Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads

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.

Golden Computer Centre in Sham Shui Po in HK itself is a fun destination too.

Buy American. False Made in USA claims are subject to fines exceeding $40k per violation.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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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.

It’s not even possible to convert between USB and FireWire without active electronics, as the signals are not compatible in the slightest.

You can filter them out. For now..

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

*losing

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?

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 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.

> 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)?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Brexit has been a disaster for the UK otherwise and anyone with eyes can see that

> 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

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...

Wow I’m genuinely surprised that’s not getting more press. That’s absolutely going to shock the hell out of some people.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That is not my experience with AliExpress. I usually just got my money back when I complained.

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.

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

>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.

> 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.

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.

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)?

> 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.

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%.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

Either you've never used amazon or you are lying in bad faith.

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.

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".

> 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?

>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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Good that you're not a policy maker. I'll order something from temu today

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.

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?"

> 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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

so called macrocontrollers, indestructible if Ivan on that day didnt start drinking early morning

> 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.

Ah yes, replace a creative hobby with.. hugs

I think you'd be surprised at the quality

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.

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.

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.