A friend in Berlin showed me her phone last week the way people show you a wound. A full cart from one of the big Chinese apps, nine things, and under the total a line that had never been there before: customs. Only a few euros. But the number was in daylight now, and she looked at it like it had appeared from nowhere. It had not. It had been there the whole time. Someone else was just paying it.
For a decade the haul felt free because a customs rule made it invisible. In the United States that rule was de minimis, which let any parcel under 800 dollars in duty-free with barely a form. It began to close for China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025, and then it closed for everyone: a July 2025 executive order suspended de minimis for all countries as of August 29, 2025. US Customs was clearing around four million duty-free de minimis shipments a day, and a 2023 congressional investigation put Shein and Temu alone at likely more than thirty percent of them. Today a parcel from anywhere pays the ordinary import duty for its origin, which for Chinese goods has run around thirty percent; the flat per-item shortcut for mail was retired this past February.
Europe is arriving at the same place from a different road. From July 1, 2026, the EU applies a flat three-euro customs duty, charged per item, on low-value parcels from outside the bloc, scrapping the exemption that waved anything under 150 euros through. The Council signed it off in February, pulling it forward roughly two years ahead of the bloc's 2028 customs overhaul, mostly because member states had stopped waiting and were inventing their own fees. In 2024 about 4.6 billion of these parcels entered the EU, and more than ninety percent came from China. A separate handling fee is coming too, proposed at around two euros, though the Commission will not set its size or timing until autumn. My friend's few euros are only the first few euros.
The market moved before the politicians finished the paperwork. In the week ending May 11, US spending fell more than ten percent at Shein and more than twenty percent at Temu, according to Consumer Edge card data. Bloomberg Second Measure, a different card panel, had caught the shock earlier: in the week of April 25, Shein fell twenty-three percent and Temu seventeen. Temu's US daily users roughly halved between March and May, and it tore up its model within hours, ending direct factory shipping and rebuilding around US warehouses. Shein, worth 66 billion dollars in a 2023 private round, is now chasing a Hong Kong listing closer to 40 to 50 billion, after New York and London fell through. The discount does not lie even when the company would rather it did.
Here is the part that interests me, and it is not the part about Shein. Consumer Edge followed the same cohort of cards, shoppers who bought from Temu or Shein early in the year and then stopped, to see where the money went. It did not go toward buying less. It went sideways: the same cards turned up at Zara and Asos, at American Eagle and Hollister, at Nordstrom Rack and Old Navy. Amazon's clothing aisles swelled too, its women's category up more than a quarter over six months by a separate Similarweb count. The fortnightly restock, the industry's habit of refilling your wardrobe every two weeks, the fortnight machine I keep complaining about, did not switch off. It changed venue. A cheap dopamine hit at one checkout became a slightly-less-cheap one at the next.
But look closer, because two names on that list are not fast fashion at all. Those same departing shoppers also turned up at Savers, the thrift chain, and at Nuuly, the clothing-rental service. That is a small thing, and I do not want to oversell it. Still, it is the first time in years I have seen the runoff from a fast-fashion shock flow toward wearing clothes twice rather than buying them twice.
So do not mistake a duty for a virtue. Three euros does not unmake a garment built to survive a season, not a decade, and it does not clean up the mountain those clothes become in Kantamanto, the vast secondhand market in Accra, Ghana, once we are bored of them. It just moves the accounting from the container ship to your screen, where you finally have to look at it. That is worth something. A price you can see is a decision you can make. Look at the seams. Buy it once, or buy it twice, but at least now you know what it costs.
