Your Shein and Temu habit could end up costing you $60,000
Saturday, 27 June 2026
Kiwis dump 52,000 tonnes of clothing annually.
The average Auckland family spends $50 weekly on apparel, bleeding thousands every year.
Investing that money over a decade could yield $60,000 or slash $33,700 off a mortgage.
New Zealanders dump over 50,000 tonnes of clothing into the landfill every year, the equivalent of a large rubbish bag from each of us.
This number is one of the headline figures in a new report from Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa, which looks into the impact of fast fashion on both our economy and the environment.
The sheer quantity of clothing is staggering, but these piles of polyester, cotton and viscose also tell an important story about wasteful discretionary spending. This is money going out of Kiwi wallets to buy things they don’t actually need.
Gareth Hughes, director of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa, says this is being driven by the “more, more, more, faster, faster, faster fashion business model”.
Tearfund research shows that about one in four Kiwis have shopped on Temu, and around 550,000 on Shein.
The motivations for doing this are clear: it’s cheap and looks almost identical to the latest items on the runway.
The marketing machine is also powerfully persuasive. Anyone who has left an item unpurchased in a Temu or Shein shopping cart will know the feeling of being followed around the internet by the same shirt for weeks on end.
And with each passing day, the price seems to become a little better.
These companies have taken some of the core principles of retail marketing and hyperscaled them to an extent that we have never seen previously.
All biases programmed into our brains are being exploited, so that we click that ‘buy-now’ button and spend a small amount that seems so insignificant.
But those seemingly small amounts add up.
Data from Stats NZ’s 2023 Household Economic Survey showed the average Kiwi family spent approximately $42.70 on clothing and footwear per week, while Aucklanders spent $50.80.
Estimates from cost-of-living tracker Money Balance NZ suggest that in 2026, the average baseline sits between $45 and $65 per week, depending on the size of the family.
This suggests families are burning through $2,300 to $3,400 on clothing, of which a growing portion has been bought from online retailers.
Some of this will be necessary. We have to replace old school shoes or holey work shirts, but the sheer extent of this spending, when combined with the quantity of clothing heading to the landfill, suggests this money isn’t always going to necessities.
The ease and hidden cost of discretionary spending
Spending money on whatever we want has never been easier.
Victoria Mulligan, the co-founder of Design Futures Aotearoa, told me earlier this year that every time we’ve made paying easier, people have tended to spend more.
As we moved from cash to cards and then to contactless and one-click payments, this has systematically removed the “moment of hesitation” that can help to keep spending in check.
At the same time, the cost of clothing has been compressed by the growing accessibility of online retailers operating abroad.
Even when our money feels tight, the marketing industry is adept at pulling dollars from our credit cards through clever strategies that make us feel as though we’re getting a good deal.
In his book Influence and Pre-suasion, marketing writer Robert Cialdini wrote “what we [the marketing industry] present first changes the way people experience what we present next.”
What he was referring to here was the anchoring effect, and how an initial price can set a mental benchmark against which we compare the next price we see.
When a company advertises something for $100, but then quickly drops that price to $65, it feels like we’re getting a great deal on that item – without actually knowing what the margin is on that product.
Hughes explains the powerful role of marketing in this space led to the French Senate passing legislation to ban all advertising for ultra-fast fashion in 2025.
“They also included an eco-tax on every item sold,” he says.
The details of that law are still being ironed out, but it could provide a template for other countries to follow suit.
The long-term price we’re paying
The most tantalising thing about online shopping is that the offers always seem so cheap. It’s just a few dollars here and a few dollars there but this adds up.
If the average Auckland family is spending $50 per week on clothing and footwear, that’s equivalent to $26,000 over ten years.
If you had religiously invested that money in the S&P 500 over the last decade, you’d be looking at a portfolio of around $60,000.
Another way to look at this would be to look at the difference it could make to your mortgage.
It would effectively pay off $26,000 of the principal, while also saving you around $7,700 in interest repayments (based on average interest rates over that period) – delivering a total saving of $33,700.
But the real magic comes later. In the years to follow, you’ll continue saving because your mortgage will be smaller, meaning you’ll pay less interest over time.
These are essentially the hidden personal costs we’re paying when we do decide to spend our money on a deal that looks great. Instead of just looking at the price of the item you’re planning to eventually put into the landfill, you should be asking what difference this could make to your emergency funds, your investment or your mortgage. It’s about giving yourself a moment to pause at a time when the system is trying to make you act as fast as possible.
This is not to say you should deprive yourself of all forms of joy and discretionary spending. It’s rather a reminder that all those little acts come at a cost.
So, do you shop on Shein or Temu? Do you have any shopping regrets? And do you think we should have rules that limit the advertising of fast fashion? Let us know in the comments. If you’re using the Stuff app on iOS you’ll need to view Stuff.co.nz on a browser to view and post comments.