shopping on every platform in private mode - perhaps that also rolls me onto... the great captcha wall.
i dont know how long temu will last without americans, but it feels surreal that europeans have more buying power than americans
Americans definitely have more buying power than Europe. This doesn't look to be true.
If you use the PPP adjusted per capita GDP as a comparison metric the US stands about 37% higher than the EU. Considering the baseline tariff of 10% and the substantially higher tariffs for important trading partners the US targets, it may actually even out.
But GDP (PPP) is not the same as purchasing power, no? I don't know of any actual data but you can imagine two countries, both with the same GDP (PPP), same population size, shared currency (so the PPP doesn't factor in). One has organized its production and labor force in such a way that everyone has a relatively equal share of the pie, and the other one consists of a massive wage slave class getting by on poverty wages and a privileged few who reap the benefits of production. Surely the first of these two countries is more interesting to global ecommerce companies from a sales perspective.
Does this include the fact that tariffs negatively affect even the EU GDP?
Tariffs in the US affect the whole world, not just US or EU - every single GDP goes down, the question is how much. EU gets hit less than the US is more or less a given, but error bars are significant.
I don't know how long America will last without temu (or wallmart)
latest stats I saw had US at ~53%, followed by 12.9% Mexico, 7.4% United Kingdom, 6.4% France, 6.0% Germany, 4.6% Spain & 9.8% Others.
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud. While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares. There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
I wonder what percentage of their sales has been in the US.
43% in 2023 https://ecdb.com/blog/temu-revenue/4995
They may not be toast, but I suspect there are many panicked planning meetings happening now. (Unless they were clever and had a plan ready for a while)
They did have a plan. Temu/Shein used to ship directly from China, handling the shipping themselves for the sellers on their platforms.
Since a year or two ago (or even earlier), they started accepting (and encouraging) sellers to handle the shipping themselves (while still maintaining a fast shipping time) by giving those sellers more traffic.
In order to have fast shipping time, it basically mean the sellers need to have warehouses (or 3rd party warehouses) in the USA. It's easier for the sellers to workaround the tariffs when they are shipping in bulk to the USA.
The prices will be higher for sure, but it will be a lot lower than people are expecting.
Not sure how well the plan will work. Just what I heard from people working in the industry.
Temu is absolutely amazing. I went from being a frequent Amazon customer in 2020 to not having used Amazon at all in 2024, all thanks to Temu.
As far as I know in Europe TEMU sends stuff from local fulfillment centers.
So maybe TEMU US can return in that form if the trade conflict settles.
They aim to send 80% from European warehouses, but it's less than a year since they started so there's no figure for the current amount.
The tax is the same either way, since they collect VAT for packages sent from China. The advantage is the faster delivery time.
The Temu ads I see are so awful that they totally put me off from even wanting to look at their site.
Good, happy to see this!
I wonder what the environmental impact of this would be.
No loss there
Temu's whole grift was subsidized products and subsided shipping and both of those things are no longer available why would they continue to worry about the US?
Oh no!
anyway..
temu and shein are cooked
Less cheap junk flowing into the US sounds like a win to me. Maybe clothes should be more expensive and better quality.
I already buy a lot of clothes at least partially made in OECD states. Even with that “partially” doing a lot of work and my avoiding paying extra for “fancy” brand names… I don’t think Americans earning closer to median household income are gonna be happy about paying the kind of prices I pay.
At least we can rest assured that they will be more expensive.
Now I need to pay 10x for a USB cable, a charger etc.
Monoprice has low cost cables.
Monoprice cables are made in China. They'll also cost 10x.
I'm not certain, but I suspect this'll work out better for Monoprice than it does for individuals.
I _think_ Monoprice will pay the couple of hundred dollars "per package" fees for the pallet or container full of cables they bring in, amortising that cost over thousands of items. They'll still get charged the 145% tariff though, but they'll probably cost something like 3x rather than 10x. (Until they work out that they no longer compete with individuals buying from AliExpress/Temu/Shein, or probably even with side hustle Fulfilment by Amazon micro-importers).
...for now.
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Also less affordable electronics
Tangent. I got into building hi-fi tube amplifiers some years back. Part of it was a kind of nostalgia for the days of Heath-Kit which I am only just old enough to remember the company's sunsetting years.
It was a fun few years deep-diving into the various amplifier topologies, buying NOS vacuum tubes on eBay, looking through electronics flea markets for parts. I made several amps, tried different tubes, topologies.... Eventually I settled on a small stereo amp and designed a PCB for it, created a small kit even.
