Europe Warns Giant E-tailer To Stop Cheating Consumers or Face Its Wrath (theregister.com) 72
The European Commission warned Chinese e-tailer SHEIN on Monday that it must address multiple consumer law violations or face fines across EU member states. Regulators found SHEIN's website displayed fake discounts not based on actual prior prices, used pressure-selling tactics with false purchase deadlines, provided misleading information about consumer return rights, made deceptive sustainability claims, and hid contact details from customers. SHEIN has one month to respond to the findings and propose corrective measures, adding regulatory pressure to a company already facing US tariff challenges despite generating an estimated $38 billion in revenue last year.
But what else is Shein for- (Score:3)
Re:But what else is Shein for- (Score:5, Insightful)
-if not lies about cheap sheit?
I know what Shein, Temu and AliExpress are like and I just got used to it because I know that these sales tactics are pretty normal in parts of Asia. Having said that I'd still rather buy this 'cheap sheit' directly from Shein, Temu and AliExpress rather than 'entrepreneurs' in the West who add a 1-500% markup on the exact same 'cheap sheit' which they buy directly from Chinese factories for even less than Shein, Temu and AliExpress charge. Some of the more brazen Western resellers just source their stuff from the Shein, Temu and AliExpress web sites from the comfort of their home office, sell it to you at a huge markup and don't even bother to take the item out of the Chinese packaging before forwarding it to you. A lot of western retail these days is basically just an obscenely overpriced personal shopping service so why not just buy from as close to the source as possible and cut out these parasites? Finally, a lot of this 'cheap sheit' actually isn't 'sheit'. The quality of most of the stuff I get from Shein, Temu and AliExpress is actually quite decent.
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Cheap tools from ali express are okay, just read the reviews from Ukraine and the ruzzkie pederation.
If they're good, then the stuff is acceptable 99.9% of the time.
The price is typically less than a quarter of what you'd pay for roughly the same crap from a US manufacturer, ...
I've had a handful of tools sold to me on Temu and AliExpress that weren't quite up to snuff but the rest performed as expect. The first thing an Asian online shopper will tell you is read the reviews and pay particular attention to the negative ones and the ones with photographs and if you stick to that you'll generally get what you pay for. I suppose we can now add Slavic countries to that list.
...but it will be in metric units.
That is only a problem for the three countries that still predominantly use the antiquated imperial system of m
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That is only a problem for the three countries that still predominantly use the antiquated imperial system of measurement: United States, Liberia, and Myanmar.
[Archer] It's funny because you never think of those other two as having their shiat together[/Archer]
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Why are Europeans so bad at math?
Seriously though, nearly every country in the world uses non-metric local units sometimes. In China they use li. In Japan t
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Seriously though, nearly every country in the world uses non-metric local units sometimes. In China they use li. In Japan they use inches to measure TVs. Probably in Germany, too.
Yes, but the point was that very, very few countries use a non metric system as their primary measurement system because they just don't see a point in making their lives unnecessarily complicated. If I can choose between using metric for everything and using a mishmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems I'm going to choose pure metric every time.
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If I can choose between using metric for everything and using a mishmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems I'm going to choose pure metric every time.
And yet, your country also uses a mushmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems. So you're trying to blame other people for what you yourself are doing.
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If I can choose between using metric for everything and using a mishmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems I'm going to choose pure metric every time.
And yet, your country also uses a mushmash of metric and other arcane measurement systems. So you're trying to blame other people for what you yourself are doing.
What country would that be?
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They still measure their weight in stone (a unit I always have to look up)
Only of humans, pretty much or sometimes when a news organisation wants to report something to make it relative to humans. I have never, ever, seen, say a biggish bag of rice labelled as 1.5 stone as opposed to 10kg.
Just about everything else is done in metric weights now. Some boomery people insist on oz for cooking, since that's what they grew up with and fair enough, but I have no intuition for that. Pounds are very sporadically u
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Don't you still do a fair bit of machining in freedom units? I bought some large servos recently and they were all imperial.
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Funny how the USA still throws its weight around to keep the worldwide aviation non metric in all regards, down to actual screws despite ICAO, but it is the Europeans who are supposedly bad at math.
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That is only a problem for the three countries that still predominantly use the antiquated imperial system of measurement: United States, Liberia, and Myanmar.
The metric system was Jimmy Carter's one good idea. Conversion was supposed to be by industry. The beverage, pharma and automobile industries switched to metric, but the initiative was never followed through nationwide as intended. The result was that all Americans know what a liter or a milligram looks like, but there is no such intuitive feel for kilometers and kilograms.
Re: But what else is Shein for- (Score:2)
If several Russian and Ukrainian reviewers agree it must be good.
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The price is typically less than a quarter of what you'd pay for roughly the same crap from a US manufacturer, but it will be in metric units.
I'm quite sure that the 192/195 countries of the world that use metric will manage to cope somehow.
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I gotta be honest, so far I can't provide any truly negative experiences with AliExpress.
And I agree... if I buy garbage, I might buy it just as well for 4 bucks in China rather than pay 22 on Amazon.
