When the Ritual No Longer Needs the Purchase

On FoodNeverComes, users choose dishes, watch a total accumulate, check out and follow a fictional delivery. A simulated call supplies the familiar complication: the rider is nearby but cannot locate them. The bill is imaginary. So is the food.

In his September 23 BBC report, Soutik Biswas describes the site and interviews its founders, software developers Purvansh Parmar and Anshul Sharma. Their premise is funny because the machinery is so recognisable. Remove the meal and the payment, and there is still an experience people know how to have.

The joke also performs a useful experiment in systems analysis. It takes apart something ordinarily presented as one activity—ordering dinner—and shows how many distinct things were happening inside it: choosing, anticipating, committing, tracking, waiting, eating.

Some of those parts can apparently be offered without the others. What remains uncertain is whether repeating them helps someone step out of a spending habit or gives that habit another place to practise.

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The Part That Survives the Product

Parmar's account begins not with an abstract theory but with food he did not particularly want. During a work project in Mumbai, he told the BBC, he ordered treats and once bought a large jar of sour cream that he gave away to friends. He came to suspect that the attraction was sometimes the act of ordering rather than the food.

Sharma recognised a related pattern in filling online baskets with electronics without completing the purchase. The founders built a site that carries the rehearsal further: an imitation checkout, an imitation delivery, even an imitation inconvenience.

These sites illustrate a ritual becoming separable from the purpose it once served. A process organised around obtaining something can acquire enough appeal to operate without delivering it.

That does not make the ritual worthless. Anticipation is part of an ordinary good life. Planning a holiday can be enjoyable before anyone boards a plane; play need not produce a parcel to justify its existence. A free simulation might be entertainment, a substitute for an unnecessary purchase, or simply a joke worth trying once.

But the separation changes what we need to ask. A completed order no longer corresponds to a meal delivered; it records participation in the ritual. To learn whether that participation offers enjoyment or relief, we have to look beyond the transaction the interface knows how to count.

The founders' second site makes the point almost too neatly. According to the BBC, TripNeverLeaves lets users plan a holiday and then take a virtual flight that never leaves the runway. Every procedural step can be completed while the traveller goes nowhere.

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A Release Valve or a Rehearsal?

The name “dopamine sites” offers a tidy explanation for the appeal. The experts Biswas interviewed make it less tidy.

University of Michigan neuroscientist Kent Berridge distinguishes wanting from liking: the motivational pull towards something is not identical to the pleasure of having it. Stanford addiction psychiatrist Anna Lembke likewise cautions against treating dopamine as simply a pleasure chemical.

That distinction matters here. An interface that successfully evokes pursuit has not necessarily delivered satisfaction.

The report does not establish which effect these sites have over time. Yale consumer researcher Ravi Dhar allows that simulated shopping might serve as a release valve, while saying more empirical evidence is needed. Berridge expects the novelty to fade. Lembke worries that repeated simulation could reinforce the behaviour it imitates, but says the evidence is not yet in and the effect may differ between people.

Those are competing possibilities, not findings that can be averaged into a verdict.

At the level of one session, the difference is clear and narrow: an imaginary order incurs no real food bill. Across repeated sessions, the question changes. Does the user become less inclined to make unwanted purchases elsewhere, or more accustomed to answering boredom with a shopping ritual? Over a longer period, does the simulation become unnecessary, or become another routine the person finds difficult to leave?

These possible paths create different feedback loops. Relief could interrupt the movement from an urge to an unwanted purchase. Rehearsal could strengthen the movement from an urge to opening a shopping interface. The same visible action—placing a fake order—could belong to either path.

Counting it will not tell us which.

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Let Leaving Count as Success

Coherenceism supplies a standard here, not a diagnosis. An arrangement is not good merely because its parts fit together smoothly. Its coherence has to include the experience of those it affects, including whatever its own measures leave out.

Applied to these sites, that means neither dismissing users as dupes nor declaring them helped because no money changed hands. Their enjoyment matters. So do their ability to stop, their subsequent spending and their own judgment about whether the experience was useful.

The founders told the BBC they intend to keep the sites free and eventually share data with researchers. That is an intention, not evidence of a therapeutic benefit. Nor does the report establish a covert commercial scheme. The honest task is to keep the question open long enough to learn something.

If a simulation is offered as relief from unwanted consumption, its evaluation should be willing to discover that less use is a better outcome. A person who tries it, recognises an urge and no longer needs it might be a success. If an evaluator counted return visits as the measure of benefit, that good ending would look like a loss. This is a hypothetical test of the measure, not a claim about how these founders assess their sites.

That is the measurement problem this small internet novelty exposes. Once participation can be separated from the intended benefit, activity alone becomes an unreliable measure of success. The operator can readily observe activity inside the service. The user's benefit may appear outside it: an avoided purchase, an evening spent differently, a repaired phone rather than a replacement. Designing around that benefit requires accepting that the most valuable result may not bring the user back.

Sharma's own story supplies a modest version of such an ending. He told the BBC that after spending a week comparing replacement phones and adding them to a basket, he repaired his cracked handset instead. This was not a test of the fake-shopping site. It was an instance in which browsing ended without acquisition—and a practical need was met another way.

That is no prescription, but it does distinguish completing a ritual from meeting the need that prompted it. The aim is not to abolish anticipation, make pleasure productive or turn every playful website into a clinic. It is to preserve our ability to notice when pursuit has stopped serving us. A service offered as relief from an unwanted habit must be able to count the moment we no longer need it as a good ending.