Shein and Temu lose a third of their audience: 3 euros is enough to deflate the bubble

According to Le Figaro, which relies on figures from the Fédération du e-commerce et de la vente à distance (Fevad, the French e-commerce and distance-selling federation) and from Médiamétrie (the French audience-measurement body), Shein's monthly audience fell by 34.6% and Temu's by 28.3% in the third quarter. The slump comes just after the entry into force of the European 3-euro tax on small parcels. The daily makes the link between the two. What the dispatch does not say: if sales followed the audience, how much of the drop is down to the tax rather than other factors, and what is happening to the margins of the two groups. An audience is not turnover. Everything that follows is our reading.

First observation, almost comic: three euros. A third of visitors evaporated for the price of a coffee. That says a lot about the mechanics of the model. A T-shirt for a few euros does not hold up by magic; it holds up because every cent was wrung out somewhere, upstream, and because the final price leaves no margin for the unforeseen. When the gap between "almost free" and "a little less free" is enough to drive customers away, it means the demand was hanging on that differential.

This is where labour reappears, the very thing the displayed price is designed to erase. A low-cost good is not a gift of nature: it is labour whose unpaid share, the surplus labour, has been pushed to the maximum somewhere along the chain. The dispatch says nothing about working conditions at Shein or Temu, and we will not invent any. But the structural question is posed: does a model resting on compressed labour costs and on the de facto absence of customs duties still work when the state clips that last advantage?

Note in passing the wording of the headline: the audience is "plombée" (weighed down) by the tax, as if the figures fell on their own. In fact consumers, platforms and a European fiscal decision are clashing. Taking a chart for a subject is commodity fetishism applied to the consumer beat.

Let us not, however, slip into enthusiasm. A 3-euro tax per parcel is a traffic correction, not a transformation of the relations of production. It makes the last kilometre dearer, not the workshop. It may protect European retailers, or simply shift the rent: platforms pass on, absorb or get around the cost, and it is the workers on the line, the least equipped to negotiate, who risk taking the hit if margins tighten. The question remains who, in the end, will pay those three euros.

Capital, for its part, adapts quickly: it will change warehouse, route, customs status. The true measure of this tax will be found in the quarters that follow, not in a falling audience. In the meantime, one may reflect on an economy in which three euros serve as industrial policy.