That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.
Surprisingly, I find I am more pleased with purchases I make outside of Amazon despite all of Amazon's perks. "Platforms" like Amazon and fake "brands" aside, online retailers that only sell "real brands" are still around; they never disappeared despite Amazon's meteoric rise. Many sell through Amazon but also sell outside Amazon, too. Some do not sell through Amazon.
Being born before the internet existed, I started ordering products delivered by mail in the catalog era. I am biased toward locating "real brands" that have built reputations for high quality. I miss these brands. I loved the transition from catalogs to websites, but it seems like in the last 10-15 years fake "brands" that can offer no promises whatsoever have been killing off the motivation for having real ones that guarantee high quality.
Americans can get a Shenzhen-only 5-day Visa on arrival (VOA) from Hong Kong through the Luohu entry at the LoWu station via the regular MTR. Don't take the HSR, they do not offer it there and you will be turned away. You Must go to the office at Louhu station, it is the only way. It's easy, just take the metro.
Anyways, at LoWu it takes about 45 minutes after doing the paper work. It was very easy. Visa approval for Americans this exact way is estimated to be north of 98%. Exchange your HKD at the government run forex up stairs in the mall after entering China, it's a 1.5% commission, best I've ever seen. Then pay in cash - your Western credit cards Will Not Work. It is a fairly easy day trip - about 45min from Kowloon by rail. The 5-day Visa is a Single Entry.
To go to the trading district take Luobao line (#1) to Huaqianglu (3 stops). It's a 10 minute train trip or a fairly uneventful hour walk if you're up to it. English at the trading district and the border mall is ok. Everywhere else, not so much.
Recommended. The place is absolutely bonkers.
They have this wildly intricate culture of price bargaining. If you're looking to actually buy stuff, you can get amazing deals. But I just went as a tourist.
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.
It's certainly a hard border, Shenzhen is as China as Tijuana is Mexico. So if you're in HK and have a day to travel around, give it a go, it's a fun adventure.
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/backnum.html
For example AMD Athlon. Official announcement June 23 1999, official shipping date August 17, 1999. A week after announcement reservations started at Akihabara https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/p_cpu.ht... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/price.ht...
>"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."
>"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."
A week before official AMD shipping date retail Athlons arrive in Japan https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813.html
>"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem....
https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at...
US 4 days later on August 17 Alienware was merely teasing pictures of Athlon system https://www.shacknews.com/article/1019/wheres-my-athlon According to Anand "OEMs will start advertising Athlon based systems starting August 16, 1999" https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24
You have to be careful, though. There are a shocking number of legit-looking brands with their own sites that are just drop-shipping the same stuff, at an enormous markup. My wife found a piece of clothing she liked for $60; a quick image search found it (with the exact same images) for $8 on Shein. Nice hustle, if you can make it work.
e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/owner-conservative-appa...
Chinese drop shippers aren't dumb enough to pull the scam from within the FTC's juridsiction.
Or to openly advertise it.
> And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.
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.
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.
Maybe just spoiled from the early days of Walmart and now Amazon.
Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It’s just more profitable for them not to
I needed to make a 3/4" hole in a 1/8" thick mild steel angle to repair a cart. Didn't have a drill bit that size and quickly realized that a hole saw would be a better choice. Off to Amazon. After some browsing, found the same 3/4" carbide-tipped holesaw from a million resellers. Found a package of two for $13. Following the logic of "even if they only last for one hole, it's still cheaper than buying a good drill bit that I'll never use again", I ordered it. Item arrived and it looked as cheaply made as the photo!
But what do I have to lose? For $13, it's worth a shot.
Chucked up the holesaw, dripped some cutting oil on the metal and went to work. Fricking thing went through the steel like it wasn't even there. I was fully expecting that the teeth would chip off and go flying about halfway through, or it wouldn't do crap and the metal would work-harden, making my job even harder or worst case, the entire flimsy-looking thing would shatter (I have excellent safety glasses BTW). No, about 1 minute later I had a nice clean 3/4" hole with perfect edges that didn't even need deburring.
That led to the first Amazon review that I ever wrote: I was that shocked at how well it performed. Turned on my (Amazon-bought) stick welder and finished the repair.
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.
Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
This is why I still buy from Amazon.
My research, and experience with Amazon, just left me avoiding it when I can. That's not always possible and there's plenty of good stuff to buy on Amazon as well, but 2 day delivery can mean a week here and returns aren't as simple as dropping it off a block from an office in the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=1688s
I'll just return the fuses to Amazon after my family burns up I guess.
Now expand that to people buying supplements, bolts holding things in place that can harm people, etc from Amazon.
Depends how much you buy. If you end up returning too much stuff, Amazon will ban you.
I'll gladly take the cheaper alternatives instead of being charged 2 or 3 times the amount I'd pay if I import it myself.
The above is similar to recent reviews I've seen.
It's infuriating that there is a reliance on user reporting to find and report COMPLETELY OBVIOUS fake reviews on Amazon. A great example of why competition is necessary, and not just from one other entity equally interested in allowing the others existing to avoid being a "monopoly"
Amazon took my review down.
Have they removed reviews you report? I've only ever heard of them removing legitimate negative reviews.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=firewire+to+usb+adapter
It's fascinating to me that every letter-soup brand is competing on a product that is literally fraud.
There are various YouTube videos showing a daisy chain of Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 1/2 adapters connected to various Firewire cables and adapters. I was hoping to avoid all of that but the camera doesn't show at all. Fortunately, nothing seems damaged on either side.
I've only got 6 tapes so I'm sending them off to a service and sending the adapter back to Amazon.
I think the only way to avoid disappointment is to avoid Amazon altogether. Their customer experience is extremely deceptive and engineered to make you spend the most money. From the featured searches all the way to how it charges you paid shipping instead of free at checkout.
We should all feel burned enough at this point and stop rewarding them. Bezos purchased the Washington Post for all this money, and he won't stop there.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
I bought a garden hose sprayer at Dollar General for $1, and it leaked immediately. $1 is so little now that it was basically free, but even for free it wouldn't have been worth it, and I'm not going to make a trip to get a $1 refund. At some point, "cheap" is so bad that it has negative value, as it only adds clutter and waste.
People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US. People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
I really have to wonder how important this Chinese junk is. They make so much junk for the US, that the EU, including Von der Lyon, had to make a plan to deal with Chinese companies wanting to, and I quote here, "dump" all their exports on to the EU market.
The EU is very protectionist over their countries' economic outputs and manufacturing. But if the US does that...
The "reciprocal" tariffs are based on not the tariff duties foreign countries imposed on US goods, but the trade deficit the US has with said foreign country. There's a lot of idiocy in the tariffs, but this was one of the loudest complaints people had with them.
> People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
Because the list of "countries" being charged made it clear that it wasn't being based on a list of countries as people understand them. Uninhabited islands and islands consisting only of US military bases being on the list were strong signs of the lack of competence in the planning for the tariffs.
And really, that's why people are complaining so hard: it is abundantly clear that tariffs are being rolled out in a botched manner by incompetent people for inane reasons, so whatever positive effect they might have is completely ruined and all of their negative effects are intensely amplified.
It does have its own customs zone, it doesn’t fall under Australia.
