My Temu-cal Romance

Confessions of a sudden shopaholic

Photo by V H from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/orange-parcel-with-temu-logo-on-concrete-surface-35765457/

The word Temu is synonymous, at least in some quarters, with low-quality, cheap Chinaslop. Nevertheless, over the last six months, I’ve found myself engaged in what I can only call my Temucal addiction. Like many addictions, it started under stress — stresses I think more folks are due to experience soon.

I didn’t even know what Temu was back in the early days of 2025, beyond the fact that they’d bought time during the Super Bowl to advertise how you could “shop like a billionaire.” I’ve only met a few billionaires, and I don’t exactly know how they shop, but my sense is that it doesn’t involve a lot of apps. It involves more personal shoppers and private viewings at Sotheby’s.

Temu is far from that. The Temu experience is mostly one of wading through a million different advertisements, most of them featuring what seem to be AI-generated photos, none of which give you a proper sense of scale for the actual product until you flip through to the ninth, tenth, or eleventh photograph, where they might deign to provide you with the item’s measurements. And if you think you can’t be trapped by this, you definitely will be—if not the first time, then no later than the fourth time you buy from Temu. It isn’t, in other words, like shopping like a billionaire, except in the sense that everybody is probably trying to defraud billionaires when they shop, too. Nevertheless, after an experience where I had to buy a bunch of things cheaply and couldn’t find them in any of the extensive outlets available in Doha, my hand was finally forced.

It turns out there are categories for which Temu is not just competitive but perfect. If you need things that are cheap, if you don’t particularly care if they fail, and if you’re able to purchase a second round of things very quickly, then Temu can save you a lot of money.

As I understand it from reading elsewhere, the basic Temu business model is fairly simple. The original idea was that factories in China making goods for external clients, whether Chinese or Western, would end up with what were essentially factory seconds. If you’ve ever done anything that involves a production run, you know that there are certain economies of scale. Producing 1,000 units of something may not cost that much more than producing 900. Well, once you’re doing 1,000, you may as well do 1,100. What do you do with those excess units? Temu offered a solution: you could sell them. This wouldn’t be something your original client would notice, or something they could really go after you for anyway. And because a lot of contract manufacturing just doesn’t involve high margins, it would let the factory sell as a white label or off-brand and keep its profit margins going.

You can see how this would be attractive to Chinese firms deep in the throes of involution, wanting to keep the lights on and squeeze another unit of profit out of what is essentially a commodity co-production business. And so it was, and so Temu was born: essentially factory-direct, out-the-back-door shipments.

You can also see how, once a market channel was established, it would grow. If you have been on Temu, then you probably know that there are some firms that seem to produce essentially for the Temu market. In other words, they’re skipping the entire marketing and distribution channel that competitors have to go through and producing things that are good enough for that market, instead of following the factory-second or excess-quantity model that Temu originally ran on.

That’s a major shift. It is basically what happened to outlet stores in the United States, which moved from being a way for established firms to dump their slightly imperfect goods to something else entirely: brands like Brooks Brothers and even Hugo Boss began producing *for* their outlets, using cheaper materials—single-stitch instead of double-stitch clothing, say—that could be sold at a discount to customers who wanted something that still felt name-brand.

Temu, in other words, is becoming a marketplace unto itself, just as Amazon has. Indeed, in a lot of ways, Amazon and Temu are converging. Amazon, of course, sells a lot of name-brand products, or at least products marketing themselves as name-brand. But Amazon also sells Amazon Basics and Amazon originals, its white-label lines. And then there are the things we self-consciously refer to as the Glorpdorp or Zeeblehop market: things sold by Chinese firms that have literally no brand names beyond the random combination of consonants and vowels needed to be listed on Amazon, and which frankly seem awfully similar to the same things you can get for slightly less on Temu itself. Some of that is dropshipping, some of it is firms selling on both marketplaces, and some of it is probably just convergent evolution.

What this all means is that the experience available to consumers around the world these days is exactly what used to be available on Alibaba. Alibaba was, as the name suggests, a kind of thieves’ den in which almost anything could be bought—legally, semi-legally, or illegally—but which was incredibly difficult to police. Temu is more or less a whitewashed version of Alibaba.

There are amazing and sometimes borderline legal finds on Temu. You can go on Temu and purchase those fun little balsa wood model airplanes that you used to be able to get only at museums in the United States. You can buy 30 of them for 30 QAR—well under $10. I did, and I certainly intended to play with them with kids, though I haven’t yet. One day. Mostly it was just fun to see that that factory remains alive and well, still producing the same things I used to buy. Of course, I also remember paying a dollar per airplane, and that is just not what I’m paying now. Temu is miraculous.

