I go for the latter, chuck in some extra guacamole and watch as the app follows the courier<\/a>\u2019s journey. But I\u2019d better get used to the idea of leftovers \u2013 because none of this food<\/a> will ever turn up on my doorstep. I haven\u2019t been scammed, and my order hasn\u2019t been intercepted by hungry neighbours. The fact that this meal will never materialise is the whole point. <\/p>\n Confused yet? The app in question, which bears the Ronseal-style name Food Never Comes, is one of a clutch of platforms known as dopamine sites, originating in South Korea. It\u2019s not just takeaway simulations either. The likes of Dopahaul and PeykMart have been designed to mimic the online shopping<\/a> experience, but without any money changing hands; you can even track your imaginary deliveries once you\u2019ve \u201cbought\u201d them.<\/p>\n Their aim is to provide that heady rush that comes with when you press \u201cadd to basket\u201d, without any of the associated cost \u2013 or, say, the shame of having to trek to the Post Office to return some truly heinous \u201cScandi style\u201d clogs that you ordered from an Instagram brand in the dead of night (definitely not speaking from experience here). <\/p>\n Frankly, I\u2019m something of a Millennial doom-spender. When I\u2019m happy, I can go weeks without opening the ASOS app. But when I\u2019m stressed out? Sad? I often default to retail therapy, underpinned by a vague pessimism. Why not buy another silly wiggly frame to fill with a silly print? It\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to buy a house any time soon.<\/p>\n I\u2019m far from alone in partaking in this particular coping mechanism. Recent research<\/a> from Tesco Bank found that 18 per cent of adults doom-spend when they\u2019re faced<\/a> with negative headlines and dispiriting social media posts; it\u2019s most prevalent among the younger generations, with 37 per cent of Gen Z and 25 per cent of Millennials surveyed admitting to it. <\/p>\n Could these sites be a good \u2013 and far cheaper \u2013 alternative to impulse shopping<\/a> (with none of the associated returns admin)? Or is this just yet another step towards a Black Mirror-style dystopia where we\u2019re all sitting around silently tapping our phones in pursuit of yet another artificial high? <\/p>\n Dopamine<\/a>, the neurotransmitter that helps us feel pleasure as part of the brain\u2019s reward system, is released whenever you do something enjoyable; using social media, for example, gives us regular hits<\/a>, which encourage us to return again and again. <\/p>\n We can also \u201ctrigger dopamine through the anticipation or expectation of an event or experience, not just the actual experience of it\u201d, explains psychotherapist and author Eloise Skinner<\/a>. \u201cWhen our brain predicts a pleasurable outcome, it triggers a dopamine release,\u201d she adds, \u201cand this is also involved in reinforcement, making us more likely to repeat a behaviour that triggers these pleasure pathways\u201d.<\/p>\n These fake shopping platforms, then, \u201cwork to put this process into action without ever delivering the eventual reward\u201d, Skinner says. And because they are \u201cdesigned with no eventual consequences in mind\u201d, we\u2019re not necessarily disappointed when the products never arrive (if so, the dopamine rush would \u201cfade away\u201d). <\/p>\n A stint spent virtually shopping for fake products soon sends me down the existential rabbit hole. What could be next \u2013 a dating app populated with imaginary people, whom you can swipe through to receive the buzz of a match? <\/p>\n Instead, she adds, the feeling of no consequences might give us \u201ca sense of freedom, autonomy and control\u201d or escapism, \u201cwhich can be welcome in generations where life feels stressful and overwhelming\u201d. <\/p>\n Essentially, Skinner reckons, \u201cit\u2019s not too dissimilar from window shopping, which people can often do to feel a sense of excitement or novelty without having any financial consequences\u201d. Consider it a high-tech version of adding items to your online cart and never checking out, a practice that\u2019s been nicknamed \u201cghost shopping\u201d.<\/p>\n Over on Food Never Comes, each item has a \u201cprice\u201d, with a fake delivery charge and even fictitious taxes added onto the total, too, for an extra dash of verisimilitude. There\u2019s a certain childish fun to dreaming up chaotic food combinations, but there\u2019s also a lesson to be learned about my consumption habits hidden in there, too. <\/p>\n Using it shows me that often when I start thinking about a takeaway, I\u2019ve not got any particularly burning desire to sample the delights of Uber Eats \u2013 I\u2019m just bored and faffing around on my phone in search of a buzz. A quick scroll exercises much of the desire to actually make a real order.