I Temu'd So You Don't Have To
I'm sure you've seen Temu, the invasive, ever-present, "seems like a scam" retailer on one or more of your social feeds. Usually, their ads include a ridiculously cheap deal on something it knows you're interested in (because it knows your browser history). Recently I was pitched a few ads for video games via Temu, and the deal was good enough to get my attention. I first thought, "there's no fucking way," then I thought, "if they can advertise it, it's got to be true, right?" This led me down a rabbit hole that I knew would cost me some money.
Like Shein or Fashion Nova, Temu has a reputation for selling items at absurdly low prices only for them to arrive and just be garbage versions of the initially advertised product. Clothes that look cool in pictures but don't fit any human being comfortably. Furniture or storage items that look handy but end up being flimsy, poorly designed, and actually useless. It's a real exercise in how nefarious advertising can be, and what shady internet companies can get away with.
Then there's video games and vinyl records. These are two categories of items that can't really be fudged. There is no legit way to sell bootleg PS5 games or "fake" vinyl records. Maybe printing your own vinyl is possible, but I don't think the profit margins are beneficial enough to prop up a sub-market. So, if I'm being advertised PS5 games and Records on Temu, it's reasonable to believe these are playable and legit.
So I bit the bullet and took the bait of one of their "free gift" campaigns. It starts with you selecting 9 or so "free gifts". Once that's done, the app spreads those gifts out over a 2-week period. During those 2 weeks, if you meet certain purchase thresholds, you get the gifts for free (sometimes shipping on the gifts was free; sometimes it wasn't).
If you keep up with the campaign, log on every day, and meet your purchase thresholds, everything you picked during the gift phase is absolutely free. I was VERY surprised to see that was true. But what of these purchase thresholds? Do they add up to be a real deal, or is it all a trick? Well, friend, that's why we're here. I had a bit of disposable income, and I wanted Temu to prove to me it was a good deal.
TLDR - I'm happy to report the Temu model of sales IS a good deal on both a practical and theoretical level (but we'll get to that). If you are willing to play their little "buy this garbage, so you can have this good stuff" game, you can emerge from the other side with some cool stuff at a good price, but you have to know the rules.
Rule 1.
Temu wants you to spend money on its disposable Chinese-made, off-brand garbage. That's where their profit comes from. Spending $10 on a pair of hat boxes that cost $0.75 to manufacture is how the whole thing works.
Rule 2.
Use the spending thresholds to find stuff you might actually use. Depending on the price, some decent items can be found in the post-gifting phase. You might need to scroll pretty deep into their algorithm, but you'll find something. In my case, many of the items I ended up buying to meet the threshold were decently priced items I had passed up during the gifting phase.
Rule 3.
Shop outside of the campaign. Temu is algorithm-driven, so it feeds you a never-ending list of shit to buy based on your shopping habits. Once you're in one of their weird purchasing campaigns, it's very tempting to only shop within the "keep buying to get more gifts" ecosystem. However, in that ecosystem, nothing is searchable, and all items are fed based on browsing and purchasing habits. Tell Temu what you're interested in by just pulling up the app and shopping with search terms outside the campaign; it will help the results you get fed in the campaign.
Rule 4.
Don't overspend. If your purchase threshold is $20, don't spend $40. Your goal is to get through to the "free gifts" as cheaply as possible by purchasing items you might actually use. That will make much more sense once we cover the actual financial breakdown.
Financial Breakdown
Since Temu isn't great at surfacing what your "free gifts" were post-purchase, I'm going to group these items into 2 categories: "Things I wanted" and "Temu Trash". Based on price paid per item, I'm sure some of the things I wanted weren't part of the list of gifts, but in the end, it all boils down to the value of the items versus the money spent for them.
First up, we have the "Things I Wanted"...
Five PS5 games, one PS4 game, and 3 vinyl records for the raw cost of $79.83. Given the current retail price for Resident Evil Requiem is $70, this is without question a great (some might say, unheard-of) deal.
But to unlock these prices, you've got to play the game by buying their profit-pushing Temu-Trash. Here's a breakdown of what that was and how much I paid for each item.
Most of these items were fed to me based on algorithm and probably profit margin. I DID opt in to each item, but I wasn't sure of the quality or usefulness of them.
The good news, eight of the fifteen items are things I'll actually use (the bold/asterix'd items). The dog brush removes my dog's shedding hair really well, and the infrared thermometer is a GREAT purchase for a Mississippi Air conditioner owner. Other things like generic black rubber gloves and scissors are more a necessary home expense than they are "Temu trash". The ultimate usefulness of the Power Strip, Hat Boxes, and Pipe Camera is still up in the air, so we will count them as garbage for now.
$143.34 for seven "complete trash" items and eight "I wasn't shopping for them, but they turned out to be useful" items is a weird math problem to digest. Middle-aged moms hooked on finding a "deal" probably love this, but a 42-year-old dude who doesn't nessecarily need more stuff has a hard time justifying the cost.
That $143 doesn't live in a vacuum, though; remember the only reason you're spending the $143 is to gain access to the items you spent $79 on. The stuff you really want. When we break down those wanted items ever further, the actual savings really start to show themselves.
Above are the same 10 items from the first chart, except this time, a couple more metrics are added. First, the actual current Amazon price (a scientist or economist would refer to this as the market price or control variant). This is the price of the items in the real world to keep this grounded.
In the far-right column is the "Sergio-specific" "typical price I'd pay" amount. As a cheap bastard, I like to wait until things drop in price before I buy them. All of these items would probably eventually drop to a price I'd be willing to pay either through market fluctuations or event sales. Think of these prices as the prices with time as a factor. Previously, I referred to Resident Evil Requiem as a $70 game. In 3 years, it would easily be a $30 game, and that's when I would typically buy it.
So, by today's standards, the items I wanted to buy vs the amount of money I spent gave me a $94 deal. Obviously, it was a bit more than I would have probably spent, as that total was $38.17 more than the actual cost, but a lot of that can be explained away by pointing out that I'll be playing games years before I otherwise would (I hope that makes sense outside of my weird cheap-guy brain).
Looking at all the math here and factoring in the value derived from the items I didn't intend to purchase, it's safe to say Temu IS a deal, a big deal actually. But you have to play their little game, and you have to see it through to the end. Buy the trash, find items that fit into your life, and be ok with just tossing stuff that is objectively bad.
Temu is a product of our late-stage capitalist nightmares. Useless items are being purchased by people who don't need or want them to feed a system that preys on the weak. I hope you didn't read this article as a Temu endorsement. Sure, you can get a "deal," but in the end, the human cost of manufacturing piles and piles of useless crap that will just end up in a landfill can't be good for humanity on multiple levels.
I both love and hate that I participated in this campaign. It helped me understand the nature of one of the more popular black holes of the internet and also got me some legit cool stuff, but knowing most consumers aren't experiencing Temu in such a pragmatic way scares the ever-living shit out of me.