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I gotta be honest, so far I can't provide any truly negative experiences with AliExpress.
And I agree... if I buy garbage, I might buy it just as well for 4 bucks in China rather than pay 22 on Amazon.
... and then get robbed by Amazon on shipping.
Dropshipping (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the more brazen Western resellers just source their stuff from the Shein, Temu and AliExpress web sites from the comfort of their home office, sell it to you at a huge markup and don't even bother to take the item out of the Chinese packaging before forwarding it to you.
Dropshipping doesn't involve forwarding parcels.
The parcel never went through the reseller's hand.
It went straight from the Chinese dispatcher to the buyer.
The western reseller is merely a customized front-end shop.
At best, the Chinese themselves could relying on a parcel forwarding service that can split or joins shipment for various taxation reasons.
(e.g.: stuff bought from AliExpress often transits through the Netherlands here in Europe).
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Dropshipping doesn't involve forwarding parcels. The parcel never went through the reseller's hand.
That actually varies because many resellers are not the sharpest tool in the shed. My wife bought some tea from a US based web shop. They actually shipped it to us from the US with a US sticker glued over the original Chinese postal sticker. Pull that off, use a camera based AI translator to find out where it was bought, go to the Chinese web shop and find out you can get three similar packets of tea for what the US reseller charged. Slightly expensive way to find out about that Chinese online tea shop but
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sell it to you at a huge markup and don't even bother to take the item out of the Chinese packaging before forwarding it to you.
The really entrepreneurial ones never touch the merchandise, and just drop ship it from the manufacturer directly to the purchaser.
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It doesn't matter in the EU. Everyone has to abide my minimum standards.
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-if not lies about cheap sheit?
When cheap defines your entire existence, that honesty is revealed every time someone sees the final price in the sales cart.
If you have a need to lie above and beyond that, then you're selling corruption. Not goods.
User experience (Score:2)
My daughter buys from these people. The stuff they sell is cheap and cheerful, it doesn't last long. Which is fine for a child of 11 who is still growing.
As she gets older and stops getting taller I will try to get her to understand the value of clothes that last more than 4 months, but for now the Shein sheit meets her use case pretty well.
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My daughter buys from these people. The stuff they sell is cheap and cheerful, it doesn't last long. Which is fine for a child of 11 who is still growing.
It's fine, the clothes contain minimal lead.
Re:User experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Like buying brand labels protects you from cheap garbage.
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Like buying brand labels protects you from cheap garbage.
A completely black and white view of a world filled with shades of grey is unhelpful and inaccurate. Buying stuff from a reputable brand from a company with a brand to protect and a presence in your country so with actual liability won't 100% guarantee you protection, but you're much less likely to get lead contaminated crap than if you buy super cheap imports with none of that.
Declaring that X isn't perfect therefore Y is no worse is a fallacy of som
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Then answer 2 questions:
a) why would there be lead in a piece of cloth? That does not make any sense.
b) why would there be no lead, when the same piece of cloth is fabricated in the same factory, just because it is branded by a "well known brand"? That does not make any sense, either.
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a) I don't know where it was introduced, but it was definitely there and might still be in other products. From https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]:
The investigation pointed out that Health Canada's limit for lead in children's products was 90 mg/kg. Scientists at the University of Toronto found that a Shein jacket for toddlers had around 20 times the amount of lead that Canadian public health officials said was allowed in children's products.
b) It's not necessarily the same factory. Even when it is, the inputs (fabric, dyes, etc.) can be different from the legitimate runs versus the knock-off runs that use different shifts.
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Well, they are forbidden in dyes. But that does not make them vanish. ...
I thought this lead problem died out 30 years ago
Probably I get to much lead and forget to much - haha.
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That does not make any sense.
Way to aggressively put your own ignorance and assumptions front and centre. I'd have provided links if you weren't being a dick about it, so instead you can figure out all by your little self how to google "lead in clothes". Please do because I wouldn't wish lead (or other) poisoning on you or anyone you care about.
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If it does not make sense: it does no make sense.
Try harder.
So my shoes from Dior made in Malaysia contain lead ... first question: how the funk did the lead get into the leather of the shoes?
And if I buy the exact same shoes at a bus station Thailand, made in Malaysia, they do not contain lead?
Oh, I mixed it up ...
That factory is making shoes. A percentage is ordered by "insert brand", the rest is sold to who ever wants them. The factory is running 24h every day. Doing the same shoes ...
And at the door the
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If it does not make sense: it does no make sense.
Reality is the way it is. You can deny it exists because it doesn't make sense, but it will continue to exist regardless[*].
https://www.theguardian.com/fa... [theguardian.com]
Big brands are big enough to be able to exert some control over their supply chains. Depending on the brand it would do huge damage to sell lead contaminated clothes and the markup allows them to incur that extra expense.
[*]Oh it's you! Perpetual motion machine guy. Yep does not surprise me when you can't
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There is no country on the planet that allows lead contamination in fabric used as cloth by humans. And: how would get lead into the fabric?
Perpetual motion machine guy That is you, not me. The guy who does not grasp basic physics.
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There is no country on the planet that allows lead contamination in fabric used as cloth by humans.
