Why I hate Temu
The "shop like a billionaire" platform just sucks on every possible level
I keep seeing ads for Temu, and I also briefly downloaded the app as a favour to a friend who doesn't have privacy to get feminine clothes herself. I am increasingly convinced it's the most depressing business ever created, and a perfect distillation of everything that's wrong with modern capitalism.
Their tagline is "shop like a billionaire", which appears to mean "gratify every random whim, secure in the knowledge that you can afford it". The ads feature perky young women dancing down the street and buying clothes, wigs, even home furnishings for themselves and a selection of not terribly impressed passers-by. The emphasis is very much on the extremely low prices and consequently the volume of stuff she's able to buy.
My brief experience with the app confirms that it's all about volume. Clicking on any item is likely to get a pop up warning that there are only [single digit number] left at this price, with another price five times as high to emphasise the sense that you're getting a bargain. Leaving items in your cart for a couple of days ends up with one or more of them vanishing, sold out, although you can probably find something else that's confusingly similar. Everything about the app seems to be pushing you to buy straight away and save any inconvenient questions for later.
Inconvenient questions like how are these items so cheap? Are they exceptionally poor quality? Were they produced by gross exploitation of workers? Is it a "loss leader" operation designed to drive competitors out of business before increasing prices? A scam to harvest our data and make money that way? Some combination of all the above? And perhaps even more fundamentally: do I need or even want this item?
I can't help contrasting the Temu experience with what happens when I try to buy something specific online - something I've already decided I need or at least want. It seems that the clearer I am about what I'm looking for, the more frustrating the search becomes. Google's "eh, close enough" approach to search terms certainly doesn't help, but it seems like online marketplaces don't so much offer what I want as inform me I should want what they're offering.
Since Temu's advertising stresses the abundance of products on offer, it feels like the things you want ought to be on there somewhere, even if you have to wade through a sea of irrelevant offers to discover them. But another grim facet of Temu is that this abundance is mostly an illusion. They have a lot of products, but most of them are the same few items in an array of different colours and styles, or listed with slightly different keywords: endless variations on the same uninspired theme.
Putting it all together, it seems like you're supposed to abandon the idea of getting what you actually want, and substitute the dubious joy of getting lots of things you don't particularly want, as if sufficient quantity will somehow transmute into quality. I doubt real billionaires ever have to try this improbable alchemy, since they can simply commission exactly what they want, but that just shows that "like a billionaire" is as empty as the rest of Temu's smoke and mirrors.
So this is the Temu experience: buying a lot of cheap rubbish with minimal thought and pretending that's the same as buying the things you need and want. When the items don't make you happy, you can just dump them and go on to buy others, and so on until we're all drowning in garbage. I hardly need to point out that it's not sustainable, but it doesn't even seem very cheerful. Are there really people who get a sense of fulfilment from buying on the basis of quantity rather than quality? Or is this yet another way Temu is trying to fool us?