Some years, the World Bank has reported imports from the island: https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/USA/Yea...
It's a data error. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
Do you know if tariffs are assessed based on the country of origin in the bill of lading? The Guardian article doesn’t answer that question. I’d suspect so since that’s how everyone is counting imports and exports, but the Guardian article isn’t clear.
The postal/shipping/logistics service will almost certainly have gone "that's not right..." and quietly fixed it.
The EU has been advocating for a free-trade agreement, the TTIP, with the USA from 2013 on. It was buried in 2016 by the 45th president of the USA, who somehow thought it unfair. The EU has proposed a free-trade agreement only a few weeks ago. [2]
You may believe what you want, but at least in dealings with the USA the EU has always promoted free trade. Even Fox News acknowledges that ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...
[2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/european-union-ready-neg...
The EU, on the other hand, has made buying goods from the US, for consumers, horrifically expensive, including reducing the value of non-duty paid goods to essentially zero and leaving it up to EU member countries to decide if they then wanted to charge an additional "inspection fee" often more than the value of the goods themselves. Spoiler: those countries did.
So, your point isn't really relevant from a consumer point of view. The EU and its member states have tried every dirty trick in the book to make it as awful as possible to buy anything from the US.
The actual, lived experience is far different than whatever any bloc or country may claim (such as being in favor of free trade). The EU has always been economically protectionist, since its birth.
For those not in the know (and too lazy to look it up ;)), de minimis rules for customs duties set a threshold below which no import duties are applied. The de minimis threshold for the USA used to be 800 US$ (and for now continues to be for all but imports from China), the de minimis threshold of the EU is 150 EUR. In other words, if you import goods worth less than 800 US$ into the USA from the EU no duties are applied. If you import goods worth less than 150 EUR from the USA into the EU, no duties are applied.
There is also a tax de minimis, which is a threshold when you have to pay sales and possibly other taxes, e.g. luxury, alcohol and so on. Obviously those taxes differ from country to country in the USA and the EU, and, for example, importing bourbon whiskey into Denmark would be more expensive than into Germany because of the way alcohol is taxed. But the de minimis determines when those taxes even apply. The USA leverages those taxes from a threshold of 800 US$ (again, not any longer for imports from China), while most EU nations set this de minimis threshold to 0.
Merchants usually combine all these costs (duties, taxes, fees, insurances, shipping, etc.) into something called the "landed costs" [0]. Relevant taxes and fees are higher in EU nations than in the USA, which explains most of the differences, but you are quite right, the WTO considers the USA's landing costs fairer than those of most EU nations (Germany is especially bad.) I have no special insights but I guess this is because Intra-EU trading is devoid of duties, fees and taxes (it is a free trade zone after all).
If you want to poke around a little in the various trading nations of the globe, [1] has a nice database available.
So, I do not agree with your conclusion that the EU is a protective lock box, but could improve. Thank you for pointing this aspect out. It is easy to forget about nuance and how complicated and convoluted some of these things can be.
I ended up trading it for a Volkswagen Jetta. unrelated, but quirky.
Inspection fees, duties and taxes make it so functionally no Danish consumer bothers to purchase goods shipped from the US. For Americans to then come rushing to our aid when us poor Europeans are getting a dose of what we've been giving for decades is ironic, to say the least.
It wasn't that a flat 10% tariff implies that even non-populated islands have a 10% tariff.
Do you consider the tariffs to be a (tax) burden on US citizens?
Ultimately, lots of things manufactured domestically will still increase in price because of the raw materials they require.
Auto manufacturers have been doing this for decades when the US started imposing tariffs on Japanese manufacturers back in the 1970's. To get around the tariffs and still get access to the US markets, they would simply assemble the parts of the cars here and bypass the rules of the tariffs. Many companies then started doing the same.
This effectively changed the behavior of the companies to avoid the tariffs. The end result was more manufacturing and assembly plants here - even though most of the big production tasks of the vehicles were still done overseas.
Also, there's already been several announcements of companies moving their manufacturing to the US in order to avoid getting hit with tariffs:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-commits-500-billion-to...
Nvidia (NVDA) on Monday said it will produce up to $500 billion of AI infrastructure in the US within the next four years as the tech industry looks to bolster its domestic manufacturing footprint in the face of Trump's approach to trade policy and desire to onshore more US heavy industry.
Also, Ford made some moves to avoid both US and European tariffs:
Less than a week after the White House announced its comprehensive set of tariffs, the Dearborn automaker exclusively revealed to Ford Authority its comprehensive plan to relocate all of its assembly plants to Hawaii. The move will be made possible by state of the art 3D printing technology and has the support of the United Auto Workers.
In any event, Ford envisions Hawaii as an export hub for markets outside North America and a key pillar of the company’s domestic production capabilities. Ford will utilize an obscure maritime law from World War II as a way to get completely around European and Asian tariffs, as the original intent of the legislation enabled private companies to avoid punitive trade measures to get badly needed supplies to the Allies at the height of the conflict.
https://fordauthority.com/2025/04/ford-will-avoid-trump-tari...
> We’ll have more on this never, because this was our final April Fools’ article for 2025. We hope you enjoyed all of them!
https://fordauthority.com/2025/03/ford-taking-broad-steps-to...
In addition to scrutinizing its supply chain, Ford is also in the process of stocking up on parts that comply with the current U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and it’s also taking a second look at its operations in those countries, according to Automotive News. Ford is “strategically stockpiling components where it is cost-effective and parts that are not pending engineering changes,” supply chain chief Liz Door told suppliers in a recent memo.
This is what got me. They had this article talking about looking at its operations in those countries and then the April Fools article which essentially described them doing just that.
Although I already knew Ford does most of its manufacturing in the US, I should've known better.
Thanks for the heads up regardless.
For example, i stopped buying US wine, US orange juice and I keep an eye open for any US made thing I could remove from my environment.
I also think government spending on overcapacity so we can export food is a waste of money and bad for the economy and the environment. How many millions of acres of soy bean crops do we actually need?
If the market for exported soy suffers because of who people voted for, let's reduce the subsidies by n%, farmers will plant less won't be able to keep all their land and we can return that land to Native Americans. This is disruption we need (but won't get because murica).
This consumption tax is tax policy, not trade policy. That was evident when there was not even any discussion about excepting manufacturing inputs (neither this time nor the 45th administration).
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
It's always going to be cheaper to make things in places where labor costs and environmental responsibility expectations are low.
Yeah, offshoring was mostly about driving down costs by laundering labor and environmental law.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
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.
You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.
There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
Wages may have to go higher at the lower end, but consumption also needs to change. Most of the price of "food" is packaging, transport and marketing, not farmers' wages. Here in France people buy on average 50 items of clothing a year, 50! The amount of items has increased by 50% in the last 15 years.
I support a $20 minimum wage AND
I think tariffs can be justified, especially when we use free trade to ignore the external costs to the environment and the arbitrage of exploitative labor AND
I have a problem with implementing tariffs in such a shotgun, ill-considered, shoddy way lacking clear strategy or intent
A lot of these people too have been saying "buy local!" or "support black businesses!" for a while now. They're not the same people bemoaning the lost of hyper consumerist plastic junk.
However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.
Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected".
Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so much. And it makes working against Chinese trade far less effective and more-costly.
Claiming these aren't a tax on Americans? That's just a lie. Chaotically switching your message and actual policies day to day? That's not how you foster investment in factories that'll take years to be net-profitable. Working against the CHIPS act? What the literal fuck, that's exactly the kind of thing you [edit: the "you" here is the administration and their boosters, not necessarily "you", the poster] claim to want! That was a really good idea!
So, I agree with a tiny amount of the overall policy, while finding its implementation incompetent, and the other parts to work so strongly against the effects of the part-I-like that I find desirable, that I doubt my motivations for wanting to reduce trade with developing authoritarian states and the administration's are even the same.
Canada has been laundering Chinese aluminum and steel, Malaysia has been laundering Chinese ‘honey’, etc.
A good strategy would be not to impose tariffs all goods, just the more important ones, and you would do it WITH your allies. Threaten the same tariffs on allies as China if they do not get on board. You could even use the leverage to get China to increase domestic consumption so they aren't exporting so hard.
Trump's policies aren't going to achieve what he thinks they will.
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
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. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
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.
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.
This argument is absolutely accurate and somewhere between two and six decades late depending on who you feel like blaming for offshoring. Present day all we're doing is poking inflation with a stick, threatening the bond market (and eventually the dollar reserve), and encouraging economic partners to look elsewhere for stability. 3 guesses how all that ends.
But now we have a dumpster fire and tariffs will have an even worse reputation.
For countries, tariffs is not something that is just shrugged off as it impacts their economy, there will always be political countermeasures to strongly discourage that tariffs are applied that harms them. Retaliatory tariffs, impact on other negotiations and relationships, etc.
For companies, tariffs harm profits and fair competition on both supply chain and consumer side, depending on where the tariffs are located. The company would strategize for maximum profit margins, circumventing tariffs, remove countries from their supply chain, and focusing on more profitable markets.
It wouldn't be a boycott the same way it is now of course. It would be a slower process. But tariffs is a way to force the market and always have wide negative effects. One just hopes that certain long-term side-effects (like high import cost causing focus on driving down local supply cost) is worth the impact (local cost of living increase, drop in investments, drop in friendly reputation).
Right now, after all of the other tax cuts, our budget deficit is slightly larger than the US discretionary budget.
Which means that, even if DOGE cut everything, there's still no way to close the deficit without raising taxes.
Enter the tariffs.
But poverty has dropped and income has risen under the CCP? You can argue that the CCP doesn't actually care about "individuals moving out of poverty", and all they care about is staying in power, but this is the sort of accusation that could be levied against governments in the west as well.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
They would be helped by better job opportunities where they live, by more governmental protections for workers where they live etc.
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.
As a consumer one of the few immediate means of action we have is to at least refuse these products when we can... Then yeah, vote, donate, get involved for these kids to live decently.
I kind of understand why China invests in Africa the way it does vs how the west seems to just throw charity and morality at it. Development would solve the problem naturally (a richer society will stop sending their kids to the mines, or having their schools organize them to make fireworks, a sad state of affairs that happened less than two decades ago in China but now is unthinkable).
good:
- replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
questionable:
- limit nicotine products to 10ml, so now instead of buying one bottle (200ml for example) of nicotine you have to buy 20 bottles 10ml each - ???
In this case, the safety concerns outweigh the environmental concerns.
> - replace plastic straws/cups with paper based ones
This belongs at least in "questionable" if not just "bad"
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
Since 2021 foreign merchants can send the goods tax paid, they collect the VAT and send it to to EU country, so there's no fees at customs. It works perfectly fine, but many people don't realize it or don't trust this.
I guess the intent was to let local shops compete with AE, and they succeeded, because the prices are much more in line with the local market, I just miss all the cheap stuff :P
They're not deliberately plotting some anti-tariff surprise campaign. They're just doing business as usual.
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.
They do not care if you didn't want to pay the tariff. They don't want to deal with warehousing it, offloading it, or returning it to sender. They want to get it into your hands and deal with the logistics later.
> US customers who placed orders on shopping websites like the popular Chinese fast-fashion platform Shein have been particularly impacted, even if they made their purchases long before the tariffs were announced. They are now forced to either pay hefty fees—in some cases, more than the value of the items inside — or have their packages sent back.
> They show Love’s order was put on hold for several hours, during which she received the notice asking her to pay the import duties. DHL also noted the package would be returned in five days if she declined to do so.
https://www.wired.com/story/tariffs-china-prices-fees-shein-...
I can find a few anecdotes online about FedEx delivering first and then charging later. I can also find people saying they called FedEx and refused to pay, and FedEx waived the amount. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how FedEx can hold you responsible for payment when you didn't engage in business with them -- you didn't purchase anything from them and you didn't sign any contract with them. If they paid the tariff before delivering to you, then that's on them.
Literally the first thing I thought. You want to send me to collections? Fine. Now let the collection agency prove that I owe the debt.
Cops haven't seemed to figure out that way of reducing abuse. Maybe if we pay them what we pay pizza delivery workers they will figure out how not to swat people.
I think they also send everything from EU warehouses because that loophole was closed years ago.
No offense to guys talking about other topics on those occasions.
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.
Depending on country rules, it is sometimes possible for the sender to pay and then include the charges in their delivery fees.
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.
Let's say I have a nemesis, I could in theory spend 100$ in packages from China, and ship it to them. And they'll have to pay 245$ in tariffs ? (245% today).
The bill received is a "you must pay this if you want the package. If you do not, we will destroy the package". It's not a contractual obligation where you get sent to collections or take a credit hit if you don't pay.
In the situation you described, the end result is that your nemesis does nothing, pays nothing, and you are out $100.
...unlike our friends on the European continent.
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.
When tariffs were applied, UK got 10%, EU got 20%. There's currently a temporary reprieve on the EU.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/02/trump-tariff...
1. The EU has that reprieve. Given the EU can bite back, it's possible that reprieve becomes permanent.
2. Last time Trump slapped tariffs on UK + EU, Biden prioritised reversing tariffs on the EU first because they're a bigger trading partner than the UK.
As the above poster pointed out, that's to say nothing of the many downsides of not being in the EU.
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
Get ready for the chlorine chicken!
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
ref. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/trump-aga...
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...
So I can buy my carton of 120 iphones if I pay a $100 package fee, instead of $200,000 at the 120% rate?
Alternately: My Chinese excavator only costs $100 in tariffs?
Can someone give me pseudocode here?
There are plenty of things where Temu charges $2.00 and I would be fine paying a 120% tariff on that to bring it to $4.40, because Amazon is charging $8.99 and retailers are selling a seventy pack for $30.
But I would not be fine paying a $100 tariff to bring it to $102.
I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clear on how the rest of this works.
In EO 14256:
> Transportation carriers delivering shipments to the United States from the PRC or Hong Kong sent through the international postal network must collect and remit duties to CBP under the approach outlined in either subsection (c)(i) or subsection (c)(ii) of this section. Transportation carriers must apply the same duty collection methodology to all shipments; however, transportation carriers may change their collection methodology once a month or on such other periodic timeframe as CBP determines appropriate, upon providing 24-hour notice to CBP.
