world · 2 min read
The Vatican placed an order, and so did Antarctica
Orders have arrived from 202 countries and territories. Eighteen of them ordered exactly once, and the list includes the Vatican, Svalbard, Timor-Leste and Antarctica.
by Arthur
published September 24, 2026
Orders have now arrived from 202 countries and territories. That sounds like a big company number, but the truth is less glamorous and more interesting: eighteen of those places showed up exactly once, one person, one order, and never again. The list includes the Vatican, Svalbard, Timor-Leste, the Comoros, Norfolk Island, Lesotho, Åland and Antarctica.
The geography of desire is deeply uneven
| group | countries | orders | % of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| the top 10 | 10 | 22,878 | 68.6% |
| 11th to 50th | 40 | 8,475 | 25.4% |
| 51st to 120th | 70 | 1,697 | 5.1% |
| 121st to 202nd | 82 | 324 | 1.0% |
The 33,374 orders with an identified destination country, through September 21st, 2026. The country comes from the address the person typed, after passing through our geocoder.
Ten countries account for more than two thirds of everything. On the other end, 82 countries put together do not reach 1% of orders, and all of them fit inside a single busy afternoon in the United States. It is the same curve any global store has, with one difference: nobody paid international shipping to land on this list, so what is left is pure wanting.
How Antarctica got in here
Better to explain than to fake a mystery. The address on that order was typed as an ordinary street followed by the word Antarctica, and our geocoder accepted it without complaint, which dropped a pin on the frozen continent. It was a single item. We do not know whether the person sits at a research station or simply enjoyed typing that, and we are equally fond of both possibilities.
The Vatican is the smallest sovereign state on earth and it still placed an order. Svalbard is an archipelago inside the Arctic. Norfolk Island is a tiny territory in the middle of the Pacific. None of this is a data glitch: it is the real shape of a site that charges nothing and therefore has no market, only reach.
The tail shops in English
Across the 82 countries at the bottom of the list, 265 of the 324 orders were placed on the English version of the site, or 81.8%. When no version exists in a person's own language, they do not leave: they shop in English instead. Which is exactly why every new language redraws the map, because the demand was already there before the translation, just hidden inside English.
Ten countries make 68.6% of the orders and another 82 make 1%. The tail does not pay the bills, but it is the part that proves wanting has no address.
If you are the person from the Vatican, from Antarctica or from Svalbard, your order is on file here, and its fictional journey was put together with the same care as anybody else's. We are obviously not saying who you are. We just thought it was fair to mention that we noticed.