Bodega. Or how Silicon Valley is screwing us all 😉

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• The Theranos sham that rocked Silicon Valley last year is, well, so last year.
• There’s a new bad boy in town.
• Welcome to the latest wannabe unicorn and 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 fancy, state-of-the-art vending machines.
• “Turning bodegas into a thing of the past,” to quote the founders.
• Yup: Silicon Valley not only is taking us to the cleaners with spyware, malware, fraud, clickbait, fake news and dancing cats, they are now trying to do to convenience stores and mom & pop micro retailers what Uber did to taxis.
• What Netflix did to Blockbuster.
• What Amazon did to… everyone.
• Does Bodega own revolutionary patents?
• Not that I know of.
• It is just some glorified vending machine.
• The business model?
• A bunch of platitudes, clichés and lame Silicon Valley jargon.
• When are they going to market?
• Who knows.
• As far as I can tell they have a working prototype.
• Or two.
• The founders did take the time to create some sort of idiotic brand manifesto about how careful they were to make sure that by claiming the brand name they were not inflicting “cultural appropriation” upon the “Latin American community”.
• Cultural appropriation????!!!!
• Pleeeeeese. *
• The rationale of their logo, the vignette of a cat, is that said felines abound in real life bodegas.
• #Facepalm
• Nevertheless, they obtained millions of dollars of seed capital from top investors.
• Boy, I envy these nerds.
• My team and I have to work weeks if not months to get paid five figures for some dopey campaign that more often than not gets obliterated by focus groups.
• These guys “invent” the vending machine and they get stupid money thrown at them.
• I wish I could put together some Power Point deck chockfull of bullshit and get that kind of moolah to pursue my pipe dreams.
• You gotta give it to these colossal hucksters of hot air.
• Masters of the press release.
• Wizards of the bullshit explainer video.
• High priests of hype.
• Kings Midas of the tech scam.
• They are executing a pure, unadulterated “fake it til you make it & build the plane while you fly it” sleight of hand in front of our very eyes and we still give them the luxury of our attention.
• Plus lots of money to burn.
• Fool me once, shame on me.
• Fool me dozens and dozens of times, well, just shoot me.
• What happened to us in Madison Avenue?
• We used to be the masters of the universe at separating idiots from their money.
• How could these nerds steal our thunder?
• When did they pull the rug from under us exactly?
• Putting bodegas out of business with a faux vending machine that will be manufactured by start-up founded with millions in seed money!!!!!?????
• Shame on you, Silicon Valley!!!!
• And shame on us too.
• We should’ve thought of it first.
• But we were too busy poring through a 90 page long RFP written by some procurement middle manager with mustard on his lapel.
• Or filling out an expense report that will require the approval of Sir Martin and his cousin.
• We deserve our irrelevance.
• We had it coming.
• We asked for it and it is being given us hard.
• To be continued next week.

*Cultural appropriation might be the most preposterous concept ever coined by a pompous college professor desperately seeking tenure.