(c)(i) is Ad Valorem Duty and (c)(ii) is Specific Duty
Then there's [avalara.com](https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2025/02/how-to...) saying on 4/10 that it's 120% OR $100, but not clear if filer gets to choose.
The latest I can find is from today (4/15/25) from [metro.global](https://metro.global/news/new-tariffs-and-the-end-of-de-mini...) that says 120% AND $100 per package (rising to $200 June 1st).
Your question is so simply put it seems like there should be an easy answer but it seems like there's a lot of interpretations on what's going to happen. It's possible that all of these sources were true on the day they were posted but the rules are continuously changing.
I just did some digging and cannot find an answer. Everything just says "X% or $Y flat fee".
Maybe it's up to the discretion of the administration. How much did you donate to Trump's campaign?
disclaimer: I personally don't agree with that, so no need to argue against me. Just answering OP's question, because I feel that it is important to understand the other side.
I have a bunch of white oak from a tree I cut down and had milled into lumber.
I wanted to make a bunch of benches for friends/family, etc. I have the lumber so all I needed was the bench ends/legs.
I looked at the domestic options and it was going to cost. I couldn't find anyone that would sell a set of legs for under $300 a piece or wanted me to "contact them for pricing." and that's all BEFORE shipping.
Keep in mind that your local bigbox store sells an almost exact replica of the made in China bench legs with crap lumber for $99. It'd be cheaper for me to buy those, junk the lumber and use my own.
I then checked alibaba and walked through the process of getting RFQ. The competent sellers who knew what I wanted and what to do were easy to work with and quick to check the various shipping costs - the per unit price would be pretty low($20ish even with my low volume order) but shipping would be $50-$70 a per set of legs due to the weight of the cast iron. BUT, now, even with tariffs, that leg would go from $~90 to $180ish AND I'd still be well below what the domestic cost is.
If I go forward at all, I'll still probably go with the Alibaba folks. I don't see how USA manufacturers will suddenly start producing these sort of bulky intermediary consumer products anytime soon.
I suspect for many imported items there is no local manufacturing and there won't be one. Oh well we'll see soon how the voters react to that.
"Is it possible to step off the hedonic treadmill? The best approach involves silencing our desires, restraining the insatiable appetite of our dopamine neurons. This is what the Amish have done. They have learned to live without modern consumerism. They don't use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quite permanence to heady growth. The end result is a happiness boom. The Amish turn out to be as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. Furthermore, their rates of depression are more than ten fold lower than the rest of the American population. The Amish are content because they have learned to ignore their dopaminergic pleas for more." https://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/16/happiness-wealth-...
One wonders if this is simply due to under-diagnosis.
Telling the Amish they're depressed sounds like a wonderful business oppportunity! Think of all the follow up products and services!
They're trying to retain their audience because you know, cash. And making the far right fascists angry by calling them autocratic, authoritarians who will deport them, would cost money.
No need to make this politics. At this point it's basically capitlism against authoritarianism. "Left" doesn't exist as a viable political position right now.
Ha. You say that as though those things are incompatible. Some capital is putting up token resistance to the rise of authoritarianism, but it can't be a strong counterforce because that would risk retribution. Instead more and more capitalists bend the knee in hopes of favorable treatment. That's why I say the likes of CNN and NBC will switch to bootlicking before long.
But we're talking about the statement made and transitions.
It just doesn't get any funding from the millionaires who fund the DNC or the billionaires who fund the GOP. And money is how political organizations run. We have too much wealth inequality to effectively enfranchise most of the population; Capitalism ate democracy, film at 11.
https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam
They send all sorts of things but there was a big wave of seeds that got a lot of news coverage because of biosecurity fears.
That said the overwhelmingly majority are shocked but believe it's all just a negotiating tactic:
Though, I haven't seen any analysis on how common this is, so the effect might be negligible in terms of how much "the Chinese" are paying for these tariffs.
Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.
The tariffs are not paid for by the foreign producer and domestic consumer alone unless PED=0 or PES is extremely large.
The other end of the spectrum is stuff people cannot do without, in which case the seller has no incentive to lower their margins because their customers don’t have a choice. Then, tariffs are entirely paid by the buyer.
In reality, everything is in between and accurately estimating how much everyone will be paying is very difficult. What we can predict with certainty is that prices can only go up, and that some businesses will fold because they cannot absorb the loss.
Prices go down when demand goes down, right? Why's that, don't sellers need to make a certain margin?
It's hard reporting on the current administration, it's the classic Russian flood style messaging, where you just flood as much (mis)information as you can, and people just can't follow.
https://www.ft.com/content/876bc3ec-aadb-11e8-8253-48106866c...
But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
So when possible I always shop within the EU, or maybe the US.
Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
"Dont want to be stuck in the morass of EU red tape" is more like it. Not that US red tape is any better, mind you, but suffice to say that unless you have massive scale, registration schemes will make you ROI negative unless you are making >100k in sales per month from the country in question.
Some even require registration by region. For example GER vs UK vs FR and rest a while back, all needed separate registration. And the paperwork is usually in the home coun try official language. Ha joke is on you when you start getting tax authority messages. They arent saying bonjour!
Source: i did this for my company.
And by you I mean PostNord in the case of Denmark
I get stuff delivered from the UK to the EU very regularly and all competent sellers handle VAT and duties just fine without additional processing fees. Smaller companies don’t always bother, though, but most of the time I don’t have to pay customs because everything is declared properly.
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.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
I assume they made a similar change.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
There's no "Summer" or "Winter" season clothes. They just update them continually.
Few years ago there was a trend in online ads showing t-shirts and hoodies with "realistic" print ons of animals, optical illusions, mazes, etc. Realistic only on photos or rather renderings. Felt like some form of brainrot. It was all Chinese clone shops or outright scams. Luckily the trend is dead now.
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
How do you figure?
Not "anyone"; only the 4% of humanity that lives in the USA.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
You can just refuse to accept the item, and it'll be returned to the sender or destroyed.
Speak for yourself. I am in this world but I am not in USA and I won't be subject to your stupid tariffs. Good luck to you.
…meanwhile a couple of I²C light sensors, some brass book screws, a router bit or two? Free shipping because of the (whatever) deal or Ali Choice shipping, and just as fast too.
Of course with Shein and Temu this isn't about cheap electronics, parts, and tools any more, but wholesale environmental destruction by fast-fashion. It wouldn't get much worse if the Chinese fashion manufacturers just shipped their wares directly to the Atacama desert.
Enjoy this while it lasts Nachbar, no tariffs there for us just yet.
And then stuff from China appears at my doorstep almost for free?
I would love to buy more from European sellers, but unless you're a serious company with deals shipping is just too expensive.
Ridiculous! And they don't even discount you for bringing the package to their dropbox or to a store, it's the same price for home pickup. There's just no way to economically ship things as an individual.
It looks like they are hoping the market will improve by itself.
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/postal-se...
Looking at flights for people: you can get a return flight to China from the UK for less than £350, which means less than £175 one way.
Let's say that's about 100kg (person plus luggage) then this means that flying 100g from China to the UK costs less than 17.5p or 20c in euros.
I expect that cargo will be cheaper than passenger plane, so shipping small stuff from China to Europe can indeed be very cheap. It's about volume and efficiency.
