It's been used by city-dwellers for quite a long time.
"And she said, "Honey take me dancing"
But they ended up by sleeping in a doorway
By the bodegas and the lights on
Upper Broadway
Wearing diamonds on the soles of their shoes"
Paul Simon, "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," 1986
And yeah it pretty much means shitty, dirty corner-mart. I mean, any port in a storm, and many stock fresh foods and are cared for as well as a little family can, but they don't come anywhere near the cleanliness, safety, and stability of an actual grocery store.
I have a hard time bagging on bodegas, because they're pretty much all that's left of the Mom&Pop. Supermarkets are a marvel--so much cleaner and better laid-out than when I was a kid. But I don't buy shit like General Mills, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, RJ Nabisco, Nestle, etc. and I don't like that buying food has become so centralized and homogenized.
Wal-Mart has the best bakery within 50 miles of where I live, and it is very good. The bakery is run by a lady who just happened to bounce all over the Country her whole life, spending her time baking, and her goods are fresh and great. But I find it sad that running a small business has become so onerous and punishing that she doesn't really have any options other than baking out of a Wal-Mart.
I was part of a grad school b-school marketing project whose goal was to find out about these "food deserts," you hear about from liberal types. We put together 50 or so pages of prior academic justification and data, then constructed our own survey who aim was to find out if people wanted, and knew how to get reasonably healthy food. Of course, the running theory at the time was that poor neighborhoods were being "historically deprived" or "systemically under-served" or whatever.
So we hand off this work to the prof, who teaches both grad and undergrad. She tells us she'll handle the next stage. We get some early survey data back, which indicates largely that yeah, of course people know where to get fruit and greens (this is a lot like the "black people don't know how to get ID thing" of today), and that of course people know that shit food is bad for them, and of course they're going to keep eating it anyway if they feel like it.
The other interesting thing that happens, is there's some hullabaloo that's being kept on the hush-hush, but of course leaks: One of the survey teams is a bunch of undergraduate girls, who head off into the ghetto to ask survey questions and are almost immediately molested. Like, the whole team, half a dozen of them, working in pairs, all going to different neighborhoods. The prof's amazing plan was to hand clipboards to under-20 girls and send them off to the demilitarized zone to ask if people knew where to buy carrots. Thinking somehow that by doing this in the middle of the day served as protection. They run into packs of dudes hanging around sidewalks, who paw at them and slobber over them, until they manage to cry their way back to their Jettas and high-tail it home.
Anyway. Bodegas. Yeah, they're the informal logistical infrastructure that provides (fairly) fresh foods to poor people. And this "food desert" thing is so much bullshit. It exists because academic liberals can't find them without going all Heart of Darkness.
See, I'm old enough to remember what corner variety stores were before 7-11 came into the country and pretty much changed ... Americanized? .. everything. Gas stations used to be just that - gas stations. Maybe they sold smokes and had a pop machine, otherwise, they just sold gas, and maybe also had a garage for servicing (and you didn't have to mess with pumping your own damn gas.)
Now-People would probably call the little variety store on the corner a "bodega", as it was run by an Italian immigrant couple, but we just called it "the corner store"/variety store. (And yeah, he also had a little butcher shop in the back and sold a few veggies that he probably bought off the local old "babushka ladies" of the neighbourhood.) And since there were a few small mom and pop variety stores around, we just called it by the name of the owner if we wanted to be specific ... I think we only made trips to a supermarket maybe once a month back then.
I can't really remember, honestly, and there wasn't that kind of thing then and there yet. I just remember the trips to the Dominion supermarket were pretty infrequent, and it was always so damn crowded on a Saturday because of no Sunday shopping (and that last part was true right up until the 1990s.) I just mostly got sent to that corner store with a small list and some money, and that was our grocery shopping. A pound of ground beef, a can of something, maybe some milk, and a pack of cigarettes (well, he knew I wasn't smoking them at 7 years old.)
