Shop like a billionaire? I'll get right on that, Temu.

Until I blocked them, for a while there I'd been seeing ads for what looked like really crappy junk (junk that I neither want nor need) intruding on my Twitter timeline. 

Then there was the Super Bowl ad, urging us to "shop like a billionaire." 

"Shop like a billionaire." What does this even mean. Not that I know many billionaires - make that any billionaires - but I suspect that billionaires aren't buying $7 flowered pants, a shaman drum fof $16.91, or a "Punch Free Wall Mount Phone Plug Holder Mobile Phone Charging Stand Air Conditioner TV Remote Control Storage Box" for the impossibly lower-than-low price of $0.22. 

Maybe the point is that billionaires got to be billionaires by making prudent purchases like that 22-cent phone holder. I mean, why spend $12.99 on Amazon when you can get the same item for 22 cents on Temu.

Of course, it's not really the same same item. Just the same sort of thing, only a junkier version of it.

So maybe the pitch is that billionaires can buy anything they want, and so can Temu shoppers because, like Amazon, if you can think of it, you can probably find it on Temu. That is, unless you're lookng for something like a book by an author you've actually heard of, or a CD (remember them?) by an artist you actually want to listen to. Or a reputable brand that you'd actually want in your house. You can find Oreo earrings for $.59, but, alas, no Oreos.

Temu is a Chinese ecommerce site - based, oddly enough, somewhat-somehow in Boston  (there's also a Dublin connection) -  with a Dollar Store-ish model of offering cheap, impossibly low prices that come at the expense of quality. And, more than likely, ethical production.

Temu, it seems, is out to: 

...dominate the fast-fashion and fast-everything online retail industry and, in the process, see how much American consumers are willing to tolerate in the name of purchasing insanely cheap stuff.

And there are plenty of things about Temu that consumers have to overlook: the cluttered website, the sketchy pop-up ads, the questionable quality of goods, the opaque Chinese ownership structure, and murky business practices that have attracted federal scrutiny, including lax efforts to protect consumer data from hackers. (Source: Boston Globe)

The company gets to offer those bottom floor pricing by eliminating the distributor middlemen. Their supply chain goes directly from Temu to the manufacturer. 

As noted, consumers have a number of reservations about Temu. One is that, given the murkiness about the organization, people are concerned about security. Then there's the murky origins of where the items are made. Sure, most are made in China, but by what company? There are imposters and fake goods on Amazon, and at least Temu isn't doing much by way of make-pretend with brand names. (You come up empty if you search for Le Creuset on temu.com, but you can get a knockoff Dutch oven for about one-tenth of the price of the well-worth-it real deal .) And the companies that are producing the goods sold on Temu are a bit suspect. 

The qualilty also tends largely towards the you-get-what-you-pay-for fall-apart level that characterizes fast fashion and fast everything else. 

A couple of years, I ordered some low end sneakers on Amazon. They were a cute flower pattern and only cost about $30. I knew they weren't going to be rugged enough to work on a walk of any length, but I thought they'd be a fun summer thing to wear. 

I think I wore them once. The sneakers were plenty flimsy, and the support was just non-existent. I decided to stick with my more expensive sneakers. They may not come in cute flower patterns, but they're built to last.

The cute flowered sneakers went into the donation box, but mostly I'm embarrassed that I bought them to begin with. Maybe they weren't the crappiest of the crappy, the worst of the worst, but those cute flowered sneakers were likely produced by child or near-slave labor, under terrible working conditions. And, let's face it, even though someone got some short-term use out of the janky sneakers I donated, those cut flowered sneakers probably ended up unrecycled (maybe even unrecyclable) in landfill somewhere. 

Not every item purchased on Temu is fall-apart lousy. I've seen articles that say that the quality, while not top-of-the-line, isn't terrible terrible on everything they've purchased on Temu.

I'm sure that's the case, but everything I looked at on the site looked pretty cheesy. 

But people like stuff, and they like cheap stuff, so I wouldn't be surprised if Temu takes off and Americans can keep doing what, sadly, we do best: consuming a lot of useless, janky crap we don't need. Like those cute flowered sneakers I bought a few years ago.

Sigh...