Here in Australia I can order a $10 (AUD) item from aliexpress and get free shipping from China. But as a consumer or small busines, if I want to send anything bigger than a letter within Australia it's likely to cost me way more than $10 just for the postage.
It doesn't make sense and it must distort retail trade in China's favour. I'm honestly not surprised the US withdrew from that treaty, I think it needs reworking.
Because those low shipping prices are being subsidized by taxes and the rates other shippers pay which make their way back to him because he shares an economy with them.
Just because the specific source of the subsidy is complex and can't be accounted for by the consumer doesn't mean it's not paid.
You misunderstand my point a little - As a consumer, I want access to that pricing! Why does it cost me tens of dollars to post something across my own country? But it costs someone in China almost nothing to post much further, including the part in this country?
And the answer is that treaties mean that we're all paying for it in other ways. In fact my expensive parcel may be directly subsidising the cheap parcels from overseas. I'm not a fan of this idea.
> If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
My partner briefly tried to sell handmade items within Australia. The postage cost more or less killed the idea as it added 50% or more to the price of a small-ish item. Yes, a mass-produced item from China would likely cost about 10% as much and be shippable for nearly free, but the audience is different. AFAICT it's largely other people who make stuff, and some who just value handmade and want to support local. They don't want the thing from China and are a little less price sensitive, but still within limits.
For items that are directly equivalent, I would prefer to buy from an Australian company, not least because of the consumer protections. Market distortions that favour overseas sales over domestic seem like a bad plan all round.
AFAICT it means that postal costs are only paid in the originating country, and receiving countries are still obliged to deliver.
If I order a $2 item from aliexpress with free shipping, like some baseball caps I just found, nobody is paying the $10 postage fee it would cost just on shipping to send one within Australia, in China or anywhere else. Let alone the $25 it would cost to send the item the other way, back to China.
The treaty distorts the cost of delivery massively in favour of countries with low internal post costs, and ends up creating absurd situations like this.
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
A slightly greyer version: you open the box, add a ribbon to every item, repackage it, mark it "final assembly in France".
Unfortunately for you, your business probably gets outcompeted by the guy who has the same idea in Canada.
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
Also, I can tell you that the country of origin field has one of the lowest entry qualities of all fields. People just don't bother, and customs don't have the capacity. Also, depending on your warehousing, there is a good chance you simply don't know. If something in your item bucket came from either China, Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines, what are you gonna write?
It is only useful to people compulsively buying clothing regardless of the quality and who will never wear twice the same thing. Disposable stuff/waste.
One would only do that to their worst enemy.
OK I am exagerrating a bit and had a handful lf decent stuff from aliexpress/wish/temu. But you can typically only order for yourself as the quality testing is non existent. It is totally unsuitable for gifts. Mechanical pieces are often out of tolerance, clothing way uglier inperson than in photo, electronic stuff can last only days or years but you have no way to know for sure, finitions in general are very bad in general.
Am I taking crazy pills? Am I the only one who buys things a few times per year? This rampant consumerism is depressing.
You have to do your research for sure.
Honestly I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were still considered crap after WWII. Then their stuff massively improved and trounced US products. Japanese cars lasting 100's of thousands of miles while US junk at the time barely lasted that. This reminds me of that at a much bigger scale.
Really my day to day experience isn't this at all. I have good amounts of "chinese junk" tools that I use on a weekly/monthly basis that I paid probably 25% of a name brand tool and they are holding up just fine. I'm not using them daily so don't need to spend my life savings on them. I do a bit of research first so not getting the worst crap that some people run into.
Batteries are the big thing I've had excellent luck with. I can get Dewalt knockoff batteries at less than half the cost and twice the power and they last the same amount of time as my name brand.
Or buy direct from Temu/AliExpress and save money?
It's not a hard choice.
I like watches. While I still pay retail for most of my watches, the bands are like 2$ on AliExpress and 15$ on Amazon. Phone cases are much much cheaper.
Certain phones aren't released domestically at all, so now I'm looking at a 100$ fee to import them. If I want to work on a project requiring a PCB that's now impossibly expensive.
There are plenty of white label products that are made in China and marked up 400+% in the US and sold under name brands.
There are plenty of times a cheap tool is useful over an expensive one.
Reality doesn't fall under your simple black and white classification.
With regards to clothing, I'm kind of glad the market for cheap shit from sweatshops is getting a beating, as I'm tired of seeing fewer and fewer legitimately durable clothing items. We need more union shops like Carhartt's (which only makes a few things anymore) building nice durable clothing. God knows a good pure cotton duck jacket or pants are both better for the environment (no petroleum products for synthetic materials and longer life) and frankly a better investment when they last years or at least months under the hardest abuse.
So I can't get a refund, I can't get a replacement, I can't leave bad review.
This was very eye-opening to me. I immediately uninstalled their stupid app.
This means high volume low value sellers have little incentive to actually properly describe things or post correctly. A common issue I keep seeing is sellers using slower postage than paid for. You can immediately see from the tracking number, even if you wait 7+ days to submit feedback, you'll get a 'sorry' refund and the feedback is somehow 'addressed' without them going back in time and delivering it faster.
Online reviews are just a sham now, Goodhart's law etc as even if the reviews aren't fake, they're encouraged or incentivised from real customers. Look up any service provider on TrustPilot and it's the same: hundreds of 5-star reviews from people told to add a review just after signing up, a dozen 1-star reviews from bad customer service, and barely anything in between.
I wouldn't buy something where a warranty would be useful from them.
Ok, maybe very niche hobby products, but then I wouldn't expect a warranty.
For cycling there are now a group of trusted companies that many people purchase from - WinSpace, Magene, iGPSport, that stand behind their products.
I have a Magene p505 crank-based power meter - £250 delivered. It's as accurate as ones costing 4X as much, and has not shown any signs of issues in the year+ I've been using it.
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. For cycling, especially Carbon Fibre parts, this isn't surprising - the sheer depth and breadth of composites knowledge from years of making bikes for western brands has paid off handsomely.
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.
I recently needed some bearings for a project. I wanted them quickly, so AliExpress would take too long. I visited 5 local stores and none of them sold the bearings I needed. AliExpress had 200 sellers selling them in every possible type for a decent price.
Ended up buying AliExpress quality from Amazon for a higher price because they shipped faster.
Nothing can break but the metal can be alloyed with lead to make it easier to machine or coated in something toxic.
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.
You need to know the brands to buy (Trace Velo, Peak Torque and China Cycling helps here) and buy directly from their Ali Express store, or from their website.
Amazon is only if you need a cheap bike maintenance tool within a couple of days that you're happy only using a few times before you have to throw it out. Not for components.
Every site is different, no? Amazon isn't AliExpress. Though lately Amazon if flooded with marked-up AliExpress stuff. I'm not fond of Amazon, their customer service is more of a hit and miss since various years.
That said, I've been watching Trace Velo. He reviews a lot of AliExpress cycling things. It's often bad after prolonged use. Meaning, yeah, their testing is lacking. But some brand do seem to be trying to become a trusted brand. E.g. Ugreen nowadays is often trusted. It used to be one of the many things listed on AliExpress.