I should also note that if you want a nice bag from Harrods…Temu might have you covered.

As much as the frisson of buying name-brand goods for less can be appealing, there are also times when, frankly, you don’t need the name-brand equivalent. I use a kind of bookmark, a Post-it note equivalent that’s essentially a piece of tape with a little coloring on one side. This is something that I think 3M brought to market first—and if it wasn’t 3M, it was somebody a lot like them. But when you come down to it, it’s plastic, adhesive, and coloring. Nobody’s life is riding on it. I don’t care if it’s the best adhesive ever made or merely good enough. It just has to mark a place in a book long enough for me to put it into my notes later as part of my workflow. And if I’m going to pay somebody for it, should I pay 3M $5 or $10 when I can get the same thing on Temu for $1 or $2?

Consider razor blades. You can get five-razor blades that are serviceable, if not particularly comfortable, for 50 cents, instead of the (admittedly better) ones Gillette will sell you for $1.50 or $2.50 a unit.My beard—not to give you too much information—grows back really thickly, and I’m one of the few people who actually needs three or five blades to get a close enough shave. And I really like Gillette. It’s really great. But is it five times as great? No. Sometimes I want a really comfortable shave, but sometimes I just need a competent shave. For something where I need a good-enough shave most days, I’m happy to buy a slightly worse product at an 80% discount.

I don’t do that, by the way, with my shaving creams. Those are by Taylor’s of Old Bond Street; I recommend the oud scented cream.

But that’s just the thing. There are some products I will pay more for and some products I won’t. And that’s something consumers in the 21st century, well beyond myself, are happy to do. It turns out that a name brand isn’t something you always need. Having a name brand was originally supposed to guarantee quality. But you only need to guarantee quality if lives, or reputation, or at least some monetary damages are on the line. When goods become essentially disposable—and at Temu prices, they’re pretty damn disposable—do you need a name brand? Or do you just need functionality, plus the knowledge that if it fails, you can buy another one and you’re only out 20% of the name-brand price?

This is something I’ve been thinking about because the internet has had another round of discourse about the Vimes Boots Theory. The Vimes Theory—and if you’re not familiar with it, you probably haven’t been on the internet that long—comes from a passage by Terry Pratchett offering an explanation for why the rich are rich and the poor stay poor:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

—Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

It’s an argument that the poor have to buy cheap consumer goods, and so end up spending more—a form of poverty tax—for the same functions that the rich simply buy nicer things to serve.

This is, as many people have observed, a fundamentally British aristocratic way of regarding consumption—or, at least, a stereotype about far-sighted aristos. It’s a world in which the British nobility buy a wonderful, robust estate wagon and use it for generations while the rest of us make do with some cheap car that keeps breaking down.

As you may have noticed, this is a terrible description of what the contemporary aristocracy, or the true upper class in most parts of the world, actually does. If you’re actually shopping like a billionaire, you might be shopping for a piece of art that consists of a literal piece of fruit taped to a wall, for which you might pay $5.2 million. In other words, the real rich are not always buying, as Pratchett assumes, better-quality goods. They’re buying goods measured on dimensions that poor people don’t even think about—such as whether the display of wealth will impress people who are also incredibly wealthy.

This is something I see all the time in Doha. Consider cars, the closest equivalent to boots. There’s the car market for people trying to become delivery drivers or Uber drivers; the car market for professionals like myself, looking for something robust, reliable, and ideally respectable without being flashy; and then there are the people who buy Land Rovers because, even though it costs 10,000 QAR to change the oil and reliability might be iffy, they don’t care. Land Rovers look cool. People in the market for them don’t necessarily worry about reliability, because reliability isn’t a concern when you have six or eight or ten top-of-the-line cars. If you need a reliable Land Rover, buy another one. Sometimes price is a signal—and sometimes price for even a good that’s cool-but-not-reliable is a signal, too (like the Wall Street Journal-approved trend of hot girls with old Broncos).

Rich people don’t have to buy reliable cars. They may buy a Toyota, but they don’t have to. Peek into the garages of my more upscale neighbors and you will find … Multiple Bentleys. Multiple Land Rovers. Multiple BMWs and Jaguars. In other words, cars you might buy because you don’t really care if they’re in the shop—you have people to take care of that.

Vimes: eat your heart out. When people shop like billionaires, they shop like people who don’t have to worry about money—not people making far-sighted investments in durable goods.

