I should mention that many of the factories selling on Temu have profiles you can view that show their factory address. You can search this on maps to see if it’s legit, and if it’s coming from a region with known rights abuses. E.g. If it’s near Beijing or Shanghai it’s probably free of outright slavery.
I’ve thought about this a lot, perhaps too much.
Slavery and wage slavery is happening across the globe, but companies with thin margins don’t resort to it any more than companies with huge margins (e.g. Nike). If anything, monopolistic corporations have much more power to use and enforce slave labor than the small and medium-sized factories selling at razor thin margins on Temu.
IIUC, the Chinese government needs US dollars so they can pay for things like chips, so they offer very favorable exchange rates to companies that export. Companies can offer cheap prices as a result, and still afford to pay their workers a living wage.
Things sold in the US are way overpriced. Temu is actually pretty normally priced if you consider the average cost of living in the countries it ships to.
Most online and physical stores mark up items 10-50% from factory price. So buying from the factory directly will net you a 10-50% discount.
If you buy it from somewhere else, it’s still coming from the same factory in China.
Finally, many of the items on Temu are factory rejects that would have gone to the landfill otherwise.
I have many complicated feelings about Temu, but economically their prices make sense.
You don’t have to donate to use donationware. Donationware donations are optional.
Donationware is a well-defined term that’s been around for decades. I don’t know why everyone ITT is hallucinating that it means something different.
Nope, that’s not what donationware means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donationware
+1 seriously I cannot recommend private browsers enough. https://www.zdnet.com/article/best-browser-for-privacy/
Fun fact time: Google sees every single thing you type into Chrome’s URL bar. They anonymize it, and any query or URL with less than 5 uses is filtered out. That dataset is then used across Google, from ads to spam detection to search rankings. Chrome’s URL logs help Google maintain their monopoly on search and ads, and most people are not aware that Google is collecting that data.
Isn’t Vim donationware? (Hint: it is)
Android:
Apple:
I don’t have first-hand experience in Chinese factories, but I have a friend who works in a US factory. The quality of the items I get from Temu seem about on par with the factory rejects I’ve gotten from him.
I usually see higher quality stuff when buying from Alibaba directly, so I assumed AliExpress and Temu are their version of an outlet store. 🤷