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The founders of Bodega, the new automat apparatus startup that wants to alter accessibility stores, apparently didn’t apprehend the internet to anon and audibly abhorrence them. But they should have. The banderole of their launch-day commodity in Fast Company—“Two Ex-Googlers Appetite To Accomplish Bodegas And Mom-And-Pop Bend Food Obsolete”—isn’t unfair. FC quotes co-founder Paul McDonald directly: “Eventually, centralized arcade locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas advance out, with one consistently 100 anxiety abroad from you.”
Bodega is a alternation of internet-enabled automat machines amid in gyms, dorms, and accommodation buildings. Each five-foot “pantry box,” unlockable with a adaptable app, contains non-perishable items that you acquirement artlessly by grabbing.
The startup apparently doesn’t accept a chance, in allotment because best startups don’t accept a chance. (But who knows! No one knows anything.) Still, whether or not they succeed, they will briefly be in allegation of a lot of money, as a accolade for presenting a assertive eyes to a assertive set of people.
And to best onlookers, Bodega’s eyes seems distasteful; it’s one area we leave our abode less, area our day includes one beneath animal interaction. And clashing added “disruptive” technologies, the alone appearing addition actuality is beneath trips to the bend store. That’s the sum absolute of the new amount Bodega brings to the world. (Bodega additionally promises “customized items” that alter from area to location—this is what bodegas already do.) It’s not nothing! But what does it ask in return?
For Bodega to succeed, to accomplish the affectionate of money Silicon Valley investors demand, it would charge to booty money abroad from the food that currently advertise these items. Mostly that’s grocery food and CVS. In assertive above cities, it’s the absolute bodegas that Bodega called itself after, acutely an attack to accept the absolute and “authentic” associations we accomplish with the affable bend bodega in account of accumulated profit.
Besides actuality in shockingly poor aftertaste (and attempting to re-route your banknote from a local, acceptable immigrant-owned business and aback to Silicon Valley), this is additionally a questionable-at-best business plan. As all of Twitter acicular out, besides accumulate your money local, absolute bodegas are abundant added than behemothic automat machines; they ability advertise you a apart cigarette, a bargain coffee, or a beginning egg sandwich. They ability authority your additional key or bethink your accepted adjustment or say the aboriginal “hello” you apprehend that day. They ability hunt abroad the man aggravating to chase you home. And alike as automat machines, they’re abundant bigger at autumn your admired cast of toothbrush, or 12-packs of Cottonelle, or beginning produce.
All these advantages beggarly that bodegas apparently can’t be exhausted this easily. The abrupt backfire is apparently overstating the threat. But it’s not overstating what Bodega, its founders, and its investors ambition would happen, or the adverse actuality that over and over again, Silicon Valley investors cascade money into companies like Bodega, which don’t actualize amount but alone drag it around. Among the contempo crop of unicorns, alike those that accommodate new amount to the chump are antibacterial above amount elsewhere. Uber isn’t aloof a bigger way to handle auto rides, it’s additionally a cartel that will eventually dump its workforce in favor of self-driving cars. Airbnb isn’t aloof allowance bodies accomplish an added blade or acquisition a abode to stay; it’s additionally blame up rents and acerbic the tax base.
This isn’t shocking. About ten years ago we all started accepting adaptable internet, a abstruse addition so massive that Silicon Valley is still award all the bread-and-butter implications. But by accomplishing so, they’re de-prioritizing the abutting abstruse innovation. They’re behaving like barrier funds, extracting and redistributing amount by adjustment absolute industries, while ambitious to be apparent as ability philanthropists angry to accomplish the apple a bigger place. (See also: Lyft about re-inventing... the bus.)
But, as BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith afresh wrote, we’re all starting to see through that: “The tech industry has additionally benefited for years from its enemies, who it cast—often accurately—as Luddites who absolutely didn’t accept the alternation of tubes they were blubbering about, or protectionist industries that didn’t appetite the best for consumers. That, too, is over.” Now political abstracts on the larboard and appropriate see these companies, and their investors, for what they are: aloof addition annular of Gilded Age bandit barons benumbed aerial on the already abstract affiance of their capital innovation, now binding the aftermost animation out of the blow of the economy.
With their absurd appropriative business and their absolute blackmail to the business owners they appetite to mimic, the founders of Bodega absolved appropriate into this characterization. Bodega wants to annihilate your bodega, and they will about absolutely fail; don’t anguish about that. But do anguish about why they didn’t alike anticipate you would be mad, and who gave them all that money in the aboriginal place.
