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As far as completely pointless ways to kill time on your phone, this is certainly one of the weirdest on record.
Behold the all-new invention of so-called “dopamine sites” — digital domains where you can browse and hunt for deals on nonexistent wares and services. Clothes, food delivery, you name it: you can pretend-shop for it all.
You don’t actually buy anything, crucially. You’re just pretending to have money to buy the things you want. It’s window-shopping reimagined for the age of doomscrolling.
But it’s also a little more than that. These cleverly-built sites simulate the experience down to checking out and “tracking” your shipment or delivery, and their absurdly realistic rituals can help people become more conscious of their spending habits. Supposedly.
The trend, according to the New York Times, originated in South Korea this spring, when Park Seohyun, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering student in Seoul, created a fake food-delivery site called “Food Never Arrives.” (It’s now an app).
Originally intended as a joke, she says, it lets you not only order nonexistent food, but provides you an estimate of the money and calories you saved by skipping on the real thing.
In a wintry economic climate, it became an unexpected hit.
“People began sharing it online and discussing whether it actually helped them resist ordering food,” Park told the NYT.
A wave of imitators followed. This summer marked the launch of “FakeHaul,” a dopamine site built by a Microsoft engineer that convincingly imitates shopping on Temu. Two developers in India inspired by Park’s site, Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma, created “Food Never Comes,” which simulates food deliveries but provides real recipes for the food you didn’t actually order. Parmar and Sharma told the newspaper that their site had more than 2.7 million views since launching in June.
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