As of August of this year, there were 756 billionaires living in the United States. If that doesn’t stagger you, the fact that their combined wealth is estimated at $6.22 trillion might. ($6.22 trillion is roughly 20 percent of our current national debt.) The biggest concentration of these American billionaires reside in California. The only country in the world that has more billionaires than we do? China.
“Shop Like a Billionaire” is the tagline for Temu, the Chinese company that markets a blizzard of retail goods at ridiculously low prices online and via their handy Temu app. Most products ship directly to the consumer from China. Temu’s inventory is vast, with 29 main product categories and over 250 subcategories. Part of the hook—besides Temu’s absurdly low prices-is how they have gamified online shopping. A la Wheel of Fortune, as soon as you log on to the Temu app, you get to spin the wheel for coupons. Today, those coupon values ranged from $30 up to $300 if you hit the jackpot. (However, the fine print reveals that to redeem your coupon, you have to buy at least three Temu products in the next four hours—and that’s limited to a set of products that the company stipulates.)
Trying to figure out the structure of this company gets a little murky. Temu is operated by a Chinese e-commerce company named PDD Holdings, a multinational group registered in the Cayman Islands but also listing Dublin as its main office address. In the U.S., Temu seems to be owned by a company called Whaleco, Inc.—a subsidiary of PDD Holdings that is registered in both Delaware and Massachusetts. As a player in the online shopping game, Temu is a relative newcomer to the U.S. Its platform went live here only two years ago in September of 2022. Temu took the national stage in February of 2023 when it ran advertising during Super Bowl LVII.
Temu’s Super Bowl 2023 ad was the creation of Saatchi & Saatchi. No offense, but the creative is pretty lackluster, despite the peppy “Shop Like A Billionaire” jingle. It looks and feels pretty much like anything you might see for TJ Maxx or Marshall’s—except that everything in Temu’s magical shopping universe seems to be only $9.99 (or probably less if manage to get one of their big fat coupons). Nevertheless, the ad caused a 45 percent increase in people downloading the Temu app, and growth among daily active users of the app went up 20 percent.
For their 2024 Super Bowl ad, Temu took the creative in-house. This time, the commercial is what I’d call “App Shopping Meets Disney’s Frozen”—with apologies to Disney, because the animation isn’t exactly Pixar caliber. Disappointingly, it’s pretty much the same concept as their 2023 live action spot, although the animation does enable Temu to make the world colorfully psychedelic. (Cannabis aficionados would more than likely give it five stars.) They also did a bit of a remix of “Shop Like A Billionaire” which, if nothing else, is consistent with their original branding.
I scratch my head over the wild success of Temu, and here’s why. On October 19, 2024, Courtney S. reported to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) that she had ordered a $9.00 dinosaur costume on Temu’s website. Temu offered her two additional items free if she purchased $30 in coupons. When she checked, the costume wasn’t even listed on her order. She went on at length about her nightmare trying to deal with Temu’s customer service, but the upshot was she never got the dinosaur costume and feels like she was scammed into buying $30 worth of coupons.
After combing through her case with my legal staff, my guess is that Courtney didn’t bother to read the fine print I kindly shared with you earlier. (When anything sounds too good to be true, always read the fine print—because it probably is.) However, it seems that Courtney’s experience is not uncommon. Many who shared their experience on the BBB website complained that their items either never came or were missing from the box, and they couldn’t hold the postal carrier or Temu accountable. On hundreds of consumer responses (mostly complaints), the Better Business Bureau gives Temu an overall 2.4 stars out of 5, which translates, at least on this forum, to a customer satisfaction rating that’s less than 50 percent. Nonetheless, Temu racked up $8.2 billion (yes, billion) in U.S. sales last year. What’s more, the company—now in third place behind online shopping centers Amazon and Ebay—projects its growth in the American market to be 136 percent in 2024.
I hate to play psychologist, but the only way I can parse this low-satisfaction/high-sales-and-growth paradox is to assume that most Temu shoppers are gamblers. They know the stuff is cheap as hell, and maybe their order won’t show up. But if it does, nothing beats that moment where you get to tell your cashier at Walmart that you got the cutest Halloween costume for your kid on Temu—and guess how much it cost?!
No wonder China has more billionaires than we do.