Using a drill press in the garage, a table saw to cut aluminum sheet stock down, even learning to powder-coat parts in a toaster-oven I picked up from Walmart, I made increasingly nicer looking amps. With two large output transformers and an even large power transformer they were fairly heavy beasts.
Nonetheless, though I built them a decade or more ago, every one of the amplifiers I built are still in use today. The music I am listening to at this moment is coming from one. Another is down in my "lab". I have given several away to friends, co-workers in the past.
I guess the reason for the tangent was to say that I did indeed find that when you have (or make) a thing of real quality it can last … perhaps a life time?
And thinking again a little nostalgically, I like that too about electronics just up to the post-modern era: a new electronics purchase might have cost you a paycheck or two, but you got I think more mileage out of that device.
EDIT: come to think of it, the heavy iron transformers are from the U.S., the tubes NOS from U.S. WWII bombers. I didn't built them of course with tariffs in mind, but surprisingly they are not so cost-dependent on overseas suppliers.
And here's a photo of the finished amp (from when I once considered selling the kits): https://imgur.com/PBKOQMk
Thanks for sharing, that’s really cool and something I wish I had the time/skill/patience for. The amp looks great and love the name - might have to dust off the tools for a “Now and Then” model.
Even more important in creating a more closed loop system with less waste. Some Android phones are e-waste before they hit a year or two.
There is also an argument that we should have fewer electronics too…
I don't think so. There is an argument for -individuals- buying too much electronics and they should revisit that, but it's not anyone's business other those people. Tanking the economy and destroying lives "just becuz consumers" is a really really bad way to run the country. Just giving back and going back to horse and buggy while China eats your lunch is not a good thing, because soon you will be making "cheap trinkets" for them
Too bad that’s not the argument being made by people pushing the current policies, instead of the idea that this will magically lead to us having more and better things.
It is very interesting how if there was a genuine attempt at degrowth this is potentially a good start.
It sure is funny how the party that has spent 2 decades screaming at anyone they could that "climate change isn't real" and "the people saying we should output less carbon are REALLY just degrowth cultists and we can consume everything forever with no issues" are outright, willfully, destroying the American economy in such a way that average americans WILL have to consume less
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the thing is that life is about freedom of choice, I didn't buy they cheap junk, I'm fairly normal. I might be the occasional hobby board off alibaba express a couple times a year. Choice is good, not bad.
Maybe the law should impose quality and environmental standards instead of tariffs. But no, that would hurt domestic businesses.
The market does what people want. Fast fashion is exactly what people want because fashion has always been changing fast and about the "new thing" and people like to be able to buy new stuff all the time.
Here you go: enjoy your $120 American jeans: https://originusa.com/collections/jeans (Oh look its on sale 20$ off...yay :/ )
The sale discount is the entire amount I was able to buy my non American jeans for. :/
I guess I can make due with one pair for the week...or wash them each day(oh wait thats gotten more expensive as well).
Proper jeans aren't really washed more than once a month or at all. Especially every day. They also will last for years therefore buying 1-3 pairs a year means your wardrobe will have plenty.
Maybe local production will get cheaper once more people start keeping their money in local communities. Sending it to China is just awful for your country/region and kills local businesses.
Disclaimer: from Europe so I don't care about USA at all. It's still having the same effect here
> Maybe local production will get cheaper once more people start keeping their money in local communities.
Is the thinking here that increased scale would allow production to get cheaper? How would this account for the fact that production was scaled here, but was not cost-competitive when it was operating at scale? What's different now?
Let's say currently it costs $15 to make thing 1m units of X in China and $50 to make 10k of them in the USA. USA could be scaled to make 50k of them for $40 and 100k for $30. 1m could cost like $25. There are people for who are ready to pay more for local products so the current production volume makes sense, but majority of people will go for cheaper option when given the chance so it doesn't make sense to scale up the production currently. If the import cost of the item goes above local production cost and there is still enough demand for the item, it can make sense to scale up that production even if you cannot compete with the China made things internationally.
Of course that assumes your own costs (like raw materials) do not increase at least on the same scale and that you can rely on the situation being long-term thing (i.e. will last years rather than weeks) as costs include your CapEx on things like new machines.
> say currently it costs $15 to make thing 1m units of X in China and $50 to make 10k of them in the USA. USA could be scaled to make 50k of them for $40 and 100k for $30. 1m could cost like $25.
So here we are assuming that we could get a 50% reduction in cost by scaling to 1m units of a thing. The problem with this logic is that many product categories currently made overseas were produced domestically at scale until relatively recently.
This assumption also appears to imply that the goods in question either have a very low labor input or are produced using automation that is not available to Chinese manufacturers.
