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By Anna Rahmanan
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I have just had lunch, which should settle the matter. Instead, somewhere between my espresso and the return to my laptop, I decide I want something sweet.
This is inconvenient and annoying for all the usual reasons. I should avoid sugar because of my cholesterol, and I do not need to spend money on desserts while also consuming two $6 coffees a day. My bank account and arteries, briefly united, are against the idea.
Then I remember a website I have read about: FoodNeverComes.com, a fake food-delivery app whose entire odd promise is contained in its just-as-odd name: you browse the menu, choose your food, customize it, add it to your cart, check out and track your delivery driver. After all that, though, the food never actually comes—and you never have to pay or enter your credit card information.
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Perfect, I think. I do not really need a doughnut, after all. I just need to trick my brain into believing that one is coming, get briefly riled up when it fails to arrive, mentally draft a complaint email to this phantom restaurant and then suddenly realize it is dinnertime and therefore acceptable to have another meal.
Anna Rahmanan
Despite the mental acrobatics, I will have spent no money and consumed no calories. I will simply have wasted 12 minutes ordering fake food, which, by contemporary wellness standards, is basically meditation.
That tiny sense of accomplishment is what FoodNeverComes is banking on, if “banking” is the right word for a website that refuses to take my money. It belongs to a loose genre of online destinations now being called “dopamine sites.”
Fake shops, fake delivery apps and fake checkout pages that reproduce the ritual of online consumption while removing the consequence (or the prize, depending on how you look at things). The point is not to own the thing, eat the thing or wait by the door for the thing, but to experience the dopamine rush that supposedly comes with expecting it.
Unfortunately, expecting a doughnut while knowing perfectly well that no doughnut is coming only makes me rush to the kitchen and rummage through my children’s hidden candy jar. Clearly, my dopamine triggers are not properly triggering.
I figure retail therapy might work better. After all, fake shopping sites do away with the usual drawbacks of retail therapy, including high prices, buyer’s remorse and the fact that there is no longer any room in the house for more stuff.
So I log on to Dopamine Shop, which simulates the entire online shopping experience without offering any real products, accepting any real payments or making any real deliveries. It looks uncannily like Amazon, which is either reassuring or part of the problem.
I immediately add a $110 bookshelf ladder that I have been dreaming about despite not owning the sort of bookcase that would lend itself to one. I rapidly find such a bookcase and add that to my cart, too.
Then I move on to beauty, where I select hyaluronic sun gel, collagen and a brightening serum that I am sure will finally resolve my pore issue. Since my children’s screams in the background will not let me forget about them, I scroll through the toy section and add a couple of cars and board games. I wrap things up with a sous vide cooker that I am convinced will finally turn my husband into a fan of my food, plus a cold brew maker mason jar because—well, why not?
It occurs to me that I have not looked at the price of anything, which is the exact opposite of how I would normally shop. When I look through my cart and discover that the total is just under $900, I am not entirely sure how to feel. I cannot forget that I will not receive a single one of these items. Then again, I did not even have to take out my credit card or recite the number— Which I now know by heart, if we are being honest.
I cannot even pretend the purchases are real. As soon as I click “purchase,” an explosion of digital receipts fills the screen beneath the message: “Delivered to your imagination!”
The site reminds me that I “almost spent” $876.16 but “ACTUALLY spent” $0, which means I have technically “SAVED” $876.16.
Talk about girl math.
Despite the excitement of racing through an entire fake Amazon, which I assume is what shopping at Saks with no budget feels like, I am left feeling empty after clicking purchase. I think that’s mostly because I am devoid of the very things that make shopping fulfilling, which then leads me to believe that I’m actually a logical person, which then makes me pretty happy given the fact that I constantly think that I’ve gone insane around four little children at all times.
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This little impromptu experiment teaches me something about myself: I like shopping because I like the products I buy, and I like ordering food online because, well, I like eating the food that arrives.
When thinking about the allure of these dopamine sites, it occurs to me that the logic behind them can’t be that different from the buzz involved in constantly opening Instagram or just checking our iPhones for notifications.
For what it's worth, I find myself constantly unlocking my phone without having any actual use for it. Every so often, gazing at it delivers a spectacular piece of gossip on WhatsApp, an amazing meme on Instagram or the email I have been waiting for. The action may be automatic, but the possibility of a reward is real because, sometimes, I unlock my phone and get something wonderful. On these fake websites, though, the very idea is that you're not ever really getting anything.
Clearly, though, they are working: FoodNeverComes claims to have satisfied nearly 1 million “cravings” to date. That is nearly 1 million occasions on which someone went through the motions of ordering dinner knowing that dinner would never arrive—a remarkably large audience for a service whose defining feature is that it provides no service at all.
At the very least, I understand that the existence of these websites reveals how thoroughly the internet has trained us to mistake anticipation for satisfaction. Although it didn't really work on me, I bow down to the internet and its insane creations. As for my afternoon craving, FoodNeverComes.com obviously did not cure it but merely confirm that I do not want the idea of a doughnut, the anticipation of a doughnut or a tiny animated driver supposedly bringing me the doughnut. I want the doughnut. So I eat one of my children's Fruit Roll-Ups instead. The dopamine arrives immediately.
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