Their products can also be bought either directly or from other bike-specialized shops, they don't sell exclusively through Aliexpress.
It tends to work out cheaper with the various AliExpress deals you can stack together to buy from there though.
Do you follow Trace Velo on YouTube? Any others you recommend (aside from China Cycling)?
I also follow Peak Torque, who is very hot on engineering. Hambini is ok, but pretty brash and abrasive.
Some Chinese companies care about a long-term brand and place high standards on themselves but it's not true that anything online has passed safety standards. It's hard to differentiate the two due to the amount of fake reviews also.
I got my last esp-32 from Mouser iirc. In Europe. They finally sorted out EU fulfillment warehouses.
Spoiled americans :) I've always had to pay shipping from anywhere outside my country.
As long as you don't value safety.[1]
[1]: https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/skin-melted...
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).
I bought a bunch of parts for a racing drone from Aliexpress because I didn't expect a traditional retailer's warranty to really matter much. ("This frame has been in a crash. No warranty.") What's the point of paying extra in that scenario?
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 bought one to get sticker residue off my windshield, but it's proven useful many times since.
Mind, considering how well it removes glue, I wouldn't stick anything that was touched by it in my mouth... but may be okay for the hand end of your chopsticks.
Of course, after you use it, I would recommend to wash the cutlery.
Product Name: Goo and Adhesive Remover Spray Gel
Product Code: 2096, 2137C
Ingredients CAS No. Function
Petroleum distillates 64742-47-8 Solvent
Aliphatic ether alcohol Withheld Solvent
d-Limonene 5989-27-5 Solvent
Polymer Withheld Thickener
Orange sweet extract 8028-48-6 Solvent
Solvent orange 60 6925-69-5 Colorant
Solvent red 18 6483-64-3 Colorant
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.
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.
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.
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.
More than 50% of those are below 3 stars. They don't suppress any legitimate reviews.
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 get them for free, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690563
> 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.
Most of my reviews are for items with very little reviews due to the nature of Vine, so I can directly see the impact of my score on the average score.
Why did you do that? Did they pay you? Or did you get the stuff for free?
Note that if anything they are more stringent with the quality of the reviews we need to write, not less.
I find reviews on those sites still useful, and at least on Ali there are a fair number of negative ones as well. Users tell if a specific part works with Home Assistant or zigbee2mqt.
I suggest to sort by order number and not stars.
The result is people opening the box, going yep, it works, 5 stars, gimme those points.
If it breaks a week or so later? Too late! No way to give feedback.
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).
If you want compare, at least compare with facts.
I can't install the app because I travel between countries and they block my Google account from installing the local app. I'm sure there's ways around that but I'd rather just use the website.
You can do an additional remarks later, but I often don't bother. It's drowned out anyway.
What I often do is read the reviews. What's usually done is a critical review and still 5 stars. The fake reviews are pretty easily spotted. It shouldn't be this way, but in my experience it's still better than Amazon. With Amazon more effort is made to fake a review.
I quite like AE because you can avoid the app and returns on DOAs often just involve a refund without returning anything. There are silly annoyances, and sometimes buying locally is inexplicably cheaper, but for little electronics, they're hard to beat.
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).
Amen, and resilience. It's a combative UX, trying to force you into bundles instead of single purchases, Choice items rather than cheaper with regular p&p, not advertising that some things (eg bare lithium cells) will be shipped seemingly by sailors chucking corked glass bottles into the sea and hoping they get to you within three business years.
I've not had too much of a problem with outright scams. Some things have been smaller than expected (photo issues - description accurate) and if it's delicate (eg plywood robot models, larger foam planes) they will find a way to grind it into dust before delivery. Both those examples got a refund the next day.
But it's cheap when it works but the central company appears to be honest and helpful when you contact them.
I found Aliexpress to be great for retro gaming consoles, for anyone interested and willing to wait, you can get an "R36S" which can play all the old gameboy games and other retro games for ~$30.
Several years ago, I was frustrated with the insane costs of hockey sticks. I'd been going through sticks at about a 6-8 month clip since high school and having to buy $300 hockey sticks every six months was not something I was happy about.
I got on Alibaba, sent out several emails saying I was an equipment manager for a US based hockey team. The team was looking to get some stock sticks for backups since players were going through sticks like crazy.
I emailed two companies who did carbon fiber manufacturing. One company made one-piece composite sticks that were blank. You could tell them what length, flex, lie and blade pattern you wanted and then if you wanted 12K or 14K carbon fibre. I got two 12K blanks. They were impressively durable and lasted for well over a year. Almost twice as long as my expensive retail sticks. They were a little more whippy than I was used to, but it was easy getting used to it.
The other company was a bit shady. The first email I got back was someone asking me how many top of the line Bauer sticks I needed. I asked him how that was possible and he just said he had access and just give him the specs and they'll send them out. I ordered two of those to boot thinking it was a pretty big gamble. Turns out they were legit. My buddies who used the same retail model couldn't tell the difference. We went over the graphics and couldn't see any difference either. Ironically, I still have one of these Bauer 1X Lite sticks that I use when I get down to a single stick and I'm waiting for the newer ones to ship.
Interestingly enough, by the time I had gone through three of the sticks, suddenly there were several companies popping up offering "blank" sticks for a fraction of the cost of the retail sticks. Effectively doing the same thing I did, but now as legit hockey companies trying to save players some money. All told, I think I spent around $500 for the 4 sticks I bought. A fraction of what retail sticks would've cost. I haven't gone back and ordered more sticks, just because there's so many pro stock stuff out there and so many other companies selling these blanks now.
I've been really enjoying my recent Anbernic RG 406V and it can play pretty much all the systems I want it to so I guess I'll just stick to that if the handheld market collapses.
Well you have until May 2nd to order tarrif free fyi. Most people dont realuze this.
When was the last time you used it? It was definitely true a few years ago.
They are making each time more difficult to assert the product quality. I'm super careful, but still sometimes buy from seller SHOP123456789
I feel like AliExpress has improved in this area though, likely due to pressure from Temu.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of direct access to overseas markets, rather than local distributors slapping 200% margin on Chinese sourced/produced items that you can buy from AliExpress. But I'm not in favor of flooding the market with cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap that ends up in landfill in a few weeks or days.
So no, I don't feel sorry for Temu.
The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name 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.
I also have quite a bit of disdain for people using these sites. Nobody needs this and it is just harmful all around.
There are many items sold on Aliexpress that are of decent quality.
I think the point is to buy what you really need, and focus on quality, rather than impulse buying cheap stuff that ends up in the garbage after a month.
Our consumerism is hooked onto cheap crap, the factories producing it are only fulfilling the demand.
The experience left me feeling very, very dirty.
The items in question were some small fire sticks for camping, a couple of solar portable power banks, and two small canvas backpacks. Each arrived in separate packages on different days, all shipped from what appeared to be the same CA facility, so right off the bat, we're two strikes against environmental friendliness.
The items were, as you'd expect, utter trash.
