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Marketplace All-in-One

Why Temu prices are so low

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.51.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Chinese-based platform Temu is transforming e-commerce, and it’s recently surged in popularity in the U.S. Described as being “like Amazon on steroids,” Temu’s products are often cheap and unbranded — but those low prices could be coming at high costs. Also on the program: few visible cracks in the labor market, a lack of remote work training, and an obituary for General Electric as a corporate conglomerate.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You've seen the ads for Temu. How do they do it? I'm David Brancaccio in New York.

0:06.3

First, the private sector added more workers than expected in March. The ADP payroll

0:11.5

calculation today showed 184,000 more people getting paychecks.

0:16.0

Susan Schmidt is head of public equity at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board.

0:21.0

The economy does seem to be humming along and importantly no cracks in the labor market.

0:26.2

So continuing to see this strength in the labor market and that underlying jobs are out there and people are going to work.

0:33.0

That's great if you want to work.

0:35.0

That's tough if you're hoping interest rates are going to drop because that's exactly the opposite of what this might signal.

0:41.0

You'll be paying close attention as we will Friday morning when the official hiring,

0:46.8

payroll and unemployment reports come out.

0:49.6

That's right.

0:50.6

Remember that investors put much more emphasis on that, but it does continue to show a really strong labor market.

0:56.0

When things are that strong, there's still concern that inflation might be continuing to increase.

1:01.0

That's what the Fed is going to be focused on reading into this data trying to figure out what the underlying drivers are.

1:06.9

Given the pandemic and the March of technology about 60% of companies allow most of their employees with office jobs to work

1:14.2

some days from home. This is from the latest workplace flexibility trends

1:18.4

report from global workplace analytics but very few get training on how to make hybrid work.

1:24.6

Marketplace's Samantha Fields has that.

1:27.0

When many companies suddenly told employees to start working from home,

1:31.0

Jeff Polzer at Harvard Business School says it would have been great for them to do

1:34.4

training on how to do that well.

1:36.6

But there was a lot of scrambling just to figure out how to stay safe and kids were at home so there was a lot going on. Four years later

...

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