I was ensconced in blankets and pillows when a beaked lord of the underworld revealed himself to me.
During my morning phone scroll in bed, the following ad descended upon on my feed:
It's a sad day when a targeted ad makes you hiss "not of this world, not of this world."
I knew there was only one place this could be from: hell. Or in URL form: Wish.com.
What is Wish.com?While Goop is a curated edit of products you will never need, Wish is a palpitation-inducing bogland of products you will also never need.
Think bloodworms, leggings with a single thigh hole, a NSFW melon, and what could very well be 23 stray cats.
The San Francisco-based marketplace was founded in 2010 by Google engineer Peter Szulczewski and Yahoo programmer Danny Zhang. The e-commerce site began as a wish-list app, which makes sense if your idea of material pleasures includes a breast-shaped soap dispenser and an unworkable peach gearshift.
With a focus on low-priced goods manufactured in China, the company became the most downloaded e-commerce app. It's currently valued at more than $8.7 billion.
"Wish prides itself on helping users' money go further," reads an answer in Wish's FAQs. That the marketplace dares to include more questions than it answers — Why do I need a laser Shrek lamp for my child? — is bewildering, but the biggest oversight is that it mentions its aim to stretch customers' cash, yet says nothing about stretching customers' grasp of sanity and reality.
Considering the variety of items available on the site, Wish must surely implement a screening process with its vendors and their goods. Right?
"We screen for items that violate IP, make false representations, that attempt to price gouge consumers, and those that advocate for hate crime or glorify hatred towards others," Glenn Lehrman, Wish's head of communications, told Insider when contacted about this article.
"That being said, with more than 200 million unique items on our platform, we do rely on our community to help us police items that may violate any of the above policies."
What's with Wish's haunting targeted ads?Without ever having visited Wish.com, I'd been targeted with ads for a "Be a woman with orgasm" pleasure enhancer and an absorbent, wolf-themed hallway runner over the years. At times, it has felt like a sinister take on my supposed lack of sexual prowess. But there's no logic to the ads — it's simply a matter of shocking users into clicking through.
The company's cofounder Szulczewski "spent six and a half years at developing core technology powering Google AdWords."
Wish is also one of Facebook's biggest spenders, forking out more than $100 million on ads each year.
It has worked, in a way. Users have been creeped out enough to create groups like r/WTFwish and The Weirdest Sh*t on Wish to showcase Wish's weirdest items.
Exploring Wish.com's most feral COVID-19 productsOver the past few months, the company has become a go-to marketplace for protective equipment and other pandemic-related items.
"We've seen a huge surge in popularity over the last few months in essential items, in particular face masks, sanitizer, gloves, toilet paper, and paper towels," Lehrman told Insider.
So, what fetid fruit does Wish bear during COVID-19?
In an act of needless self-sacrifice — not seen since Jack Dawson didn't perch on the doorframe — I've rounded up Wish's most nauseating products available under its pandemic, COVID-19, and coronavirus sections.
