Amazon Haul is a notice

No surpriseI thought as I discarded the 12-volt charging adapter I had bought for my car. I’d bought the thing on Temu, the Chinese cheap shopping app, as part of a larger selection of other random things the app had marketed to me: chargers to plug into my adapter and car seat-gap-filler-crab-clamps to flank them.

The charger cost $2.43 and took weeks to arrive. Because it came from China, I knew I had no hope of returning it, but $2.43 is less than a Diet Coke these days, so who cares? Turns out I didn’t care because I wanted to use the gadget to charge things. So I felt disappointed, but not insulted, when the gizmo’s plastic pins broke loose a few days after arrival, rendering the device useless. I should have just bought a Diet Coke instead.

This week, Amazon announced a new store, Amazon Haul, that hopes to compete with Temu, Shein and other suppliers of such goods. When I opened Haul, which is only available on Amazon’s mobile app, it presented me with a number of “incredible finds” at “crazy low prices”: a $3.99 table runner; a pair of blue and white zebra print women’s swim trunks for $5.99; a flurry of smartphone cases as low as $2.99; a set of foundation brushes for $2.99; a silicone sink strainer for $2.99; two dozen cork-bottomed chair-leg floor protectors for $6.99.

Temu and Shein have been popular for a long time. But Amazon’s entry into this market makes it officially mainstream. The result is not just “low-cost” shopping, but a different kind of shopping. Now people buy low-quality goods that they don’t necessarily expect to use, knowing full well that they might be worthless for the experience of having bought them.

Of course, people have always shopped just to shop: to hang out at the mall, to experience the relief of retail therapy, to adopt the identity of a brand or style, to pass the time between events. But the Internet changed shopping. First, e-commerce made it more standardized and efficient. Instead of thumbing through clothes on a rack or rummaging through a discount bin, customers clicked on product images set against stark white backgrounds. They searched for keywords that assumed shopping was driven by need rather than desire. Shopping became more rational, more structured.

Read: Do Americans Ever Get Tired of Cheap Junk?

It also consolidated. Amazon.com became a so-called one-stop shop, and others, including Walmart.com, followed suit. They offered consumers, well, everything; people no longer had to visit specialized websites. Then, online sellers implemented algorithmic recommendations to steer customers toward items that could benefit sellers or make buyers buy more. Slowly, over years, online shopping became disorienting. When I recently searched Amazon for a 16×16 gold picture mat, I was shown a family of products, none of which were a 16×16 gold picture mat. The one I finally bought took forever to arrive – it wasn’t eligible for Prime shipping – and was damaged in transit. I wish I had made different choices, but which ones? I couldn’t find this product in a local store and I wasn’t willing to pay for a custom made product from a specialty store. This experience is now common. I buy things online that I fully expect to be unfit for purpose, necessitating their return (which has become its own kind of hell). Now shopping fulfills neither a need nor a desire. It burns up time and moves money around.

Drag is the perfect name for a habit that contributes to this feeling. On early YouTube, around mid-August, beauty vloggers looking for vlogging topics began sharing the items they had recently purchased online or in person. They produced what became known as “haul videos”. Eventually, as vloggers gave way to influencers on YouTube, Instagram, and elsewhere, direct sponsorships, feed ads, and other incentives drove drag or adjacent content: People wanted to make money from posting it.

Shein began recruiting these influencers to promote their service in the West. The products it sold were so cheap that it didn’t matter if they were good. A decent fast-fashion top or accessory out of a $20 haul was still cheaper than Abercrombie or American Eagle. Soon enough, you couldn’t even go to those stores anyway, due to pandemic lockdowns; by 2022, Shein accounted for half of fast-fashion sales in the United States. Shopping became a kind of gambling: roll the dice and hope you come out a winner, whatever that might mean.

Read: Amazon returns have gone to hell

Showing off has always been a part of shopping, but drag is putting use aside entirely and replacing it with display. For the YouTuber or Instagram influencer, it didn’t matter if the clothing or skin care products were useful or even used, just that they gave the content creator an opportunity to create content – ​​and potentially get paid by sponsors to do so. so. Not everyone is an influencer, but many people wanted to be, and dressing for the job you wanted began to involve transportation as a way of life. Shein, Temu and now Amazon Haul encourage bulk buying to justify low costs and minimize freight while sliding under threshold of $800 of US import duty. These stores made transportation a basic unit of trade.

At the same time, Chinese sellers — including some who appear to be selling the same items found on Shein, Temu, Alibaba and more — began to dominate Amazon’s third-party seller platform, known as Marketplace. In 2023, Amazon recognized that nearly half of the top 100,000 sellers on Marketplace were based in China. If you’ve ever searched for items and been presented with strange brands such as RECUTMS (that’s “Record Your Times”, not the other thing), these are probably China-based Marketplace sellers. For some time now, cheap products of dubious quality and dubious fitness for purpose have dominated Amazon’s search results – especially since these sellers can also pay for sponsored ads on Amazon to get their items.

Amazon Haul closes the gap between normal e-commerce and the retail that social media influencers popularized. Now ordinary people can buy maybe-useful, maybe-junk goods for little money in bulk.

Great to have the choice, maybe. But probably also annoying because the phone case, table runner or makeup brush you might buy that way is probably rubbish. No one hides this fact – thus Amazon’s carefully chosen language of “incredible finds” and “crazy low prices” and not “high quality items.” And consumers are now primed to expect crap anyway, after spending years buying random items from Instagram ads, TikTok stores, Shein, or the discount manufacturers that dominate Amazon itself. When I open a box that arrives at my door, I don’t really expect joy anymore. Instead, I’m hoping that what’s inside might surprise me by carrying any value at all.

Haul might sound like the latest curiosity that only worries the online lot, but it could be a warning. Over time, Amazon has evolved from a one-stop shop that sold things I liked and wanted to a place for bad things that don’t meet my needs. Transport is only one way to shop, not the only way. But it also applied to Marketplace, which slowly took over Amazon’s listings. For now, you can still buy what you want or think you do. But eventually, drag could completely take over and all shopping could become a novelty shop, mystery-grab-bag experience.