Reframing my initial question, what advantages would a US manufacturer have today that they didn't have in e.g. 1990 that would allow them to manufacture for only 66% more than the same manufacturing in China?
> Proper jeans aren't really washed more than once a month or at all.
I've had a lot of people say this to me. I've known their policy on washing jeans without them ever having to tell me, though.
People become noseblind to their own stench. Unfortunately, it's not easy to ignore the stench of someone else wearing pants with a month of sweat and fecal bacteria soaked into them. I know lots of people also only wash their coats once a year, and trust me, being more resistant to stinking isn't the same as being completely immune to stinking.
Wash your clothes. The idea of not washing them is a meme and it's incredible how many people have fallen for it lately.
I don't know about you but it feels icky to me to wear dirty pants. I could probably get by wearing them two days in a row. If I have one paid of jeans, im washing them at least every other day. If I have 7 pairs of jeans im washing at least half of them once a week. I'd rather have 7 pairs of jeans. They last long enough for me(a few years). Maybe its just because I dont have to taken them to the laverie (as the french would say) but clean clothes just feel better.
> kills local businesses
The business-to-consumer businesses, which take the largest markup, employ the most people and pay the highest wages in the supply chain, have thrived under this system.
It's not the customers that demand products be made in China, it's these "local" businesses.
If the de minimus rule is in-fact suspended on May 2nd, yes. Hasn’t happened yet, so who knows.
Amazon and other US selling platforms are also in trouble, given how much of their income is from drop shippers.
Well, given how many of their products come from China, right? How many of the products on sale on Amazon are partly or entirely produced in China? Those will have 125% (145? How mush is it today?) import duty on them, unless they're electronics.
too little too late for Forever 21 and it's 350 locations which once employed 43,000 people at it's peak: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/forever-21-files-for-second-...
The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.
I'm surprised the Chinese sellers are able to compete for fast fashion. Clothes are the one thing I don't really buy online because getting sizing right is already hard even when you're not dealing with Temu-style "well actually we said there's a +- 25 tolerance in the fine print and this is within tolerance" bullshit.
AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
No idea about Shein, but I was shocked how easy/good Temu return policy was. My wife bought some rugs and some prints and they were not as described/pictured.
Took a minute in the app to generate a qr code, then I had it to the post shop the same day and they refunded within 3 days.
I wouldn't (personally) buy clothes to wear normally from them, but something like beach shoes or a poncho for a festival I'd maybe get there.
TIL Temu has a return policy. I thought the return policy was "throw it in the trash and be out the money (albeit 1/10th of what you would have paid in a regular store)".
It's not fast-fashion they are competing with — they invented ultra-fast-fashion. Their platforms (Shein and Temu) are fully geared towards allowing manufacturers to jump on board the latest hypes and trends and have a saleable product on there within a week or so, to sell for a few weeks until it is no longer trending.
You want a 'My tariffs did that' T-shirt? Temu.
https://www.temu.com/search_result.html?search_key=tariffs%2...
Local store chains can't match that velocity.
People are happy to just try stuff on at home then deal with returns or accept the loss if it doesn't fit or look good.
They tried closing the loophole a month ago. It was such a burden trying to track and collect tariffs on small shipments they gave up.
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It is pretty crazy how worker unfriendly US trade policy has been for so long.
They need to get their priorities straight - stop directing trade policy towards tech companies employing 1000's of workers on $250,000 a year and start building factories employing 100's or people on 25c an hour.
> The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.
Or the US should figure out how to get domestic shipping rates to be as cheap as the rates that Chinese shippers pay to ship to the US.
International shipping from China to the US is subsidized by USPS under the Universal Postal Union rules since China is classified as a developing country. Terminal dues to the US have been increasing over the last 5 years to compensate for this.
https://www.ecomcrew.com/why-china-post-and-usps-are-killing...
It's still crazy to me that we classify the second largest economy as a developing country. Especially when said "developing" country is trying to flex it's muscles over the world stage and attack its neighbors.
China can either remain a developing country subject to rules imposed by developed countries. Or it can join the developed countries and shape those rules. It can't do both.
That would probably require that they receive federal funding to subsidize postage rates, which is unfortunately not going to happen (especially not under DeJoy).
Yes, perhaps the government should subsidize (or allow states to subsidize) the fixed costs of mail, just as we subsidize the fixed costs of roads, so that our business can be competitive. Is this what China does domestically, or what the US does when we charge for international shipping? Point is, we should at least list all the ways that we can be more competitive, rather than cheering isolationism that makes us all worse off.
He resigned last month.
Ah, yeah, just in time to be replaced by another Trump appointee to similar or worse results.
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Finally