<\/p>\n It\u2019s when I test out the shopping platforms that this experience comes undone for me. Buying tat I don\u2019t need constitutes a far bigger spending trap for me than takeaway, so this is where I could really do with a nice free distraction. <\/p>\n I am immediately put off, though, by how Dopahaul\u2019s interface seems to bear a strong resemblance to mega-marketplaces like Temu and AliExpress. The sites share an orangey colour scheme, and the product photos appear as if they have been cooked up by AI<\/a>. That doesn\u2019t matter so much for the gadgets and tech, but it doesn\u2019t work at all for the fashion offering. <\/p>\n Because there\u2019s nothing here that I would ever want to add to my wardrobe \u2013 just a bunch of freaky knee-high leather boots and \u201cAdasdas\u201d trainers \u2013 the shopping itch goes unscratched. <\/p>\n The \u201cSoftSculpt ribbed co-ord set\u201d, available in subtle shades of cream, mocha and blush, is particularly haunting \u2013 it looks more akin to Victorian underwear than something you\u2019d spot in the Pilates studio.<\/p>\n According to its listing, though, it has been \u201csold\u201d 28.9k times \u2013 although in this uncanny valley, it\u2019s not clear whether this is a completely made-up metric or an actual indicator of how many users are fake shopping. Perhaps I am just an incorrigible retail snob \u2013 I would probably happily be duped by some sort of \u201cDope-a-Porter\u201d platform flogging imaginary overpriced smock dresses. <\/p>\n I\u2019m not entirely convinced, then. Plus, a stint spent virtually shopping for fake products soon sends me down the existential rabbit hole. What could be next \u2013 a dating app populated with imaginary people<\/a>, whom you can swipe through to receive the buzz of a match, without ever having to really connect with a human being (this actually doesn\u2019t feel too far off)? <\/p>\n If someone is particularly lonely or anxious, or dealing with grief or sadness, it could become a way of distracting from that,<\/p>\n Lowri Walsh, psychotherapist<\/p>\n If someone is prone to overspending \u201cas a way of dealing with difficult emotions\u201d, sites like these \u201cmight be a way to reduce the consequences in the short term and help them stabilise, so they\u2019re ready to do some work around what\u2019s leading to that behaviour in the first place\u201d, explains Lowri Walsh, psychotherapist and honorary lecturer at the University of Lancashire<\/a>. <\/p>\n But the risk, she adds, is that they will just become an avoidance tactic \u2013 \u201cif someone is particularly lonely or anxious, or dealing with grief or sadness, it could become a way of distracting from that,\u201d she says. Essentially, unless we\u2019re also willing to \u201ctackle the underlying cause\u201d of our scrolling and spending, fake shopping is just \u201creplacing it with another kind of behaviour that may not be that helpful\u201d. <\/p>\n She\u2019d be concerned, too, that this is just another digital distraction that is \u201ctaking us away from real life \u2013 you\u2019re just living a simulated life on your phone, and the constant reward [from apps] makes real life feel not as exciting, or make it harder to tolerate boredom\u201d. Her comments give me pause \u2013 do I really want to spend the non-refundable minutes of my one finite existence scrolling through products that don\u2019t exist, following a delivery driver who will never deliver? When it\u2019s put like that, the answer is a hard \u201cno\u201d. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2306,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-703438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-mobile","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Did](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-16-at-12-04-21.png\")
Did somebody say, just wait? On Food Never Comes, you can even track the fake courier tasked with dispatching your \u2018order\u2019 (Food Never Comes)<\/p>\n![\"37](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/iStock-2263207333.jpg\")
37 per cent of Gen Z and 25 per cent of Millennials admit to doom-spending (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n![\"Dopahaul](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-16-at-11-15-03.png\")
Dopahaul offers all manner of products \u2013 but none of them actually exist (Dopahaul)<\/p>\n![\"Uncanny](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Screenshot-2026-07-16-at-11-30-17.png\")
Uncanny threads: This co-ord set didn\u2019t exactly pique my interest (Dopahaul)<\/p>\n