I admire your dedication to ignorance. Truly you are an inspiration. How about you read the article I linked to?
And: how would get lead into the fabric?
That's of academic interest, and not part of the topic, so stop being a lazy bugger and look it up if you want to know. For me, it's sufficient to know it's been found there. The precise mechanism by which it got there doesn't alter the health effect.
Yep, you a
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Yep, you are perpetual motion machine guy.
Perhaps you want to look at your signature?
I did not put it under each of your posts.
And your "physical explanations" make no sense, I pointed that out several times.
Regarding your lead problem, you fail to explain why the exact same shoes suddenly have no lead when the "brand sticker" is stitched onto them. That was my original point if I recall correctly. So: why do regulations work if a sticker is on the boots, but not otherwise? Do they have lead detectors at th
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I am not got to address your reality denial about lead in cheap clothing, it's well documented. Read it or don't, I don't really care, but know you cannot logic the lead out of existence.
An EM drive is a PMM, and the only way you can make it not is by denying Newtons laws. That's why they cannot work. If they did you could get more energy out than you put in. That is impossible therefore an EM drive cannot exist.
But go on tell me how kinetic energy isn't real, or maybe acceleration... That's basically what
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Like buying brand labels protects you from cheap garbage.
Whataboutism.
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Nope. The fact that ALL clothing, except for some very select outliers, come from the same factories and often the same production streets.
Quality control MIGHT be better in a well-known brand or it might be even worse. Market psychology dictates that brands only protect themselves if they feel they profit from it. Since slavs alone will keep Adidas afloat no matter what, they don't need a good brand name anymore.
So no, not whataboutism. It's gambling and your ante does not mean shit these days.
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Even if big-name brands use the same factories, that doesn’t excuse Shein’s issues. Redirecting scrutiny onto other brands instead of addressing Shein’s practices is a whataboutism, that is, a deflection from the original issue.
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Given that it's not cheap, yeah it does protect you in that regard. But to address the "garbage" part I assume you've not used Shein and have no idea what you're talking about. In many cases you buy something from those sites and you end up with a result that looks nothing like what was on the picture. Very much a scam, but the scam here is that doing a return is more effort than doing nothing so consumers wear the costs (and 3rd world countries wear the disposed pollution).
Yes brand name cloths may be bad
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What I don't get is how anyone could think a pair of shoes for under 10 bucks new could be a sensible idea.
Especially heels. It was a trope in the 90s how women absolutely did not care for their health and practicality (and in my opinion looks... The clown shoes the horse... err... woman in Sex and the City wor... my Lord were those ugly...) when it came to fashion sense...
Now that wearing heels has had to make way for comfort (walking around like an absolute slob has become accepted), you'd think that any
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Economical extortion is a US thing.
Says the guy whose continent's main source of revenue is thinking up flytraps of entwined regulation that traps foreign companies into paying huge fines. Compared to that, Trump's tariffs look sdownright traightforward.
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What I don't get is how anyone could think a pair of shoes for under 10 bucks new could be a sensible idea.
Because you got it all wrong.
Why is it a sensible idea that a pair of sneakers is in the $200 range?
Oh: because there are idiots who buy it for that price.
The manufacturing costs, are far below $5 ... so if you get them for $10, half of it is already distribution.
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I don't think good sneakers cost more than 100$ to make but they also don't cost 5$...
That being said... I was talking about more than just sneakers.
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A quick search makes me take it all back... It seems 5$ is indeed realistic for sneakers.
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Most things in our days are cheap to make.
The joke, which is not really a joke in USA, is: the packaging, printing the "warning paper - and how to dose it", and the distribution to the Pharmacy costs more than the medicine.
It is not a joke.
Most medicines you can just cook like tomato souse by pouring the right quantities "of what ever you need" into a cocking pot.
Every 10 year old one can do that. Sourcing insuline from pigs and cattle is a bit more complicated. But the prices in the US do not in any way r
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You let your 11 y.o. buy cheap shit from China? With whose credit card?
Perhaps you could also get her to understand the vast toll of that Shein sheit, too. It's o
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Not the only way the EU is hitting back (Score:3)
Delhaze/Ahold always overcharges customers (Score:2)
So why not go after them too?
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So why not go after them too?
In what way? Be specific and relate it to the exact law violated. If you can't then you have your answer. Overcharging for rubbish is not against the law. Pressure tactics are, fake discounts are (the EU has strict requirements on what price you can display when you discount, such as only being able to apply the discount on the median price from the last x days preventing you from doing the Black Friday bullshit in America where they simply make a $100 item $100 marked down from $200 and say you get 50% off
Re:Delhaze/Ahold always overcharges customers (Score:4, Insightful)
Overpricing isn’t illegal, deception is. Shein isn’t under fire for being cheap or expensive, but for violating specific consumer rights: fake discounts, false urgency, misrepresented return policies, and lack of transparency. If Delhaize or Ahold does something similar, they can and should be investigated too, but the comparison only holds if the violations are legally equivalent.
Why is there a warning? (Score:2)
paper tiger (Score:2)
Don't warn; prosecute. They are panty-waists.