- Fire Sicks: these are those magnesium bars shaped like a little key that you strike with a piece of metal to create a spark, this allowing you to maybe start a fire. Now, I've been starting camp fires without flame for most of my life (probably the only thing I took away from my time in the Boy Scouts), so I've seen plenty of junk products that claim to do the same, but these take the cake. The actual "magnesium" bar was coated in a thick black paint for some reason? And the striking tool is a flimsy piece of aluminum coated in orange paint. Useless. I had to use a bit of sandpaper to remove the paint, giving access to the metal parts of both tools, and even then, the spark created was barely hot enough to catch a pile of dead leaves on fire. I don't know what they actually used to make these, but don't assume they will save your butt in a survival situation
- "Solar" Battery Bank: these are just regular USB power banks with a an extremely inefficient photovoltaic panel glued on. It is only capable of powering the green "charging" LED but definitely does not recharge the power bank itself. After I discharged them to see how long it would take to recharge with the solar panel, they sat in direct sunlight for 3 full days before I gave up with no additional power stored. However, they're not a total loss. They still work as you'd expect a regular USB power bank would, rechargeable with a typical micro-USB cord with two outputs to charge your devices. Didn't notice any weird voltages when charging my stuff, either. At the very least, they will not end up in a landfill because I can make use of them on camping trips.
- Canvas Backpack: the stitching is a joke, so don't expect to put anything heavy in these. My wife sews as a hobby, ended up deconstructing them and reinforcing them with some proper canvas material that made them way more rugged and able to hold gear (I use one for fishing magnet crap and the other for rock-hounding tools) but we could not help but wonder just how little the workers were paid to paid these garbage bags and what those conditions are like.
Their business model is built entirely on selling you garbage you do not need that will likely just be thrown away after a few (if any) uses unless you are more diy, willing to try to find ways to make things work or repurpose them. The entire shopping experience is gamified with spinning wheels and lightning deals, coupons falling from the sky, etc, to the point where it was ridiculous and intrusively preventing from searching for things I wanted to order. It felt like their target audience was the old ladies I see spending 8 hours a day glue to the chair of a slot machine in the local casinos. It was so absurd I felt like was in a cartoon about consumerism and actually experienced guilt for having conducted the experiment.
Even the batteries in expensive devices can become dangerous and I would assume that those undergo some higher leven of QA, testing and safety standards.
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.
I bought an Anker Battery bank, which got recalled for some safety issue. There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that some random Chinese seller would not have bothered with any of that. Likely such a safety issue would have never come to light.
Battery production is in China anyways. Do you believe that all Chinese companies adhere to the same standards and that companies who are trying to get some kind of brand reputation in the west would still choose the complete bottom end of battery production?
It was also irrelevant to my point, which was exclusively about the dangers of very low quality batteries.
Lots of words for "I ordered something on Temu once, got scammed, now the whole industry should burn down"
Temu is a trash distributor, the race to the bottom needs to be stopped. Their entire business model is being cheap and shipping trash.
[citation needed]
I spent a few thousand on items on AliExpress, and I'm satisfied with almost all of them. How come?
To be honest "consumer" is really one of the worst things to call someone, but I think it applies very well to someone like you.
Also, things that are very bad for the environment should be banned. Not by me, but by the government.
I don't get the desire to pollute some other country just so one can have a hobby, go volunteer at a shelter or something useful.
Externalizing our negativity got the US pretty far, and if walking that back sucks for most people because they're used to buying literal land fill, then that's too bad.
Your environmental footprint depends on your income and your country.
Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
The only exception is something where the only purpose is to be environmentally good (maybe planting some trees, maybe something that reduces energy usage).
Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
No, it depends on what you do with that income.
>Everything bought is environmentally unfriendly in proportion to the cost.
Plainly false. E.g. more expensive things made of natural materials and lasting for a long time create much less landfill than products which are cheap but last only a short time.
I own expensive shelfs which my parent bought for me as a child decades ago. They are literally "as good as new", much of the IKEA furniture I had to replace. Clearly the IKEA furniture had a bigger impact, although it was "cheaper".
>Complaining about specific things being bad is almost pointless.
All complaining I do is pointless. Obviously no institution who could force change is making decisions based on my HN posts.
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).
Disrupting US trade quickly with massive global tariffs will cause all sorts of secondary effects like a massive downturn in ad spending - directly affecting companies like Meta and Google who look insulated right now because they don't sell physical products.
Not a great time to be dependent on ad revenue.
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.
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...
However... there are a lot of money losing campaigns out there. A lot of that relates to economic buoyancy. Startups showing growth for the next round. But also established companies getting into new sectors, defending market share, etc.
We are still, I think, in a "greed mode" economy. Fear hasn't really shown it's face yet. If that switch flips... I suspect meta/alphabet will be impacted this time.
It's really hard to tell though.
What will be more interesting though is if that money comes back to Meta or Google, or if people will find new, better opportunities while they pull back (eg. what happened to TV in 08).
Meta are concerned about this and already trying to book in bulk sales for next year with agencies which is something they've never done before https://digiday.com/media-buying/meta-moves-into-controversi...
I think your point about dominance is a main player. I can make a dozen cases for LLMs as world of opportunity and compliments for both of these companies.
It takes a lot of opportunity/gain to hedge against the risk of losing 20% of search or social media revenue.
If you already have the whole market, losing share is easier than gaining.
But to a dominant incumbent..."threat" just tends to come with bigger multiplier.
If they stick with the tariffs we’ll see I guess though it seems likely Trump will have to back down.
I can't believe how many people are trying to put a positive spin on the government imposing massive taxation on people's right to buy things from other countries.
It's easy to sneer at junk fashion from Temu or whatever, but access to cheap tools and parts was the lifeblood of hobbyists and experimenters across the country.
It's not just cheap clothes from Temu. This administration just took away your right to buy anything cheaply internationally. That's not a good thing.
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.
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.
Probably doesn't mean anything.
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.
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.
On the other hand, if you're thinking all opposition to the tariffs need to agree then you're deluding yourself (not trying to be antagonistic here, but it's dangerous to be blind to alternatives.)
For instance, a smaller tariff on completed Luxury goods and a removal of the Temu exception could've easily been the play and potentially could've been done without much fanfare (by someone who wasn't Trump obviously)
If we wished upon a star that humans were better a lot of problems would go away. In the real world, poor people will make do and those with resources will buy smuggled goods. I’m already diverting a spring skiing trip to Canada because it’s cheaper to buy kit there than here.
People will just do less, become more poor and have less opportunities or work around the system by smuggling things from Canada or something.
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.
There is absolutely no way people with money just choose to pay more for goods, it just doesn't happen. People with money are shrewd.
People choose to buy cheaper because they can get more with their money. It's really as simple as that.
I personally buy Patagonia clothing for all sorts of reasons, but I could still get a somewhat comparable jacket for 1/5th or less of their stuff. Most people just buy a down jacket from uniqlo even though they could afford to buy from Patagonia.
Are there any friendly nations left?
But honestly I doubt China would just enable Russia develop and produce own CPUs. When it's comes to chinese everything they never localized production in Russia: heavy machinery, cars, electronics, etc. They are main benefactors of Russia not having own anything.
From Trump POV: Ruzzia
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.
I think you'd be surprised at the quality
Could be some raw materials, the machines that make it, or the packaging. Now everything is going to be massively more expensive and it's going to have impacts even on domestically manufactured goods.
