While many Americans were wondering what is TEMU while watching Superbowl yesterday, I debated what I should tell my American friends who texted me about it, whether they should try it or not, and what it is good for.
First, TEMU is similar to Shein in its operation model, shein is a Chinese fast fashion e-commerce that has caught on globally in the past few years for its incredibly cheap fashion products. Still, it is way more and targets a much broader consumer group. Temu is like another amazon with direct line from and bulk deals with Chinese warehouses and factories; it carries toys, home devices, kitchen wares, clothing, shoes, gadgets, etc.
Like many things from China, it is complicated, multifaceted, and it depends on which beneficiary groups you are talking about. It gives consumers cheap deals, instant gratifications, and a game experience in shopping, like what it touts in the super bowl ad ”feel like a billionaire,” and perhaps helps to bring down the inflation in the US in one way or another, It helps struggling small businesses in China to recover from extended COVID lockdown. Chinese manufacturers are desperate to start exporting and making money again. With all the high-flying innovations touted by the governments, in reality, the Chinese economy is still very much dependent on exporting cheap goods. So I bet it is warmly welcome in China and is probably admired as a role model of e”-commerce crossing the ocean” (电商出海).
But I want to tell you — even if you want to try it you should delete it after trying once. Or you should only keep the app if you have strong willpower and clear intention in what to use it for.
And I will warn you that the technology and operation efficiency of will surprise you BUT you should weigh the gratification in shopping against your overall value system and your intentions each time you open the app.
Otherwise, it’s easy to fall victim to the powerful algorithm and gamification the way you surrender to Tiktok or a casino.
In the end, you’ll realize most of the things will end up in your trashcan shortly after you purchased them, some broken before they should, some untouched but you just run out of space for them, and some went out of style right after the season, you toss them quickly as 1) they look crappy, 2) you acquire them at such low costs that it doesn’t feel painful to discard them.
Then, depending on your level of consciousness:
First, you start to feel bad for the mess at home and the cost to your mental health, that you have to watch the Mari Kondo series on Netflix again to rally to tidy things up again in your home. The clutter is costing your mental space and clarity and the time to de-clutter.
Then, you feel bad for your savings account as, ultimately, junk is not free, and it can add up to an astonishing amount of unnecessary spending.
Then- you feel bad for the earth, which has to take years to absorb these junks, while you advocate for sustainability at work and home when you educate your kids. You feel that you are applying a double standard and that feels awful.
I say these from my own experience with TEMU the past 3 months since Temu’s winter holiday campaign started as a bargain-hunting mother of two who is trying to provide the most to my family and my kids with limited resources when inflation skyrockets.
I also say this as someone who has lived in China for the formative years of her life and witnessed the society go from extreme scarcity to abundance of “stuff”. I’ve always wondered how Chinese e-commerce companies have grown so powerful. Urban density in the megacities of China helped. And then I came to realize bargain hunting and indulgence in the choices of goods are deep in my generation’s subconscious. It’s like a response mechanism built into our system. But it is not healthy, as the intention comes from insecurity. And I can tell you that i am not sure people are overall happier today than 40 years ago now that they have abundant stuff.
Colin Huang, the founder of the e-commerce giant Pingduoduo, which is the parent company of TEMU clearly gets it before most people do. I suppose he has a similar lived experience and upbringing as I do as he went to the same boarding school I went to in Hangzhou, China. And he went to the university where my dad taught and where I spent most of my childhood goofing around in.
He is probably one of the smartest tech entrepreneurs that is a product of the best education and training in China and the US for the past 4 decades (he was a Google engineer before starting his own game and e-commerce companies).
When Pingduoduo just came out with its debut IPO on Nasdaq 5 years ago, I was fascinated by its model and the good it does in closing the information gap and enabling small businesses and smallholder farms in China and enabled Chinese consumers at the same time so impressed that I wrote a blog about it in 2018. I framed it as a “good China story”. I am not sure I will say it again without contextualizing it more.
Five years later, I have experienced Temu or PDD’s e-commerce model firsthand as a consumer, not just as a China analyst, and I have changed, thanks to all the meditations I sat for and retreats I’ve been through. I have awakened that the root cause of climate change, the environmental crisis, is overconsumption, which can be traced back to the deep fear and insecurities inside us. Most of us use autopilot mode to acquire more from the outside world. It might be deeply embedded in our psyche since our hunter-gatherer ancestors; we want more for less.
But in reality,
1) we do not need more. We already have enough;
2) there is no such thing as “more for less”, someone, somewhere is bearing that invisible cost that you thought you saved.
And I hope more Chinese entrepreneurs — as they go on their world-conquering journeys — will hear this.
