Temu is an online shop, operated by the Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings and headquartered in Ireland.
It features prices so implausibly low, and adverts so accurately targeted, that you can’t help wondering if witchcraft is involved. ‘Shop Like a Billionaire’ is the tagline.
To the best of my knowledge, billionaires do not tend to order knock- off Crocs of mysterious provenance after being lured with a free £80 voucher on Instagram.
And yet it’s hard to argue with those prices. There’s a heptagonal purple box for storing your weekly pills for 28p. A stainless-steel tongue-scraper for 58p.
An erotic fishnet, open-crotch bodystocking? 99p. The reviews of the bodystocking are great too: ‘Perfect, sexy, partner loved this,’ writes Scott Grant, UK. Because nothing says ‘I value and respect you’ like ‘It was only 99p’!
How does Temu offer such a priceless consumer experience? According to Temu, it works directly with ‘tens of thousands’ of manufacturers, enabling it to offer goods to consumers at wholesale prices. Products are shipped directly from the factories, thereby bypassing costly import tariffs. So we can amend that to Chinese wholesale prices.
All of this ought to raise serious concerns about the working conditions of the people making this crap.
Labour MP Alice Kearns believes that Temu is exploiting slave labour. ‘When you look into where Temu gets its goods from and where in China it is producing them, you can see that these are areas where we know that there is the use of forced Uyghur slave labour,’ she told the BBC last year. Temu has stated that it ‘compl[ies] with all regulatory standards and compliance requirements’.
My favourite theory is that Temu is revenge for the mid-19th-century Opium Wars. Under the terms of defeat, China was forced to cede control of its ports to the British, who promptly flooded the country with opiates, creating millions of drug addicts to exploit. The Chinese have never forgotten this national humiliation.
But have you ever noticed how we in the West are now helplessly, hopelessly, humiliatingly addicted to cheap consumer goods flooding in from Chinese factories?
You think you’re immune. But then you see a blanket that looks like a tortilla wrap which would make a hilarious gift for a grandchild. It’s only £6.31 and the shipping is free.
