THIS WEEK: Toronto may be the only city in North America to boast an emergency sex toy–delivery service.
First came home-delivery pizza. Then beer came to your door. And now—finally!?—there’s an express delivery service for sex toys.
In what’s almost certainly a first for a North American city, Toronto now boasts an online sex-toy company that promises to deliver the goods within one hour. Going by the slightly clunky name Heat of the Moment Express (hotme.ca), the service lets horned-up Torontonians place an order online and have their purchase couriered to them at lightning speed.
Depending on your point of view, this development could be a healthy expression of our sexually liberated society or a sign of the apocalypse. Either way, there’s clearly an urgent demand for sex toys in this city. The question, though, is why. And who on earth is ordering them from a retail hotline?
The guys with the answers are Roberto Piazza and Bruno Pistilli, two former IT workers and the founders of Heat of the Moment. When I visit them in their warehouse on a commercial strip in Vaughan, the two are sitting in a cramped office monitoring their site for customers in need of emergency supplies.
Fuelled by a constant supply of coffee from the Tim Hortons around the corner, they are on duty until 3 a.m., chatting with customers online, taking orders, and packaging products in unmarked white bags for dispatch to all corners of the GTA.
For reasons that remain unclear, Piazza and Pistilli elected to have their computers make mooing sounds to alert them whenever a customer logs onto the site. When I visit the warehouse it’s early evening, a slow time in the sex toy–delivery business, and the farmyard noises are at a minimum. I’m assured, though, that later it will sound like a herd of cattle has wandered in.
“Thursday and Friday are our busiest nights,” says Piazza, “but late, after midnight.” More surprisingly, orders also spike at 9 a.m. on Monday and Tuesday mornings, which Piazza chalks up to the city’s horny parents. “On those mornings we get sales because the kids are going to school,” he says. “Parents are finally getting rid of [the kids] after the weekend and then going on to our site.”
I’m quite taken with the idea of randy middle-aged people dropping the kids off at school then racing back home to place a rush order on a vibrator or two, so I have to struggle to hide my disappointment when I’m told that the majority of the site’s traffic comes from a totally different demographic. They’re guys, and young ones at that. Most of them are in their 20s and 30s.
That, at least, explains why our conversation has been punctuated by messages popping up on the site asking questions like the price on the Fuck Me Silly Mega Masturbator sex doll ($399 plus tax, if you’re interested). It’s hard to imagine a soccer mom ordering one of those (although there is a version for women, too).
“We think it’s a generational thing,” says Piazza, when I ask why his service is so appealing to twentysomething men. “Nowadays young guys want everything now.” He also points out that his site tends to get the orders people wouldn’t feel comfortable buying in person—even in a sex shop, an expensive, life-like blow-up doll is a bit of a delicate purchase.
If the demographics are surprising, the logistics are downright baffling. It turns out Toronto’s jammed roads aren’t the only obstacles to be negotiated while delivering a mega masturbator against the clock. “We get a lot of special requests,” says Piazza, “like please don’t ring the doorbell, don’t make any noise, please meet me outside.” In addition to delivering to homes and hotel rooms, customers with a particular passion for the cloak and dagger have asked to rendezvous with drivers at secluded car parks. Others still prefer to receive their discreetly packaged sex toys while sipping their lattes in coffee shops, introducing the risk of the driver targeting the wrong latte sipper. Perhaps a Starbucks-style call of “I have a large, double-ended dildo on the bar for Graham” is the way forward?
And that brings us to the fraught issue of etiquette. Specifically, tipping etiquette. What, I ask, is the socially acceptable amount to tip a guy who’s just driven a sex toy across town at 2 a.m.? Ten per cent? Fifteen? Do you just grab the thing and slam the door? Piazza tells me it works just like any other service: “The bigger the order, the bigger the tip.” He does, however, point out that the company currently has a policy of reimbursing customers’ tips with the equivalent in vouchers off their next purchase. If only the city’s pizza delivery companies would do the same.
Heat of the Moment Express, 647-692-1470, hotme.ca.
CORRECTION, NOV. 15, 2012: The original version of this article featured a photo of a sex-toy display at a retail location not affiliated with Heat of the Moment Express. The photo has been replaced.
