Friends. I caved the siren song of cheap things.

I bought some stuff from Temu.

I will admit I knew like nothing about Temu other than… this stuff is suspiciously cheap. How do you even make stuff this cheap?

I hoped it was because with a nice, long shipping time, that’s no problem these days. I also sort of decided that I didn’t really want to know.

Which wasn’t my finest moral moment. For sure.

But I had been seeing all these overalls advertised for months and finally an advertisement popped up for £9.99 and I thought, that’s alright then. That’s the same as the stuff they sell in person at the local market.

And it was through Temu.

So I downloaded the app and added the overalls to the cart. And then curiosity got the best of me. I added a clock. A grout pen. A few ice pop molds. Some fake foliage. And a blender.

And then I hit buy because that app is a dangerous money trap. Time described Temu as a ‘virtual dollar store.’

And I sat back expecting these items to show up sometime in 2024.

Well, not quite. It did say within 2 weeks. And it was all very simple and I was promised a £5 credit if delivery occurred later than that.

And I ordered all of that for £38.08, which included the shipping.

8 days later I had a notification that my items arrived. I popped down to the post office to pick them up.

I opened the package. The clock box had a dent in it before I even opened it. I tried on the overalls and despite sizing up one size, they were far too small.

Then I opened the clock and the glass face was shattered on it. After cleaning up all the glass shards. I checked the app to see how convoluted a return policy it would be and it was really as simple as a few clicks.

Temu refunded the purchases and I didn’t even have to return them. The overalls are useless unless I lose 20 pounds again. The clock however, sits in the entryway, with no glass in it. As it is now a free clock, that is fine with me.

The blender box was in a similar state to the clock and already a bit mauled when I opened the package.

I took the fake foliage out of it’s bag. It smelled like plastic death and looked super clearly fake (I mean, that is the nature of fake foliage but some of them aren’t so clearly fake), but whatever. It will do. It’s for a high up shelf that isn’t easy to see and I conveniently went out of town for a few days giving the plastic odor time to dissipate without it bothering me.

The ice pop molds are totally ok. I haven’t tried the grout pen yet.

The blender looked ok coming out of the box but as soon as I went to make a milkshake, the milk leaked right out of the bottom. I went to the app to return it and it also just gave me a refund and told me to keep it.

At this point I didn’t really know what to make of Temu. What even are they? How can they stay afloat when I’ve tried to return £30 some dollars of my £38.08 purchase and they told me to pretty much just keep it – they could’ve at least resold the overalls.

The refunds all posted to my original payment method within a few days. Nothing weird on that front.

So I started to dig a little into what Temu is.

Temu is a Chinese-based company which sells a massive variety of products at incredibly low prices. It’s essentially the same thing as Wish or Shein. And while I haven’t heard terrible things about Wish, I have heard a lot of less than desirable things about Shein.

There are tons of ads about how to get free credits to Temu by advertising for them, but the quality is clearly garbage, so I don’t think I’d recommend that.

The Better Business Bureau notes that lots of customers experience very long wait times for items to arrive (not in my case) and that the customer service is terrible (also not in my case).

More concerning is that Temu is a sister business of Pinduoduo which has been accused of selling counterfeit goods and fostering poor working conditions. Temu does have a Third Party Code of Conduct which requires partners treat their employees fairly, and bans hazardous materials in products but so did Shein and that didn’t really matter all.

Considering the odor of the plastic plants, hazardous materials could be a thing with Temu.

Overall, Temu isn’t for me. I do try to avoid companies with business practices like Shein once I actually know that’s what is probably happening. There have also been some data concerns with the app because the sister company Pinduoduo did some dastardly stuff with folks data. No reports so far that the same is happening with Temu, but I did opt to fully remove the app from my phone after this experience just in case.

If Temu is your jam, no judgement here, things are a little tight for everyone these days, but I’d rather stick to Poundland or the Dollar Tree.