Bodega

Airbnb made hotels feel optional. eBay turned flea markets into afterthoughts. Uber convinced us we’d never touch a steering wheel again. American startups keep finding things we thought were permanent—brick and mortar, the idea of ownership, the friction of a simple transaction—and rendering them quaint. And now there’s Bodega, which wants your local convenience store to feel the same way.

Two former Google guys, Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, founded it on a simple premise: stick small refrigerated boxes in apartment buildings, offices, gyms—anywhere there’s density. Stock them with snacks, toilet paper, hygiene stuff, whatever. You unlock it with an app, grab what you need, and the thing charges you automatically. No cashier, no small talk, no reason to ever leave the building.

I remember being weirded out by the concept when I first read about it. Not because it’s dumb—it clearly solves a real problem, late night cravings when the store is three blocks away. But because of what it represents: another incremental step toward not needing to move through the world at all. Another small friction removed. Another reason to stay inside.

The criticism I saw was mostly about urban life. These stores aren’t just vending machines—they’re hubs, places where you see the same person behind the counter, where you run into neighbors, where the neighborhood has a heartbeat. Kill that, and something about city living starts to feel more hollow, more like living in a dorm than living in a place.

But maybe that’s naive. Maybe this is just how it works now—convenience and community are incompatible, and convenience always wins. Or maybe something will happen that Bodega’s founders didn’t anticipate, the way Airbnb actually did hollow out neighborhoods, or Uber drained the small conversation out of transit. You can’t unring the bell. Once someone builds the box, it exists, and enough people will use it that the old infrastructure starts to wither. Whether that’s progress is no longer the interesting question.