Don't get me wrong. I think companies should be held to higher standards: i just don't understand why only Temu is being held responsible of the entire broken capitalist system.
The first is liability. If they're selling chargers that burn down houses, they get sued, and they don't want to get sued, so they don't want to sell chargers that burn down houses.
The second is regulatory requirements. This one is generally worse. The incumbents capture the regulators to e.g. have the law require their technology or raise costs to exclude new entrants. The rules are often inefficient or poorly conceived with bad cost/benefit ratios. And companies making products that are dangerous but nevertheless comply with the rules will point to their checkbox compliance to dodge liability.
The problem with the first one is that it doesn't work well against companies outside the jurisdiction, because then you can't sue them, and the importer will be a small entity that just files for bankruptcy if you try to sue them. But the second one has the exact same problem. They sell products that don't comply with the rules; if you try to fine them they're outside the jurisdiction and the only thing in the jurisdiction is a fungible importer that will dissolve if you try to go after them.
In that environment the thing that actually works is the third thing. Customers expect some products to be dangerous and rely on product reviews to determine which ones. But this is the thing the second one inhibits, because then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted. And then customers are stuck choosing between the overpriced incumbents and the far cheaper foreign suppliers that may or may not be safe, with many people risking the latter because they have so much lower margins.
Also, how does it get you anything over simple liability for fraud and harm? Why does the honest seller have to write a document if nobody is going to look at it and the dishonest one is going to skip doing it anyway?
Milk was filled with borax and formaldehyde, coffee was cut with sawdust/charred bone/lead, spices were often 100% counterfeit.
The market (heavily) incentivized fraud.
In New York, in one year (1857), 8000 infants died to "swill milk" [0].
The second option (FDA and regulation) wasn't lobbied for, and the Food Bill of 1902 actually failed through heavy (counter)lobbying initially [1], until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [2] passed.
[0] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1858/05/13/785...
In less rich countries it is how things work right now.
.. which are of course the easiest thing to fake.
> then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted.
This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything? And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?
How do you get Consumer Reports to publish a fake product review? Can you point to even one instance of that actually happening?
> This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything?
Huawei is a pretty conspicuous example of it actually happening. They were starting to establish a brand and then regulatory destruction was imposed. Meanwhile there seem to be a huge number of other products from the same country with white labels or rotating unknown brands for some reason even though they probably come out of the same factory.
> And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?
That there is a difference between regulatory compliance and actual safety is obviously the point. All the incumbents need is for the rules to be complicated enough that compliance requires you to be a massive bureaucracy, or that nobody is really complying but selective enforcement gets imposed when someone undesirable is starting to look like a real challenger.
They are not really. If one of the big brand shop is found importing stuff with fake certificate, they’ll experience the same thing. One of the advantage of the stores you mention is that they have a procedure for recalls, and their responsibility is on the line if they sell faulty goods. Good luck getting anything from Temu or AliExpress in the same situation (at least Amazon is very good with this).
I can't name a single executive that was jailed over this period here in France. Yet if the law was applied justly thousands of executives and engineers would rot in jail and the world would arguably be a much better place because it would provide incentives for companies to actually behave and not destroy our planet and livelihoods. So are companies really taking responsibility for the lives they destroy? Not so sure.
