That’s why I think the real endgame here for Bodega™ is to get acquired by Amazon, who will probably install Bodega™s at their Amazon Locker™ locations.
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Less comedic than five or six Redboxes sprouting treads, rolling over to BodegaBox and shoving it on its side before dragging it out to a pile driver, but definately interesting! Also sadly likely.
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NYC is going to set these fools straight. You know what that machine looks like to me?
Free chips.
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Looks like Project Tone Deaf was a success.
Complete with the traditional “sorry if you were offended” Apology Module:
“Despite our best intentions and our admiration for traditional bodegas, we clearly hit a nerve this morning,” Bodega wrote in a Medium post. “And we apologize to anyone we’ve offended. Rather than disrespect to traditional corner stores – or worse yet, a threat – we intended only admiration.”
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Think Amazon is ahead of them by buying Whole Foods.
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The lede in this story is a bit click baity… You could make the same criticism about pretty much any new product. Imagine if people protested the iPhone because of all the poor alarm clock manufacturers that would be unemployed:
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Alarm clock manufacturers are not intrinsically linked to lower income neighborhoods like bodegas are. If they were and a startup came along and said as much that they wanted to make them obsolete i’m sure people would have a problem with that.
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Cabbies sure are linked to low income jobs, and Uber and Lyft are explicitly after those jobs.
If it’s specifically bodegas anyone is concerned with, it seems to me that they should be complaining about drug store chains like CVS. When I live in NYC in the 90s there were bodegas on every corner, now they’re mostly replaced by Walgreens and the like. But I guess they make a less derisive target than a couple of app weenies.
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I’d say the outrage is at sheer chutzpah these guys had calling their own venture Bodega and going on a mission to supplant real world bodegas. If that’s not idiocy i don’t know what is.
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I heard about the bodega deal on NPR this morning. Per one of the startup dudes, their intent is not to put bodegas out of business (bull-fucking-shit) as evidenced by the ‘fact’ that their machines would be located in areas where there weren’t any bodegas. There are so many rotten holes in that statement, that I wonder if they’ve actually located places where neighborhood shoppers are starving and have no way to get to bodegas, or to any kind of market, for that matter. (Of course not!)
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I think it’s a great name. And I see no obligation whatsoever for new products to be sensitive to their competition. And furthermore these guys are the absolute worst example of the issue, it’s a pie-in-the-sky idea that’s unlikely to make any inroads. And if it did, I’d put the blame on their customers, not on them.
Haven’t we had vending machines for quite some time now? I mean…it really feels like a glorified vending machine.
Is this really a big deal?
Japan has had vending machines like these for decades and still has thousands of small “bodega” like store too. Room for both.
The whoosh you just heard was the joke going over your head.
The name pretty much looks to take the entire concept away from decades of Hispanic corner stores and taking credit. It’d be like making a restaurant just called Taco and have your mission statement that you want to make every taco restaurant irrelevant. So yeah i think calling it Bodega is far from great name.
I think that’s why it’s a big deal. Once again techbros are taking a thing that already exists (taxis, delivery, shops, juice), adding a smartphone app and an internet connection, removing as many responsibilities to employees as possible, and getting millions of dollars in VC funding because it’s “disruptive”.
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Or taking the concept of a taco truck and applying it to other foods, which of course is done ad nauseum in every American city these days? Would you criticism them similarly?
And I still don’t see how there’s any component of them “taking credit” for the concept of a bodega here. In fact them naming it after this well established institution is the opposite of taking credit. If anything it’s an homage.
I think you’re all concerned about the wrong thing. This is the passage I find the most troubling:
McDonald believes that Bodegas could eventually serve as marketing opportunities for the companies making consumer packaged goods. Bodega has very accurate demographic details about the people who live in a particular community and would use the service, giving brands a chance to put particular products in front of their target consumer.
I fear that one day, say 30 years from now or sooner, anonymous shopping will be a thing of the past, and we’ll be unable to make any sort of purchase at all without giving up some sort of personal information to the vendor. This is already happening with regards to online shopping and will only become more widespread with regard to brick-and-mortar shops too I reckon.
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Another problem is that bodegas are individually owned where all these machines are owned by one very lean company. This kind of efficiency will drastically increase wealth inequality.
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