I, on the other hand, am a humble decathousandaire. I bought a Mazda because it outstrips Toyota in reliability. But I have found that Temu is a place to get the things you just don’t want to spend a lot of money on, like plastic holders for Q-tips. There are times when you need a lot of those things, and you need them in ways that require you to just buy something; if I can buy them for 75 cents with free shipping, that’s where I’m going to go. Sometimes, it turns out, the disposable boots are the ones you buy because you don’t need them to last.

But none of this explains why I became, as I said, *addicted* to Temu. That has to do with the war.

The war was a little bit stressful, but not so much because of the physical danger, at least after the first few days. Rather, it was stressful in a way that made you go a little bit crazy—the same crazy everybody went during COVID. And I don’t mean that they became partisans of RFK Jr. I mean that you simply had a lot of time on your hands and not much desire or ability to go outside. To be fair, being in a place under contemporary forms of siege warfare was a little bit bizarre. Missiles were being shot at us, sure, but most of them were intercepted, and there was very little chance any of them would actually hit me. All the same, there were limits on what anyone could do outside. Nobody wanted giant gatherings that could inadvertently become targets for an errant Shahed.

And that meant you were kept inside for long stretches, working from home and playing from home—and, just like COVID, the lucky among us had money we weren’t spending on normal things like driving around or going out to eat. Combine that with a distinct loss of control over external circumstnaces and you start looking for ways to spend money as a way of exerting some control over your environment—some control over a situation in which you felt you had none. Experimenting with buying on Temu was really, really attractive under those conditions. There were lots of home projects to accomplish with the spare time and the nervous energy, and Temu furnished the tools to Konmari entire rooms. True Marie Kondo Thought requires putting things in boxes, and boxes in boxes, and guess where you can get nice-looking boxes that are robust enough but don’t cost much money?

There was also something, during the height of the conflict, about being able to engage in commerce with the outside world at all. Even now, you still can’t import things under normal parameters. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is closed off, and that’s where all the stuff comes from. Temu, on the other hand, ships by air, and they kept shipping when nobody else would. The U.S. Postal Service isn’t delivering direct to Doha. Temu is. And that actually matters.

Means, motive, and opportunity—that’s enough to start you off on turning to consumption as a satisfying if illusory means of exerting control. But once you become addicted to spending, you stay addicted simply because it becomes a hobby. That’s why I call my relationship with Temu a form of chemical addiction: the dopamine hit you get from buying productivity-enhancing Temu purchases really does begin to skew your desires. You begin buying things you never possibly would have bought.

So it’s an addiction not just to shopping, or to cheap stuff, but to what that cheap stuff represents: the kind of hits that allow you to pretend that normalcy is going on, even as you engage in the acts that deny normalcy is possible at all. And that, unfortunately, is a way a lot of people are going to experience the 21st century.

Of course, I’m also thinking about this because e-commerce is in the headlines for another wartime reason: the Ukrainians have decided to begin, for justifiable reasons, bombarding Wildberries. Wildberries is often described as the Russian version of Amazon; my guess is that there’s also a huge bit of the Russian version of Temu going on there too. Wildberries has had a phenomenal and crazy life, one that involved being at the center of a power struggle between the Putin circle and the circle of Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of Chechnya. These days, Wildberries is, per Ukraine, a strategic asset, because among the firm’s e-commerce customers were Russian military commands and others who liked to shop on its special segment for the “special military operation”—which means Ukraine has deemed Wildberries facilities fair game.

I assume there’s an academic somewhere in Russia trying to distract themselves from the way history has turned since 2022 by shopping on Wildberries, and that person is having their day ruined by a whole bunch of things—but especially by the blockage of the little hint of normalcy that Wildberries carried. At the same time, of course, ballistic missiles are raining down on Kyiv, where there’s no interception providing the security for me and mine that Patriot interceptors provided for Doha, Dubai, and elsewhere during the most recent conflict.

In the 21st century, we’re going to experience something very, very weird. We’re going to have available to us all the benefits of the internet, of artificial intelligence, of always-on communication—alongside the fact that data centers, LLM models, cybersecurity, and warehouses are going to increasingly become targets of war. That’s going to flip a lot of scripts. Whereas the 20th century had clear divisions between civilian and military, in the 21st century everything is going to be blurred together. A lot of folks’ ordinary habits—whether it’s using Amazon, or Netflix running through data centers in Bahrain that become targets, or ordering from your favorite local e-commerce site—are going to be at risk of being upset.

What a strange world that’s going to be to live in. I feel like the future really is already here, just unevenly distributed—and I’m in a group of unwitting early adopters. It isn’t about shopping like billionaires: it’s about shopping like the end times.