Rena Scott, a retired registered nurse in Virginia, usually has 10 to 12 active Temu orders at any given time.
The 64-year-old has bought almost anything you can think of from the Chinese website. She has four shirts in her cart right now and regularly buys crafting items like yarn and beads (she has an entire yarn room and ordered 53 packages of a particular yarn she liked), and household items from rugs to furniture.
For Scott, doing all of her shopping on the site is a “no-brainer.”
“Everything here has come in from overseas anyway, so you’re just cutting out the middle man, like the Walmarts, the Amazons,” she said.
Millions of Americans have flocked to Temu and Shein, another Chinese e-commerce site, for their low costs. Chinese exports of low-value packages skyrocketed from $5.3 billion in 2018 to $66 billion in 2023, according to a congressional report.
But President Donald Trump’s tit-for-tat trade war is now impacting those who rely on these relatively cheap Chinese products. He slapped 145% tariffs on imports from China and a 10% minimum tax on all other countries. And the “de minimis” exemption, which allowed goods less than $800 to pour in duty-free to the United States, is expiring on May 2. On Friday, Temu and Shein raised their prices on a large number of items, from lawn chairs to swimsuits, ahead of new tariffs set to take effect this week.
For American consumers, this means even the “cheap products” that drove them to shop on Temu and Shein are no longer in reach.
“I can’t afford to buy from Temu now, and I already couldn’t afford to buy in this country,” Scott said.
Lower income customers suffer
Scott, who lives by herself, says she’s frugal and gets decent disability pay after a transplant left her unable to work. She hasn’t eaten fast food in a year because she “simply can’t afford it.” She’s driving the same car she bought in cash in 2005 and keeps the central AC at 85 degrees to avoid high electricity costs.
A Temu cabinet Scott had bought for $56 — before the price increase — is now over $80, she said, which is “not sustainable.”
Lower-income households will suffer the most from the end of cheap Chinese e-commerce sites. About 48% of de minimis packages shipped to the poorest zip codes in the United States, while 22% were delivered to the richest ones, according to February research from UCLA and Yale economists.
And the lowest-income households in America spent more than triple their share of income on apparel compared to the wealthiest households in 2021, according to a report by the Trade Partnership Worldwide, an economic research firm, analyzing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Shoppers stock up
Phillip Dampier, a 57-year-old consumer rights writer, said he’s been on Chinese e-commerce sites for about eight hours a day for the past two weeks.
He’s buying everything including paper products, kitchen tools, a portable heater, furniture, sheets and blankets — “basically anything you might find in a JCPenney.”
He said he’s stocking up for the next two years, “because I have a feeling that this economy is about to go into the tank, and we’re going to have shortages that rivaled the pandemic.”
Dempier, who lives in Rochester, New York, had been a longtime Amazon customer. Since the pandemic, he said that the Jeff Bezos-owned site had gotten more expensive and fell off its customer service. Then he made his first Temu purchase in 2023, and from there, he began shopping at AliExpress, Shein and even TaoBao, China’s OG e-commerce site.
For now, Amazon has walked back from publicly advertising the same model as Shein and Temu. After Amazon considered displaying the added cost of tariffs on certain items, Trump called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to complain on Tuesday morning, two senior White House officials told CNN.
An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the move “was never a consideration for the main Amazon site.”
The president later said that was a “good call.”
Questionable practices
Shein, Temu and AliExpress have come under heavy criticism for their lack of product safety and labor protections, as well as their detrimental impact on the environment.
These sites also encourage a culture of overconsumption. Customers are hypnotized by an endless algorithm of bright colors and coupon-earning games, but the products often end up in landfills as cheap junk.
But Scott, the former nurse in Virginia, said buying American-made goods isn’t much of an option.
“Whether I go to my local Walmart and buy it… that product was still manufactured overseas in some country where they pay horrible wages, maybe use child labor,” Scott said. Even if she finds something made in the US, “it’s wicked expensive.”
As for overconsumption, Dampier added that people can over-shop at American stores like TJ Maxx and Ross, too. “It’s kind of biased to just claim that that’s an issue with Temu and Shein, just because the prices are a little lower,” he said.
Still, the Trump administration maintains the tit-for-tat tariffs are designed to put American manufacturing and businesses first. But US consumers interviewed by CNN have expressed skepticism that the tariffs will work — and for now, they’re left bearing the cost.
“The entire idea of tariffs is idiotic, in my opinion,” Dampier said. The Trump administration “is trying to bully everybody, and it’s wrong, and the tariff policy is wrong.”
CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald, Nathaniel Meyersohn, Alayna Treene, Betsy Klein and Jordan Valinsky, contributed to this report.
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