It's been used by city-dwellers for quite a long time.
"And she said, "Honey take me dancing"
But they ended up by sleeping in a doorway
By the bodegas and the lights on
Upper Broadway
Wearing diamonds on the soles of their shoes"
And yeah it pretty much means shitty, dirty corner-mart. I mean, any port in a storm, and many stock fresh foods and are cared for as well as a little family can, but they don't come anywhere near the cleanliness, safety, and stability of an actual grocery store.
Ehh, they're not exactly a Circle-K, or a 7-11.
I have a hard time bagging on bodegas, because they're pretty much all that's left of the Mom&Pop. Supermarkets are a marvel--so much cleaner and better laid-out than when I was a kid. But I don't buy shit like General Mills, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, RJ Nabisco, Nestle, etc. and I don't like that buying food has become so centralized and homogenized.
Wal-Mart has the best bakery within 50 miles of where I live, and it is very good. The bakery is run by a lady who just happened to bounce all over the Country her whole life, spending her time baking, and her goods are fresh and great. But I find it sad that running a small business has become so onerous and punishing that she doesn't really have any options other than baking out of a Wal-Mart.
I was part of a grad school b-school marketing project whose goal was to find out about these "food deserts," you hear about from liberal types. We put together 50 or so pages of prior academic justification and data, then constructed our own survey who aim was to find out if people wanted, and knew how to get reasonably healthy food. Of course, the running theory at the time was that poor neighborhoods were being "historically deprived" or "systemically under-served" or whatever.
So we hand off this work to the prof, who teaches both grad and undergrad. She tells us she'll handle the next stage. We get some early survey data back, which indicates largely that yeah, of course people know where to get fruit and greens (this is a lot like the "black people don't know how to get ID thing" of today), and that of course people know that shit food is bad for them, and of course they're going to keep eating it anyway if they feel like it.
The other interesting thing that happens, is there's some hullabaloo that's being kept on the hush-hush, but of course leaks: One of the survey teams is a bunch of undergraduate girls, who head off into the ghetto to ask survey questions and are almost immediately molested. Like, the whole team, half a dozen of them, working in pairs, all going to different neighborhoods. The prof's amazing plan was to hand clipboards to under-20 girls and send them off to the demilitarized zone to ask if people knew where to buy carrots. Thinking somehow that by doing this in the middle of the day served as protection. They run into packs of dudes hanging around sidewalks, who paw at them and slobber over them, until they manage to cry their way back to their Jettas and high-tail it home.
Anyway. Bodegas. Yeah, they're the informal logistical infrastructure that provides (fairly) fresh foods to poor people. And this "food desert" thing is so much bullshit. It exists because academic liberals can't find them without going all Heart of Darkness.
See, I'm old enough to remember what corner variety stores were before 7-11 came into the country and pretty much changed ... Americanized? .. everything. Gas stations used to be just that - gas stations. Maybe they sold smokes and had a pop machine, otherwise, they just sold gas, and maybe also had a garage for servicing (and you didn't have to mess with pumping your own damn gas.)
Now-People would probably call the little variety store on the corner a "bodega", as it was run by an Italian immigrant couple, but we just called it "the corner store"/variety store. (And yeah, he also had a little butcher shop in the back and sold a few veggies that he probably bought off the local old "babushka ladies" of the neighbourhood.) And since there were a few small mom and pop variety stores around, we just called it by the name of the owner if we wanted to be specific ... I think we only made trips to a supermarket maybe once a month back then.
I can't really remember, honestly, and there wasn't that kind of thing then and there yet. I just remember the trips to the Dominion supermarket were pretty infrequent, and it was always so damn crowded on a Saturday because of no Sunday shopping (and that last part was true right up until the 1990s.) I just mostly got sent to that corner store with a small list and some money, and that was our grocery shopping. A pound of ground beef, a can of something, maybe some milk, and a pack of cigarettes (well, he knew I wasn't smoking them at 7 years old.)