Bodega. Or how Silicon Valley is screwing us all 😉 Part 2
October 3, 2017
By Gonzalo López Martí- Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com
- Welcome to the latest wannabe unicorn and Silicon Valley storm in a teapot.
- Bodega.
- Yeah, it’s called Bodega.
- https://www.bodega.ai/
- You might’ve read about it somewhere.
- It was founded with fanfare by two former Google employees, Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, and is getting tons of pretty negative coverage in the media.
- The business plan: replacing actual bodegas with some sort of novelty vending machines.
- “Turning bodegas into a thing of the past,” to quote the founders.
- As I was saying, these motherfxckers got tons of coverage in the press.
- For the wrong reasons, mind you.
- They received a few million from various tech investors too.
- Unbelievable.
- It takes me and my team weeks, if not months, of grueling work to get paid five figures for our obsessively crafted strategies and ad campaigns.
- In walk these geeks with THE BRILLIANT IDEA OF CREATING SOMETHING THAT ALREADY FxCKING EXISTS and they get bags of cash in funding?
- Pardon my cursing but I’m pissed.
- You know who’s pissed too?
- Frank García.
- Mr. García, chairman of the New York Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and whose grandfather headed the Asociación de Bodegueros trade group in the 1950s and ’60s expressed the following to the New York Post: “To me it’s sacrilegious — you wanna take this name and use it to make money off it? My grandfather is rolling in his grave.” *
- Filthy lucre!
- Cultural appropriation!
- Overreaction on overdrive.
- If I were Mr. García I’d taken advantage of this opportunity to talk to the media too.
- It don’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right.
- Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on TV, to quote Gore Vidal.
- All publicity is good publicity.
- Even if the Bodega start-up ends up nosediving and crashing into some Northern California office park, the founders will walk away with the ultimate Silicon Valley badge of honor: failing royally.
- Fail, fail again, fail better, blah blah blah.
- As to the fate of real bodegas, well.
- I’m no luddite but I don’t think that they are going anywhere for a while.
- Bodegas are the cockroaches of the retail ecosystem.
- To be continued next week.
* Source: http://nypost.com/2017/09/13/this-startup-wants-to-kill-your-bodega/
