Why Temu is Everything Wrong with Consumerism

Shop like a billionaire, spend like a cheapskate, and lose in the long-run.

You’ve seen the ads on your social media feeds, or even on the Super Bowl. Temu is the new online marketplace that promises to offer quality products at unbeatable prices. It is owned by PDD Holdings, a Chinese e-commerce giant that also runs Pinduoduo, one of the largest online platforms in China. Temu claims to have more than 25 million items in its catalog, from clothes and electronics to house-ware and cosmetics.

Their slogan, “shop like a billionaire”, implies that you can get anything you want from the platform without worrying about the prices, as they are ridiculously low. Items which would normally go for $50 — $100 now only cost $10, and they really seem to be authentic.

But despite the massive publicity, you have likely asked yourself if Temu really is the retailer we wanted Wish.com to be, or if it’s quite the opposite.

As we are about to expose, Temu is in fact worse than any other infamous online marketplace that sells cheap and low-quality products from China.

Think about how every items needs to be manufactured, packaged and delivered before it reaches your doorstep, yet you still only paid $5. If the customer isn’t paying for the real price of a product, somebody else has to, and you can be sure that it won’t be Temu who’s going to cut into the shareholders’ pockets for the sake of the average shopper.

Not only that, but the unreasonable price tags are also pushing the competition into despair, as Amazon retailers or Ebay sellers cannot afford to list the same item for $5, shipping included, when they themselves have likely bought the product from a supplier for at least $10.

Currently, Alibaba, Wish and Temu are the big three retailers who seem to offer the best prices for a seemingly unlimited variety of products, but one of these is not like the rest, for the reasons we’ll talk about next.

Anti-competitive prices

One of the key selling points of Temu is the dirt-cheap prices which allow the average American to buy 10 products for the cost of 2. You can find items that with discounts of up to 80% off retail prices, such as necklaces for…