kamikat

admiralteal, 8 months ago

@ZachWeinersmith

The NY Bodega is the US answer to the corner grocery store that exists in... most of the developed world, honestly.

In USAland, if you want groceries, you get in your crew cab pickup truck and take a highway 15-45 minutes (depending on traffic)to the local supercenter located behind the mile-wide city-mandated parking lot to buy a week's worth of supplies. In most of the world, you pop into your corner grocery that isn't 5 minutes out of your way on your way home from your local errands and grab food for the next day or two.

NYC, as possibly the only US city that can genuinely be called not auto-oriented, needed to fill that megamart niche with something. But it's still 'merica fuck yea-land so we replaced the beautiful and cheap local green grocer with a dingy, shady, overpriced bodega that makes most of its money on booze, cigarettes, and lottery tickets but maybe has some cabbage in the back.

You're 100% right. Drop bodegas throughout most US cities and they don't work. CAN'T work, because the bodega could never be able to make enough money to afford the huge lot of land minimum parking rules would require they have nearly anywhere.

There's an exception, though. Go to the old, poor part of town in nearly any American city and you'll still find the local bodegas -- at least in the places that various dollar stores haven't run them out of business and replaced them with a similar but much worse product (that parasitizes and exports wealth from those communities rather than being operated by members of them).

/urbanist screed