Analysis of South Korea's 'dopamine shop' retail trend

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What becomes of a desire that never materialises? And is there satisfaction to be had from the experience of yearning itself?

These are the questions posed by “dopamine shops”, a new breed of websites born out of South Korea, named after the neurotransmitter in our brains associated with pleasure and reward-seeking.

Bearing names such as “Food Never Arrives”, “FakeHaul” and the less imaginative “Dopamine Shop”, these are digital storefronts that mimic the look and feel of the real online stores with one crucial difference: no real money exchanges hands, and your order never arrives.

The idea is a silly but sticky one: it’s been making international headlines, entrepreneurs outside Asia are taking up the idea and many sites are boasting millions of users.

Dopamine shops rest on the hypothesis that window shopping can be just as thrilling as consumption itself – that the dopamine rush we get from shopping is anticipatory in nature: Dopamine Shop’s tagline – “retail therapy without spending a cent” – says it all. It seems we’re so deep into consumer culture that merely the performance of it is enough.

Curious, I spend an afternoon poking around a few of these sites, adding ridiculous upon ridiculous product to cart with gleeful abandon.

A pair of rare, gold-foiled Nike Air Force 1s embossed with the Louis Vuitton logo ($3500) go in my shopping basket, as does a Rolex watch worth more than a year’s worth of rent ($34,500). Next, in goes a Carhartt jacket ($260) and Le Creuset Dutch oven that I’ve actually been coveting ($420).

I go to the checkout and fill in a fake name and address. Shipping is free, thankfully, but they do tack on an 8 per cent tax. Oh, what the hell, life is short.

I bite the bullet and type in the number for a fake credit card, connected to a bank account that doesn’t exist. Success! My order is on its way. I’m given a tracking number and told to expect regular updates on its status.

The whole ordeal has been fun, but I’m left wanting more. This is digital edging for the person who gets off on designer labels, not sex – PornHub for the Carrie Bradshaws of the world. But now, my lust for stuff has become stronger. I crave the plastic smell emitted by a brand-new pair of sneakers, the cool metal touch of a hefty designer watch on my wrist.

I find cheap imitations for each of these products online in minutes, on websites such as Shein, and wonder if they would bring me more or less joy than my afternoon of simulation? Is it better to shop the real thing on a fake website? Or shop for fakes on a real website?

“These sites take the enjoyable parts of shopping, browsing, choosing, and imagining, and removing the bill,” says Dr Anastasia Hronis, clinical psychologist and author of The Dopamine Brain.

“People have always window-shopped, so that isn’t new. But now the ritual has been turned into a digital experience, tapping into reward pathways in the brain that excite our desire for novelty and possibility.”

However, Hronis is concerned about the time and effort people may pour into these websites, an experience which is she says is “rarely nourishing”, and likening the short-term thrill to other dopamine-rich activities such as blind boxes, gambling or porn.

“The reality is that dopamine-driven behaviours often pull us away from the things in life that feel more deeply meaningful or satisfying. ”

Desire is a funny thing in today’s culture, much of which is built around sublimating, rather than embracing, our most base instincts. We go on “dopamine detoxes”, Brick our phones and go “boy sober” or just plain sober.

At least half a million Australians are using GLP-1 medications, with an increasing number doing so for non-medical reasons such as weight management. These are drugs that work by suppressing our hunger signals – for food, yes – but also sex, shopping and addictive substances such as alcohol, as anecdotal evidence and emerging research suggests.

The therapeutic, clinical potential for these drugs to revolutionise conditions such as diabetes, obesity and addiction aside, what does it mean for the general population that we’ve become so intent on controlling our senses and erasing the evidence of a life well lived?

This modern restraint nudges against a culture fixated on cheap rewards: online gambling, porn, the endless scroll of TikTok, fast fashion hauls.

Then there’s the fact these ghost shops aren’t that pleasurable to browse in the first place. It’s interesting (and somewhat appalling) that the user experience on most of these dopamine shops is shoddy. They’re ugly, clunky to use and poorly categorised.

FakeHaul, created by a Microsoft developer in the United States, is designed in the image of ultra-fast fashion marketplace Temu. Surely if we’re in the business of simulated shopping, where money is no object, we’d all want the ultimate, white glove experience?

Enshittification, a term coined by Canadian-British technology critic and author Cory Doctorow to describe the gradual (and deliberate) decay of the digital services meant to better our daily lives, feels apt here.

Online shopping, by and large, has become so diabolically lousy it’s barely worth it any more. Food delivery apps such as UberEats are overpriced and delivery times slow. Trying to find anything worth buying through Google is like trying to navigate the laser-protected vault in Mission: Impossible – dodging sponsored ads for drop-shipping sites and fast fashion.

Interpreted differently, or more generously, one could argue these websites are akin to art projects – high-performance art designed to reflect our monkey-brained impulses back to us.

Seohyun Park, the 21-year-old mechanical engineering South Korean student behind the fake food delivery app Food Never Arrives, told The New York Times her product was intended as a lighthearted experiment. FakeHaul’s website footer explicitly states it’s a parody.

Another, Damta World, isn’t even about shopping, but designed to simulate cigarette breaks.

These websites wouldn’t be the first attempt at satire through simulation.

More than a century ago, activist Elizabeth Magie created the Landlord’s Game as a means of demonstrating the evils of capitalism. That board game would later be bought by Parker Brothers and rebranded as Monopoly – shedding the irony of its first iteration to become an earnest, rags-to-riches game and a staple of many a family argument.

The Sims, now in its 26th year, was a staple of many Millennial childhoods. Its founder, Will Wright, has said the video game, in which creators build a life from scratch, was created to satirise American consumer culture.

Performance art or not, there may be a more sinister side to these dopamine shops.

Gary Mortimer, a professor of marketing and consumer behaviour at Queensland University of Technology, says they have the potential to reinforce the very thing they’re claiming to curb.

Indeed, Dopamine Shop features a “buy it for real” button beneath its fake “add to cart” call to action that redirects users to Amazon (although these links are often broken or direct users to unrelated products).

Others seem to funnel users towards related services, such as fake food delivery app FoodNeverComes, which features prompts to download-addiction curbing app RewireHeaven.

Nor does the theory they can be a healthier outlet for shopping addicts necessarily hold up. While Mortimer says there is no research yet on the benefits of simulated shopping apps for curbing overconsumption, there is evidence that fake gambling sites can be a “gateway drug” to problematic gambling.

And while dopamine shops don’t trade in real goods, Mortimer says many trade in something far more valuable: consumer behaviour data.

Many such sites do indeed have disclaimers that user data may be collected and provided to analytics partners.

“I see this as being a very savvy business model, where potentially a brand may provide the online dopamine shopping site with products ranges, enable the site to manipulate price to identify popular items, colours and sizes, and at what price point,” says Mortimer. “That’s great marketing data.”

This information, of course, might then be used to shape targeted advertising across social media.

“The type of apps we’re now starting to see are all about simulated experiences and experiments. So we know that there’s always this intention-behaviour gap – when we survey shoppers and say, ‘how likely would you be to buy this product at this price?’, people say, ‘yeah, highly likely or most likely’, but we don’t really know if those intentions will lead to actual purchase behaviour,” he says.

While I enjoyed my afternoon foray into the world of fake shops, for now, I think I’ll keep living my Rolex-less, designer-label free existence, and get my dopamine the old-fashioned way – seeing real people, eating real food and chasing joy – no simulation needed.

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