There's also the substitution effect, where heavy tariffs on one thing will increase demand on substitutes and therefore raise their prices.
It's really bad policy all around. Nobody who has any familiarity with manufacturing thinks it's going to encourage more domestic manufacturing because the tariffs suddenly restricted your ability to buy inputs and machines at reasonable prices. You're better off building a factory in another country to service global demand.
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 to buy some nicer jeans or T-shirts. The choices are stuff made as cheaply as possible, brand name stuff made as cheaply as possible but marked up like it isn’t, and actual quality clothes at 15x the price of the cheapest stuff. Most of the US clothing manufacturers have pivoted to the high-end just to survive or moved production overseas and are coasting along on their brand reputation.
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.
Several (EU, Japan and more) have said they won't agree to this.
Bipolar bully on top just generates random chaos, the best course is to cut oneself off as much as possible as quickly as possible, which is clearly happening behind the curtains
[0]: https://baptistworldaid.org.au/resources/ethical-fashion-rep...
Are they implying that app store ranking was quid pro quo for ads buys?
> The company’s inability to maintain app performance without advertising for even a single day demonstrates the fragility of its market position.
One of the strange patterns with Google is that quid pro quo is hard to even filter out as in some cases it is actually a natural part of the system. Probably a bad thing.
These 'dollar stores' are wealth extraction centres, which don't really provide anything to society other than enriching a dropshipping middle class and foreign exploitative factory owner class. There's very little value being created.
I'd far rather support places where purchases have numerous positive externalities, whether it be from labour conditions to promoting curiosity, or from environmental impacts, to building local communities.
Society was doing quite ok until the greedy middleman classes decided to render the domestic working classes irrelevant for a little short-term profit, just so we can buy new LED lights, or change our t-shirt collection every week.
I'd love to see them go.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/19/business/dollar-general-oppos...
Dollar stores sell cheap crap and destroy communities.
So no, I don't feel quite the same about them.
They do cross domain requests to keep those trackers around.
adblocking extension hates cross-domain tracking.
They may not be toast, but I suspect there are many panicked planning meetings happening now. (Unless they were clever and had a plan ready for a while)
Since a year or two ago (or even earlier), they started accepting (and encouraging) sellers to handle the shipping themselves (while still maintaining a fast shipping time) by giving those sellers more traffic.
In order to have fast shipping time, it basically mean the sellers need to have warehouses (or 3rd party warehouses) in the USA. It's easier for the sellers to workaround the tariffs when they are shipping in bulk to the USA.
The prices will be higher for sure, but it will be a lot lower than people are expecting.
Not sure how well the plan will work. Just what I heard from people working in the industry.
So maybe TEMU US can return in that form if the trade conflict settles.
The tax is the same either way, since they collect VAT for packages sent from China. The advantage is the faster delivery time.
anyway..
I _think_ Monoprice will pay the couple of hundred dollars "per package" fees for the pallet or container full of cables they bring in, amortising that cost over thousands of items. They'll still get charged the 145% tariff though, but they'll probably cost something like 3x rather than 10x. (Until they work out that they no longer compete with individuals buying from AliExpress/Temu/Shein, or probably even with side hustle Fulfilment by Amazon micro-importers).
It was a fun few years deep-diving into the various amplifier topologies, buying NOS vacuum tubes on eBay, looking through electronics flea markets for parts. I made several amps, tried different tubes, topologies.... Eventually I settled on a small stereo amp and designed a PCB for it, created a small kit even.
Using a drill press in the garage, a table saw to cut aluminum sheet stock down, even learning to powder-coat parts in a toaster-oven I picked up from Walmart, I made increasingly nicer looking amps. With two large output transformers and an even large power transformer they were fairly heavy beasts.
Nonetheless, though I built them a decade or more ago, every one of the amplifiers I built are still in use today. The music I am listening to at this moment is coming from one. Another is down in my "lab". I have given several away to friends, co-workers in the past.
I guess the reason for the tangent was to say that I did indeed find that when you have (or make) a thing of real quality it can last … perhaps a life time?
And thinking again a little nostalgically, I like that too about electronics just up to the post-modern era: a new electronics purchase might have cost you a paycheck or two, but you got I think more mileage out of that device.
EDIT: come to think of it, the heavy iron transformers are from the U.S., the tubes NOS from U.S. WWII bombers. I didn't built them of course with tariffs in mind, but surprisingly they are not so cost-dependent on overseas suppliers.
And here's a photo of the finished amp (from when I once considered selling the kits): https://imgur.com/PBKOQMk
The sale discount is the entire amount I was able to buy my non American jeans for. :/
I guess I can make due with one pair for the week...or wash them each day(oh wait thats gotten more expensive as well).
Maybe local production will get cheaper once more people start keeping their money in local communities. Sending it to China is just awful for your country/region and kills local businesses.
Disclaimer: from Europe so I don't care about USA at all. It's still having the same effect here
Is the thinking here that increased scale would allow production to get cheaper? How would this account for the fact that production was scaled here, but was not cost-competitive when it was operating at scale? What's different now?
Of course that assumes your own costs (like raw materials) do not increase at least on the same scale and that you can rely on the situation being long-term thing (i.e. will last years rather than weeks) as costs include your CapEx on things like new machines.
So here we are assuming that we could get a 50% reduction in cost by scaling to 1m units of a thing. The problem with this logic is that many product categories currently made overseas were produced domestically at scale until relatively recently.
This assumption also appears to imply that the goods in question either have a very low labor input or are produced using automation that is not available to Chinese manufacturers.
Reframing my initial question, what advantages would a US manufacturer have today that they didn't have in e.g. 1990 that would allow them to manufacture for only 66% more than the same manufacturing in China?
I've had a lot of people say this to me. I've known their policy on washing jeans without them ever having to tell me, though.
People become noseblind to their own stench. Unfortunately, it's not easy to ignore the stench of someone else wearing pants with a month of sweat and fecal bacteria soaked into them. I know lots of people also only wash their coats once a year, and trust me, being more resistant to stinking isn't the same as being completely immune to stinking.
Wash your clothes. The idea of not washing them is a meme and it's incredible how many people have fallen for it lately.
The business-to-consumer businesses, which take the largest markup, employ the most people and pay the highest wages in the supply chain, have thrived under this system.
It's not the customers that demand products be made in China, it's these "local" businesses.
Amazon and other US selling platforms are also in trouble, given how much of their income is from drop shippers.
The temu/shein loophole should been closed ages ago.
AliExpress is indispensable for small technical items. If they're available locally at all, shipping included they'd often cost 10-20x as much.
Took a minute in the app to generate a qr code, then I had it to the post shop the same day and they refunded within 3 days.
I wouldn't (personally) buy clothes to wear normally from them, but something like beach shoes or a poncho for a festival I'd maybe get there.
You want a 'My tariffs did that' T-shirt? Temu.
https://www.temu.com/search_result.html?search_key=tariffs%2...
Local store chains can't match that velocity.
Or the US should figure out how to get domestic shipping rates to be as cheap as the rates that Chinese shippers pay to ship to the US.
https://www.ecomcrew.com/why-china-post-and-usps-are-killing...
China can either remain a developing country subject to rules imposed by developed countries. Or it can join the developed countries and shape those rules. It can't do both.