Temu = Amazon + Dollar General + Spencer’s

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Good afternoon,

Have you checked out Temu yet? What's the best deal you've seen? Send all shopping tips to dylan.scott@vox.com.

Here’s the agenda today:

UP FIRST: The world’s hottest shopping app, explained

CATCH UP: Republicans launch their impeachment inquiry

— Dylan Scott, senior correspondent

 Temu, the world’s hottest shopping app, explained

Siobhán Gallagher for Vox

Combine Amazon with Dollar General, then add a healthy dollop of the Las Vegas Strip and you have the hottest shopping app in America: Temu.

Don’t be alarmed if that name is new to you. It was new to me when I opened Vox senior correspondent Whizy Kim’s article today. But as it turns out, Temu is already huge: More than 100 million Americans are active on the shopping platform. It poses a threat to Walmart and Amazon, America’s most omnivorous retailers, as one shopper survey found that one-third of consumers said they would shop less at those superstores because of Temu.

The app, developed in China, promises customers that they can “shop like a billionaire.” However, that’s really a misnomer. The ultrawealthy value scarcity and prestige: They want the one-of-a-kind coffee table from a chic designer. What Temu provides instead is the other luxury of being a rich shopper: You don’t have to worry about the price. You can snag a pair of wireless earbuds for less than $7. Hair clips that look like Danish biscuits are $2.49. You can shop like a billionaire who’s stuck inside a Spencer’s Gifts, in other words.

Temu also built its brand on the gamification of shopping. Whizy describes the first time she logged onto the app, she was asked to spin a wheel for the chance to win $200. Another prompt told her if she checked out within the next 10 minutes, she could win $300 … in coupons. It’s like if your local mall had slot machines sitting by the front door. 

It may sound a bit crass, but it’s working.

• Temu didn’t exist a year ago and now it’s huge. The app is up and running in 48 countries and it has cleared more than $1 billion in the total value of the goods that it’s sold. That is not much next to Amazon ($477 billion in annual sales value), but it is comfortably outpacing other competitors in the discount online shopping space.
• Lower-income households are driving much of Temu’s growth. About 40 percent of its business comes from households with an annual income below $40,000 per year, by far the biggest representation of any income bracket. The southern states with the US’s highest poverty rates also show the most searchers for Temu.
• The company is making money by losing money. Temu relies on dirt-cheap prices for its value proposition to consumers and, according to one estimate, the retailer loses about $30 on every order. Its inventory is a mix of products sold at ridiculously low prices and then other items sold at or even above the prices seen on Amazon to even it out.
• Temu is a spinoff of one of China’s biggest retailers. Part of the reason the company can stomach such losses is its parent company, PDD Holdings, is an e-commerce giant in China that is already the third-biggest online retailer in that country. “This is just the international expansion of a $155 billion company,” Rui Ma, a tech analyst at Tech Buzz China, told Whizy.

Read the rest of Whizy’s engaging analysis here.

Well, we’re really doing a Biden impeachment inquiry

Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images

House Republicans voted this week to bless an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, intensifying their efforts to cast the White House as corrupt heading into next year’s presidential election.

Technically, as Vox’s Li Zhou explains, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had unilaterally started an inquiry earlier this year, giving several committees the power to look into (or for) allegations of wrongdoing. But the vote signals the GOP conference’s formal support for those efforts, something that had been lacking previously, even as some moderate Republicans who voted in favor of the inquiry say they still see little evidence for actually impeaching Biden.

That may be because, as Andrew Prokop reviewed in his own analysis, their case looks exceedingly thin:

• The House GOP’s corruption case, such as it is, rests on Hunter Biden. Donald Trump and his interlocutors in Congress have been claiming for years that the president is compromised by and even participated in his son’s illicit activity. Father and son were, the theory goes, paid off by foreign interests to manipulate foreign policy.
• But many Republicans still sound skeptical of those claims. Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) wrote in September: “What’s missing, despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden to his ne’er-do-well son’s corruption.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), said this week he’d seen no evidence “at all” that Biden had committed high crimes and misdemeanors, adding, “We’re not going to impeach someone because of the sins of their kids.”
• The public evidence so far doesn’t hold up either. There is reason to believe Biden may have, for example, spoken with Hunter’s business associates at a golf outing. But what is lacking is evidence of corrupt payoffs to father or son. The House is also depending on discredited claims related to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in its attempts to create a narrative of familial wrongdoing.

Read the rest of Andrew’s unpacking of the Republican impeachment evidence to date — and why it falls short.

• Mickey Mouse will soon enter the public domain — kind of. This will be big news around the Scott household. But it comes with a big asterisk, for all you Disney children and adults: This is the earliest iteration of Mickey, the Steamboat Willie version, not the specific face of the biggest brand in entertainment. [AP]
• English teen missing for six years is found in France. The boy who disappeared at age 11 in Spain was taken to a police station by a concerned motorist in the town of Ravel. His grandmother and legal guardian had publicly voiced concerns that the child’s mother and grandfather had taken him to a “spiritual community” in Morocco. [BBC]
• How the Smithsonian built its brain collection. The museums took advantage of Washington DC’s vulnerable — children, fetuses, and disabled people among them — and it obtained many of the specimens without any informed consent. [Washington Post]

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