- by William Briggs
- The Guardian
- Issue #2137
Photo: Panda Mart AU FaceBook
The Panda Mart phenomenon has reached Australia. Images of huge crowds of people pushing and shoving at the opening of the vast discount store in suburban Melbourne were less than uplifting. Consumer capitalism at its most dehumanising was on awful display.
The poor, the working class, are once more manipulated into believing that they want and therefore need the dross that this warehouse-style store offers. The nightmare of the Cranbourne shop is to be replicated in Preston in the very near future, and from there, across the country.
The store owner, John Chen, has described this grotesque enterprise as ‘Temu in real life.’ The bricks and mortar version will soon be stocking 50,000 different low-price, often useless products. The current store is one of more than 100 ‘superstores’ across New Zealand, South America, the USA and Africa. It plans to expand across big city locations in Australia. Panda Mart was founded in South Africa and has flooded the world with the low-price goods manufactured exclusively in China.
Four million Australians have bought products online through Temu in the past year and two million have ordered things from Shein. The ‘hands on’ experience being offered will not replace these purchases but will add to what is already there.
This has real and hugely negative ramifications. There will inevitably be job losses, flowing from the closure of smaller outfits. Sure, the goods will be cheap, but if you have no job then even the throwaway goods on offer become expensive.
Unemployment might be the price of a quick profit hit for one or even several capitalist outfits. The point remains that if there are less workers, then there is less disposable income to make their wretched economic wheel turn. This can only exacerbate the crisis and do further harm to the working class.
The millions of Australian Temu and Shein customers have added enormously to the land fill crisis. The environmental repercussions are all but impossible to quantify. Add to that the avalanche of Panda Mart waste about to be dumped. The goods will have a very short shelf life. The addition of tonnes of $3.00 soft toys that will so quickly be no longer quite so desirable, the $7.00 plastic sandals that you just had to have because they are such a bargain and the rest of the 50,000 items on the shelves must be replaced, and therefore the old ones will be dumped.
The opening of Panda Mart in Melbourne also showed an appalling and criminal lack of oversight by Australian authorities. It is obvious that nobody checked anything. Thousands of dangerous goods have had to be removed from shelves, but not before thousands were sold.
Toys with button batteries that could be swallowed and burn through the oesophagus in two hours were on sale but not labelled as dangerous. Baby rattles that were unsafe were removed. Cosmetics that failed to meet health standards, products that could choke children, faulty archery sets, bike helmets, glitter balls, calculators, and ‘flashing’ toys were among thousands of potentially and actually hazardous goods.
A spokesperson from Victorian Consumer Affairs declared the goods to be a threat. The store owner acknowledged that 38 different product types had been removed and that he “didn’t mean to breaking the law.” The law was broken. The manufacturers of the goods broke the law. Those who allowed them entry into Australia without safety checks broke the law.
The fact that the poor and the working class are not offered safeguards as a matter of course is another crime. Attempts to smooth things over by apologies and vague promises to do better are an insult. By sheer chance there have been no reports of death or serious injury. Life and health should not be a game of chance.
The machine that is capitalism grinds on, devouring all. The media show us images of thousands of people trying to get into a superstore to pick up some trinket. The news shows almost mob-like behaviour, and we hear of police having to be called to restore ‘order.’ The same media does not, will not, point the finger at who created the crisis that permits and promotes such alienation and despair. It does not, will not, describe how dignity is taken away from people by capitalism.
The new shopping ‘sensation’ will leave ruin in its wake. It will expand across the shopping malls of Australia and the world until it can expand no more. That is how the system works, or how it is no longer working.
