Those rancid fucking ghouls want to kill Chinese online shopping platforms like AliExpress by introducing a 3€ fee per item starting from July next year. Member nations may also impose their own additional fees on top of that. Apparently, the Dutch get to pay an additional 2€ per package while Romanians pay 5€.
This isn't too bad if you buy more expensive individual items. For example, paying 3€ on top of 25€ would suck but it's still less expensive than trying to get the same thing from the EU. However, if you had a 15€ package consisting of 8 smaller items, you'd have to pay an eye-watering 24€ in fees.
It absolutely infuriates me how fucking smug EU politicians and bureaucrats sound while they boast about this new scheme, like cops who had just done major drug bust or foiled some terror plot. The media also talks about people who shop on AE and Temu like they're fucking crackheads or drunk drivers or something while also admitting that the "worst offenders" are pensioners and single parents, aka the poor. Fuck those people amirite
Most of the stuff I get from AliExpress is lower-priced items so this EU protection racket is gonna suck. EU and corporate mouthpieces like to go on about how cheap Chinese goods are bad for the environment but most of the shit I get is replacement parts and accessories for things I already own that I could not get locally at all, or only at some ludicrous markup. I saw some electronics repairman say that they buy individual components directly from China because otherwise you would have to buy many of them in industrial quantities
Edit: Just look at this fucking shit, dude. My latest purchase contained a couple of Micro USB to USB-C adapters because I have a bunch of older devices and I figured it would be easier to have a couple of adapters instead of finding new Micro USB cables. The adapters cost less than 2€. Look at these prices at local retailers:
See that 2.90€ listing? Yeah, that one has a 6€ shipping fee and I'm pretty sure they're just a middle man for Alibaba products anyway 
Also, as a sidenote, I was commiserating about this and other shit with some real life acquaintances, and we were all in agreement until I brought up how our shitty fucking government is going to gut the welfare state to buy military jets and other weapons from the Yanks, at which point the mood changed completely. "We've got no choice but to defend ourselves from Russia" 
All their anger at the government, the EU and the US completely evaporated in an instant. These people are lefties
This entire stupid continent is 99% Nato-brained and there's like 10 communists. I guess this is better than the time I was accused of being a tankie Russian stooge for disagreeing with the take that Putin's ultimate goal is to conquer Europe for lebensraum for the Russians and he's gonna do it any day now
This is my colour out of space. I keep showing people the cheap, sometimes necessary, shit they buy off of amazon or "honest" ""local"" marketplace is literally the same as off of temu or aliexpress, down to the fucking pictures, because nobody puts up a fucking second production line for like 0,2 eurdollars worth of plastic desk organizers. They're all still convinved if they buy it from aeiou SARL registered at example street 123 they're getting quality products
It is the duty of every patriotic EU citizen to support their local dropshipping entrepreneurs
They think they are buying stuff made in Europe. At least going by what the people in the newspaper comment section are saying.
(If it's actually drop shipping, not reselling I suspect that will get hit by the 3€ charge too at least)
I've had conversations about your last point with my family and friends: at this point, buying all of that stuff anywhere else than aliexpress is literally racist.
unless i absolutely need the thing in the next few days i use amazon as a temu search engine. just find the thing on amazon and copy the name into temu
9 times out of 10 it will be the exact same item from the exact same factory for less than half the price
Or that it's somehow more "ethical".
I do this too, I love sending them screenshots of the same thing they have bough from "a lovely local small town gift shop" for 30€ when it's a grift that the seller has bought in bulk without doing none of the labor. The extraction the small and big business owner types in the West do through this also does my head in. The website always says something like "Designed in Finland" and will cost you and arm and a leg. The labor aristros and libs very much fall for it though.