What the Corner Store Was Actually For
There’s something about the corner store at 2am that defies optimization. Not the products—you’re never buying good wine at 2am, you know that going in—but the act itself. The fluorescent light, the person behind the counter who’s seen everything, the brief human transaction. Silicon Valley hates this.
Bodega, founded by two former Google engineers named Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, wants to eliminate that experience. Their model: install a pantry-sized box in your apartment lobby or office hallway, stock it with snacks and toiletries and emergency supplies, let an app unlock it, handle payment automatically. No cashier. No waiting. No ambient humanity whatsoever.
The name was the tell. "Bodega" is what New Yorkers call their corner stores—those dense, overstocked neighborhood institutions run largely by immigrant families that function as social infrastructure as much as retail. Naming an automated cabinet after them is either oblivious or deliberately confrontational, and when Bodega launched, critics didn’t miss it. Here was a Silicon Valley company announcing casually that it would render immigrant-owned small businesses obsolete, and it had chosen to name itself after exactly what it intended to destroy. The backlash arrived fast.
I understand the appeal. I genuinely do. The convenience is real, the hours are real, the fantasy of never needing to leave your building for a bottle of shampoo at three in the morning has obvious utility. But what tech optimism keeps getting wrong is that the friction is sometimes the point. The walk to the corner store is not a problem to be solved—it clears your head. The transaction is human. You’re not optimizing a bottleneck, you’re living in a city.
Airbnb made hotels redundant. Uber replaced taxis. Each time, the efficiency argument won, and each time something unmeasured disappeared alongside it. With Bodega, that something is the social fabric of the block—the store that’s been there twenty years, that knows your face, that makes a neighborhood feel like a neighborhood rather than a series of monetized units. Maybe I’m romanticizing it. Maybe it’s just a box with chips. But the confident naming, and the easy assumption that these places are problems rather than things people actually love, tells you everything about how these companies think.