Monday, May 05, 2025

Temu has totally lost it!

Thanks to Trump's tariffs on China, which officially took effect on May 2, the China-based Temu (place to buy really cheap things in bulk) has completely bottomed out! Luckily, I was aware of upcoming tariffs and ordered all the stuff I needed to stock up on about 3 weeks earlier, before the tariffs kicked in. Because after May 2: The Temu online shelves are now barren! And everything remaining seems to have more-than-quadrupled in price AND converted into a pseudo-"Local" label, with shipping charges. (Previously, if you ordered $30 or more from ANY shop in Temu, you'd get free shipping for all. Now, though, you must order $30 from only ONE particular shop.)

In short: I'm stocked up for the next 6 months or so, and won't be ordering anything else from Temu at their ridiculous prices for gew-gaws/trinkets/tchotchkes. (Amazon prices for similar remain fairly stable. They were always slightly more expensive than Temu, so I ordered from Temu. But now that Temu has apparently collapsed, I can find the same things on Amazon and still make a profit when I re-sell them.)

Example of Temu's new ridiculousness:
Say you once paid $2.00 for 100 zinc alloy charms. According to the 145% reciprocal tariff that China placed in response to Trump's quite reasonable, equalizing tariff (based on what China has been over-charging everything from the US for the past 3 decades), you should now be paying $4.50 for the same 100 charms. Still reasonable; I'd still pay that, because I could re-sell them and still make a profit. But NO: Temu is now charging $8 for the same set of cheap charms. So, NO.  I'm sure there are many more like me who are not going to be paying Temu's current prices. I'll be OK. I don't think that Temu will be.

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