That Story About The Guys Trying To Replace Mom And Pop Stores With Their Startup Sucks
Have you ever read something that made you so furious you couldn't stop reading? Do you find yourself, in this year of our lord 2017, doing this very thing actually quite often? You are not alone. We do it too, and so does the rest of the internet. This is the Hate Reader's Digest.
The Read
Wednesday morning, Fast Company published a story about Bodega, a startup from two former Google employees, Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, aiming to replace urban mom-and-pop stores and bodegas with highly customizable, flashily designed vending machines.
You should read the original story by Elizabeth Segran, which, to be clear, is a good piece of reporting. Segran confronted one of Bodega's founders on some of the more problematic aspects of the company1. She also interviewed the chairman of the New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on these very topics, who was very critical of the startup.
The Hate
It's not the quality of the reporting the internet latched onto to, but the insensitivity and stupidity of the idea of Bodega itself.
Desus Nice, appropriately of Bodega Boys podcast fame, tweeted a diss at Bodega with a reference to another very hate readable story:
But beyond the angry jokes, there's a lot of angry truth.
The Fader tweeted this story, which they published earlier this year:
Madison Malone Kircher at New York Mag took a nice swipe at Bodega and its Bay Area tech scene roots with Silicon Valley, Please Stay Away From My Bodega.
The founders seem to have missed that while rich investors love to hear about the opportunities for "disrupting" urban institutions, the people who actually use them don't, so much.
The Intercept's Sam Biddle weighed in on how Bodega's inexplicable ability to raise funding from venture capitalists and angel investments from companies like Facebook and Google further exemplifies the tech bubble that seemed extreme in 2014 and yet continues to grow:
Reading Biddle's 2014 story about the storage startup, MakeSpace, it's easy to see parallels with today's news (Bodega raised has $2.5 million, according to Tech Crunch):
This is a storage unit business that's received over $10 million in venture capital backing. I know that $10 million is essentially bee piss in a world where WhatsApp goes for $19 billion, but the idea of "ten million dollars" really need to start meaning something again.
[Gawker]
And while bodegas are most prevalent in New York and Los Angeles, the Washington Post's Molly Roberts took aim at the vending machine company with the aptly-named op-ed, 'Bodega,' The Start-Up That Wants To Kill Mom-And-Pop Shops, Is A Very Bad Idea.
Bodega isn't just an insulting idea. It's also a bad one. Though community stores' idiosyncrasies will keep customers coming back, there's more to it. The inability of Bodega's founders to appreciate the value of the unique has led to a bigger flaw in their business model.
Eater's Helen Rosner tweeted a very good thread deconstructing Bodega's possible business model and the problems it might encounter2:
There's more. Read all of Rosner's thread here.
Finally, as a bit of a palette cleanser, enjoy Loving The Bodega Downstairs, a New York Times story from February, published after many of New York's Yemeni-owned bodega's went on strike to protest President Trump's travel ban:
"When I walk in," he said, "they say, 'the regular?' That means two eggs with cheese on whole wheat for me," he explained, "and one egg scrambled with ketchup for the dog."
