My Fake Retail Chain Has Seven Locations, a Loyalty Program, and Better Q3 Numbers Than I Do Personally

Let me be upfront with you: I have never run a business. I have never hired an employee, negotiated a lease, or attended a single supply chain logistics seminar. What I have done is spent the last eight months building a fictional home goods retail chain called Brindlewood & Co. inside a Microsoft Excel workbook that now has 23 tabs, color-coded inventory categories, and a customer satisfaction index I update every other Sunday.

Brindlewood & Co. currently operates seven locations across a fictional mid-sized metro I named Carlow Heights. Its flagship store—located in a made-up shopping district I have mapped out in a separate Google Doc—specializes in artisanal candles, aggressively cozy throw blankets, and the kind of ceramic mugs that whisper you deserve this directly into your soul. Last quarter, my Westside location underperformed. I restructured its product mix. The numbers improved. I felt genuine professional satisfaction.

None of this is real. And yet.

The Spreadsheet That Became a Universe

Turns out, I am not alone in this particular flavor of madness. Across Reddit threads, Discord servers, and the shadowy corners of productivity forums, there exists a quietly thriving subculture of people who have built elaborate, fully functional fake businesses inside spreadsheets, Notion databases, and Airtable workspaces. Not as jokes. Not as art projects. As ongoing concerns they return to regularly, update with genuine care, and—this is the part that gets me—actually learn from.

We're talking inventory management systems with SKU codes for products that don't exist. Profit and loss statements for restaurants that have never served a single plate of food. Org charts for companies staffed entirely by people named things like "Regional Manager Diane" who has, in my personal canon, been with Brindlewood since the early days and is frankly due for a raise.

The spreadsheets range from modest (a single-tab fake bakery with a seasonal menu) to genuinely staggering (one Redditor documented a fictional logistics company with simulated shipping routes, fuel cost variables, and driver performance metrics that update based on randomized formulas). These aren't people who work in finance. These are people who work in HR, teach middle school, do graphic design, and one guy who kept saying he "just wanted to see if the math worked out."

Spoiler: for him, it did. He's now on his third fictional company.

Why Build Something That Sells Nothing?

Here's the thing about running a fake business that nobody tells you: it scratches approximately four different psychological itches simultaneously, which is a remarkable return on zero investment.

Itch one: control. Real life is a cascading series of variables you cannot manage. Your fake artisanal soap company, however, does exactly what you tell it to do. You set the margins. You decide the product lineup. When the Lavender & Oat SKU isn't moving, you discontinue it without a single awkward conversation. The entire enterprise bends to your will in a way that literally nothing else in adult life does. It's not escapism so much as rehearsal for a world where things make sense.

Itch two: the simulation game jones, scratched for free. Anyone who has lost three weeks of their life to Stardew Valley, Planet Coaster, or the Sims understands the specific pleasure of watching a system you built hum along productively. Fake business spreadsheets deliver that same dopamine loop without the $30 price tag or the 2 AM "just one more season" spiral. You are, essentially, playing a business simulator with no graphics and unlimited free DLC.

Itch three: low-stakes entrepreneurship education. Multiple people in these communities describe their fake businesses as the most practical business education they've ever received. When you're forced to actually model out what happens to your margins when rent goes up 12%, or what a staffing change does to your labor cost percentage, the concepts stop being abstract. One woman who's been running a fictional vintage clothing boutique for over a year told a forum she now understands cash flow better than she did after two semesters of business classes. The fake boutique, she noted, is currently profitable. Her real savings account was not available for comment.

Itch four: honestly? It's just fun. Naming your fake regional managers. Designing a loyalty program tier system where top customers get a fictional status called "Brindlewood Gold." Writing a fake company origin story for the "About" section of a website that doesn't exist. It's worldbuilding with a spreadsheet instead of a fantasy map, and there is something deeply, specifically satisfying about it that I refuse to pathologize.

The Line Between Hobby and Actual Business Plan

Here's where it gets philosophically interesting, and also a little bit terrifying: some of these fake businesses are good. Like, suspiciously functional. The models are tight. The unit economics make sense. The pricing strategy is sound.

A few people in these communities have reported—sheepishly, with the energy of someone confessing something embarrassing—that their fictional business eventually became a real one. The spreadsheet that started as a creative outlet turned into a legitimate business plan when they realized the numbers actually worked. One guy's fake specialty coffee subscription service became a real specialty coffee subscription service. He credits his eight months of fake quarterly reports with giving him the confidence and the framework to actually launch.

Which raises the question: at what point does a fake business become a real one? Is it when money changes hands? When someone else's name appears on the org chart for reasons other than your own amusement? Or is it earlier—when you start making real decisions based on what your fictional Q3 report told you?

I ask because last week I rearranged my actual personal budget after noticing that my Brindlewood & Co. Eastside location's overhead structure was more sensible than my own monthly expenses. The fake business was, in a measurable sense, better run than my real life.

Diane Is Getting That Raise

I don't know what Brindlewood & Co. is, exactly. It's not a business. It's not a game. It's not quite a creative writing project. It lives somewhere in the overlap between all three—a weird little simulation I tend to like a garden, except the garden sells throw blankets and has a regional manager who has been loyally fictional for eight months.

What I know is this: I understand profit margins now. I understand inventory turnover. I understand why you don't open a seventh location before your sixth one is stable, a lesson I learned the hard way when my Northgate store nearly tanked the whole fictional chain in February.

And I know that when real-life decisions feel overwhelming and chaotic and completely outside my control, I can open that spreadsheet, look at the color-coded tabs, and remember that somewhere in Carlow Heights, a fictional candle shop is doing just fine.

Diane's raise is approved, by the way. She's been with the company since the beginning. She's earned it.