Disrupting bodegas: Automation, appropriation, and the branding of urban authenticity

In September of 2017, two former Google employees announced the launch of a start-up in the U.S. called Bodega, a human-less convenience kiosk designed with machine learning capabilities that was named after small, neighborhood brick-and-mortar convenience stores in New York City. Using a textual analysis approach, this article explores the critical discourse that emerged on social media, blogs, and online news outlets in the aftermath the start-up's launch. It suggests that the narrative constructed about bodegas in urban communities reified a brand of multicultural urban authenticity and immigrant determination and grit. The branding of bodegas distances them from the very communities they historically served and obscures the complex realities of labor, precarity, and gentrification in New York City.