Virtual Retail-ity
When I read The online shopping trend where you buy nothing by Itika Sharma Punit...
This week, I placed orders for a \$44,860 Patek Philippe hand-engraved watch, a \$12,500 Hermès handbag, a \$9,800 Tiffany diamond ring, and a \$7,350 Cartier Love bracelet in yellow gold.I don’t need any of them. I certainly can’t afford them. Thankfully, they’ll never arrive.
Instead of Amazon, I spent the past week browsing a new breed of websites known as "dopamine sites," a trend that emerged in South Korea. These websites — like Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes — recreate the entire ritual of online shopping: You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order, and even track your delivery.
Then … nothing happens. No money changes hands. No package arrives.
[...]
Purchasing and shopping are not necessarily the same act. The former is about acquiring and the latter is more of a ritual. The pleasure from dopamine websites comes from the ritual.
My thoughts returned to Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design:
In Sharon’s narrative, the gambling machine is not a conduit of risk that allows for socially meaningful deep play or heroic release from a “safe and momentless” life (to use Goffman’s phrase), but rather, a reliable mechanism for securing a zone of insulation from a “human world” she experiences as capricious, discontinuous, and insecure. The continuity of machine gambling holds worldly contingencies in a kind of abeyance, granting her an otherwise elusive zone of certainty—a zone that Mollie described earlier as “the eye of a storm.” “Players hang, it could be said, in a state of suspended animation,” writes one machine gambling researcher.
Retail therapy inside an insulated virtual reality. A little certainty and a hit of dopamine, one shopping basket at a time.
Maybe the purchase was never the thing.