Plus: The Biden impeachment inquiry is on.
Thursday, December 14, 2023 Good afternoon, Have you checked out Temu yet? What's the best deal you've seen? Send all shopping tips to dylan.scott@vox.com. Hereâs the agenda today: UP FIRST: The worldâs hottest shopping app, explained CATCH UP: Republicans launch their impeachment inquiry â Dylan Scott, senior correspondent UP FIRST Temu, the worldâs hottest shopping app, explained Siobhán Gallagher for Vox Combine Amazon with Dollar General, then add a healthy dollop of the Las Vegas Strip and you have the hottest shopping app in America: Temu. Donât be alarmed if that name is new to you. It was new to me when I opened Vox senior correspondent Whizy Kimâs article today. But as it turns out, Temu is already huge: More than 100 million Americans are active on the shopping platform. It poses a threat to Walmart and Amazon, Americaâs most omnivorous retailers, as one shopper survey found that one-third of consumers said they would shop less at those superstores because of Temu. The app, developed in China, promises customers that they can âshop like a billionaire.â However, thatâs really a misnomer. The ultrawealthy value scarcity and prestige: They want the one-of-a-kind coffee table from a chic designer. What Temu provides instead is the other luxury of being a rich shopper: You donât have to worry about the price. You can snag a pair of wireless earbuds for less than $7. Hair clips that look like Danish biscuits are $2.49. You can shop like a billionaire whoâs stuck inside a Spencerâs Gifts, in other words. Temu also built its brand on the gamification of shopping. Whizy describes the first time she logged onto the app, she was asked to spin a wheel for the chance to win $200. Another prompt told her if she checked out within the next 10 minutes, she could win $300 ⦠in coupons. Itâs like if your local mall had slot machines sitting by the front door. It may sound a bit crass, but itâs working. - Temu didnât exist a year ago and now itâs huge. The app is up and running in 48 countries and it has cleared more than $1 billion in the total value of the goods that itâs sold. That is not much next to Amazon ($477 billion in annual sales value), but it is comfortably outpacing other competitors in the discount online shopping space.
- Lower-income households are driving much of Temuâs growth. About 40 percent of its business comes from households with an annual income below $40,000 per year, by far the biggest representation of any income bracket. The southern states with the USâs highest poverty rates also show the most searchers for Temu.
- The company is making money by losing money. Temu relies on dirt-cheap prices for its value proposition to consumers and, according to one estimate, the retailer loses about $30 on every order. Its inventory is a mix of products sold at ridiculously low prices and then other items sold at or even above the prices seen on Amazon to even it out.
- Temu is a spinoff of one of Chinaâs biggest retailers. Part of the reason the company can stomach such losses is its parent company, PDD Holdings, is an e-commerce giant in China that is already the third-biggest online retailer in that country. âThis is just the international expansion of a $155 billion company,â Rui Ma, a tech analyst at Tech Buzz China, told Whizy. [Read the rest of Whizyâs engaging analysis here](. CATCH UP Well, weâre really doing a Biden impeachment inquiry [Lead pipes, broken open to show their toxic interiors, lay on a tiled surface.]( Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images House Republicans voted this week to bless an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, intensifying their efforts to cast the White House as corrupt heading into next yearâs presidential election. Technically, as Voxâs Li Zhou [explains](, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had unilaterally started an inquiry earlier this year, giving several committees the power to look into (or for) allegations of wrongdoing. But the vote signals the GOP conferenceâs formal support for those efforts, something that had been lacking previously, even as some moderate Republicans who voted in favor of the inquiry say they still see little evidence for actually impeaching Biden. That may be because, as Andrew Prokop reviewed in his own analysis, their case looks exceedingly thin: - The House GOPâs corruption case, such as it is, rests on Hunter Biden. Donald Trump and his interlocutors in Congress have been claiming for years that the president is compromised by and even participated in his sonâs illicit activity. Father and son were, the theory goes, paid off by foreign interests to manipulate foreign policy.
- But many Republicans still sound skeptical of those claims. Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) wrote in September: âWhatâs missing, despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden to his neâer-do-well sonâs corruption.â Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), said this week heâd seen no evidence âat allâ that Biden had committed high crimes and misdemeanors, adding, âWeâre not going to impeach someone because of the sins of their kids.â
- The public evidence so far doesnât hold up either. There is reason to believe Biden may have, for example, spoken with Hunterâs business associates at a golf outing. But what is lacking is evidence of corrupt payoffs to father or son. The House is also depending on discredited claims related to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in its attempts to create a narrative of familial wrongdoing. [Read the rest of Andrewâs unpacking of the Republican impeachment evidence to date â and why it falls short.]( VERBATIM ð£ï¸ âWeâre always trying to figure out how to stop bleeding ⦠We have an organ that literally bleeds every month for 40 years, and we donât understand how it stops bleeding.â â Bethany Samuelson Bannow, assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, at Anna North on the failures to create better menstruation products. [[Vox](] AROUND THE WEB - Mickey Mouse will soon enter the public domain â kind of. This will be big news around the Scott household. But it comes with a big asterisk, for all you Disney children and adults: This is the earliest iteration of Mickey, the [Steamboat Willie]( version, not the specific face of the biggest brand in entertainment. [[AP](]
- English teen missing for six years is found in France. The boy who disappeared at age 11 in Spain was taken to a police station by a concerned motorist in the town of Ravel. His grandmother and legal guardian had publicly voiced concerns that the childâs mother and grandfather had taken him to a âspiritual communityâ in Morocco. [[BBC](]
- How the Smithsonian built its brain collection. The museums took advantage of Washington DCâs vulnerable â children, fetuses, and disabled people among them â and it obtained many of the specimens without any informed consent. [[Washington Post](]
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