Slavery and wage slavery is happening across the globe, but companies with thin margins don't resort to it any more than companies with huge margins (e.g. Nike). If anything, monopolistic corporations have much more power to use and enforce slave labor than the small and medium-sized factories selling at razor thin margins on Temu.

That's most likely not the case. Larger corporations require more workforce stability and require better trained labour to maintain quality control. These needs are better fulfilled by factories who actually hire their labourers instead of hiring temps and auxiliary workers who make considerably less.

Factories that are supplying corporations like temu can only maintain a profit margin if they rely on the cheaper auxiliary labour. Often times hiring and firing them for specific manufacturing quotas. This is one of the reasons temu doesn't have any consistency in quality.

Things sold in the US are way overpriced. Temu is actually pretty normally priced if you consider the average cost of living in the countries it ships to.

If anything they are extremely underpriced, especially when you equate the cost of shipping. The cost of a lot of items on temu are significantly lower than the production cost. As you said it's rare to have a markup that exceeds 50% and a lot of stuff on temu is significantly cheaper than that.

I believe temu operates as a way to minimize the excess of surplus production. Basically in economics it's always hard to balance the size of your labour force to meet the exact level of consumer demand.

Demand could be growing, so we built a new factory. Great, we are now employing more workers and have the ability to supply the increased demand. And then something like COVID happens, exports stop, demand halts, and now you have a factory with no work.

In the west, it's tough shit, pack it up, go home. However, in China local governments can supply local businesses with loans, hoping that demand returns and they can eventually turn a profit. So they pay the factories to produce anyways, well what do they produce if there is no actual demand for export. Well anything, it doesn't matter, it's just about maintaining productivity levels. Just throw the shit in the warehouse and we'll figure out what to do with it later......enter temu.

If you buy it from somewhere else, it's still coming from a factory in China. May as well cut out the middleman.

But you aren't buying from the factory, you're buying from temu, the middle man.

Temu, but economically their prices make sense.

Only if you equate the use of cheap auxiliary labour, the sky rocketing debt of local Chinese governments, and the subsidization of global shipping offered by the Chinese fed.

The problem with this version of robbing Peter to pay Paul is that there isn't actually any profit imported into the country. The loans and subsidies offered by their government were implemented to intice an actual return, where the Fed supports the local government, who support the company, who use the profit to support the workers. When there is no profit, the system is just aquiring debt.