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New Yorkers increasingly don’t know what they’re paying for. And that’s the point.
By
Hannah Frishberg
Published Mar 20, 2025
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By
Hannah Frishberg
Published Mar 20, 2025
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In a world curated by algorithms and in a city where consumers have it all, how can a company delight customers in 2025? For many New York City businesses, the answer is to add the element of surprise.
Several borough-based online boutiques, including Azura, Petite Studio, Jones New York and Cee Cee’s Closet, now sell “mystery boxes” containing bundles of clothing or jewelry. Many of the boxes have strict no refund policies, even though customers don't know what items they're buying.
Booksellers like Park Slope’s Ripped Bodice and Manhattan’s Strand Book Store now offer books wrapped to conceal their titles — a sales tactic known as the blind book date. Both the Brooklyn Public Library and New York Public Library have gotten in on the trend as well.
Not sure what to eat or drink? Sunset Park sake brewery Brooklyn Kura has an $80-a-month sake subscription program, NoHo’s Funny Face Bakery has a $36 Surprise Me Pack of treats “for the person who can’t make up their mind,” and the East Village’s newly opened Surprise Scoop will sell you ice cream with a catch: They pick the flavor.
Not sure what to watch? Nitehawk Cinema’s Prospect Park location’s “Sundays On Fire” series and AMC's “Screen Unseen” series don’t reveal what’s playing until showtime.
Marketing experts aren’t surprised. The surprise saturation, they say, has been building for years alongside another growing trend: the algorithm-based predictability of online shopping. And they say that New Yorkers are increasingly drawn to the unknown, and even paying more for it, because they’re exhausted by all the choices and control available to them in other areas of life, particularly online. Some predict that this trend is only beginning.
“ Surprise is an emotion intensifier. It's a way to just kind of turn up the volume on the vibrancy of life,” said psychology researcher and “surprisologist” Tania Luna, who co-authored the 2015 book “Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected.”
“We're living an increasingly algorithm-driven existence that really is catering to comfort, predictability, ease, convenience,” she said, noting that many of us experience a “numbness” from spending so much time scrolling and looking at screens. Surprise can function as a balm, she said.
Surprising experiences also tend to make for good social media posts, creating something of a positive feedback loop whereby people seek out surprises in the real world, document them for the digital world, see them in the digital world, and seek them out in the real world, repeat, repeat.
Alex Nagler, a longtime digital media analyst and marketer, said he’s seen surprise come to play a more and more significant role in marketing and in his personal life, where he is a fan of Broadway Roulette, which picks what Broadway show you’ll see.
“I'm so used to curating what I wear, what I listen to, what I'm eating, that sometimes it's fun to let a random number generator decide something I'm doing,” said Nagler, who does not always enjoy the shows he sees through Broadway Roulette — but says that’s not the point.
“It’s the experimentation, the joy of finding something new unexpectedly,” he said. “It’s fun to be able to say, OK, I’m not making this decision. I’m letting chance make it for me.”
When the show he ends up seeing is a dud, he doesn’t feel guilty because the onus of choice and regret is instead put on chance itself.
The same desire for a lack of control drives administrative assistant River Willcutts to attend immersive theater performances, where very few details are shared about the show in advance.
“There are some shows where you have absolutely no control over who you’re gonna see and what you’re gonna be doing,” said Willcutts, who recently visited a Bushwick church basement to enjoy a performance of the show "Dream Roulette."
“Roulette as a business model,” as marketing expert Scott Redick put it, may well be the next frontier for the surprise economy. “I wouldn't be surprised if that spreads quickly."
Today, the algorithm picks up on our preferences so quickly, it’s easy to feel trapped within echo chambers of our own creation. “People are rebelling against this” by ceding their choices to fate, said Redick.
That’s certainly what people are doing when they play ice cream roulette at Surprise Scoops, where customers pay to be served a random flavor.
Using surprises as a marketing technique is not new: Trading cards, Happy Meal toys and capsule vending machines all rely upon an element of unexpectedness.
What is new is the heightened demand for and resultant abundance of surprise, and not just as a passing pleasure but for the sake of existential relief.
And that’s why, explained Luna (the ”surprisologist”), even if roulette-playing consumers hate the ice cream flavor they get or the Broadway play they see, “it doesn’t even matter. It’s this moment of your brain responding to a genuine moment of the unexpected.”
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Hannah Frishberg
Hannah Frishberg covers New York City arts and culture. Got a tip? Email Hannah at [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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