No surpriseI thought as I got rid of the 12-volt charging adapter I bought for my car. I had bought this product on Temu, the Chinese low-cost shopping app, as part of a wider range of other random products that the app had marketed to me: chargers to plug into my adapter and car seat filler crumbs. -receivers 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 did care, because I wanted to use the gadget to charge things. So I felt a disappointment, but not an affront, when the gadget’s plastic prongs came loose just days after its arrival, rendering the device unusable. I should have bought a Diet Coke instead.

This week, Amazon announced a new store, Amazon Haul, that hopes to compete with Temu, Shein and other providers of such items. When I opened Haul, available only on Amazon’s mobile app, it presented me with a range of “amazing finds” at “unbelievably low prices”: a table runner for $3.99; a pair of blue and white zebra print women’s swim bottoms for $5.99; a barrage of smartphone cases at just $2.99; a foundation brush set for $2.99; a silicone sink strainer for $2.99; two dozen cork bottom chair leg floor protectors for $6.99.

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

Of course, people have always shopped just for the sake of shopping: to stroll at the mall, to feel the relief of shopping therapy, to adopt the identity of a brand or style, to pass the time between two events. But the Internet has changed shopping. First, e-commerce has made it more standardized and efficient. Instead of flipping through clothes on a rack or rummaging through a discount bin, shoppers were clicking on product images on white backgrounds. They searched for keywords, assuming purchases were driven by need rather than desire. Shopping has become more rational, more structured.

Read: Will Americans Ever Get Fed Up With Cheap Trash?

This has also been consolidated. Amazon.com has become what’s known as an everything store, and others, including Walmart.com, have followed suit. They offered everything to consumers; people no longer needed to visit specialized websites. Then, online sellers deployed algorithmic recommendations to steer buyers toward products that could benefit sellers or encourage buyers to purchase more. Little by little, over the years, online shopping has become disorienting. When I recently searched Amazon for a 16×16 gold photo mat, I was shown a family of products, none of which were 16×16 gold photo mats. The one I finally purchased took forever to arrive (it was not eligible for Prime shipping) and was damaged in transit. I would have liked to make 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 in a specialty store. This experience is now commonplace. I buy things online that I consider unfit for their intended use and that require their return (which has become its own kind of hell). Now, shopping satisfies neither a need nor a desire. This wastes time and displaces money.

Carry is the perfect name for a habit that contributes to this feeling. In the early days of YouTube, around mid-month, beauty vloggers looking for vlogging topics began sharing products they had recently purchased, either online or in person. They produced what became known as “transportation videos.” Eventually, as vloggers gave way to influencers on YouTube, Instagram and elsewhere, direct sponsorships, in-feed ads and other incentives generated carried or adjacent content: people would make money by publishing it.

Shein began recruiting these influencers to promote its service in the West. The products she sold were so cheap that it didn’t matter if they were good. A decent fast-fashion top or accessory for $20 was still cheaper than Abercrombie or American Eagle. Very quickly, you couldn’t even go to these stores anyway, because of the pandemic lockdowns; by 2022, Shein represented half of fast fashion sales in the United States. Shopping has become a kind of game of chance: roll the dice and hope you come out a winner, whatever that means.

Read: Amazon returns have gone to hell

Display has always been a part of shopping, but shopping has completely sidelined usage, replacing it with exhibition. For the YouTuber or Instagram influencer, it wasn’t important that the clothing or skincare products were useful or even used, but simply that they gave the content creator the opportunity to create content and, potentially, being 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 started to become a way of life. Shein, Temu and now Amazon Haul encourage bulk purchasing to justify low costs and minimize freight, while slipping under the weight of shipping. $800 threshold of US import tax. These stores made transportation a basic unit of commerce.

At the same time, Chinese sellers – some of whom appear to be selling the same products found on Shein, Temu, Alibaba, etc. – have begun to dominate Amazon’s third-party seller platform, known as Marketplace. By 2023, Amazon recognized that nearly half of the Marketplace’s top 100,000 sellers were based in China. If you’ve ever researched products and been presented with weird and absurd brands like RECUTMES (it’s “Record your times”, not anything else), these are probably market sellers based in China. For some time now, cheap products of questionable quality and questionable suitability have dominated search results on Amazon, partly because these sellers can also pay for sponsored ads on Amazon to sell their products.

Amazon Haul bridges the gap between normal e-commerce and the retail business popularized by social media influencers. Now ordinary people can buy maybe useful, maybe trash, products in bulk for little money.

Great to have a choice, perhaps. But probably also irritating, because the phone case, table runner, or makeup brush you might buy this way is probably trash. No one is hiding this fact, hence Amazon’s carefully chosen language of “incredible finds” and “incredibly low prices”, not “high quality products”. And consumers are now willing to expect crap anyway, after spending years buying random products 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 no longer really expect pleasure. Instead, I hope that what’s inside might surprise me by having some value.

Haul may seem like the latest curiosity that only people on the internet are concerned about, but that could be an omen. Over time, Amazon went from an everything store that sold products I loved and wanted to a place selling bad things that didn’t meet my needs. Transportation is just one way to shop, not the only way. But this was also true for Marketplace, which gradually took over Amazon’s listings. For now, you can still buy whatever you want or are thinking of doing. But eventually, transportation could take over entirely, and all shopping could become a novelty store and mystery bag experience.