> "As evidenced by the major backlash over the recent launch of a company called Bodega — where the founders and investors genuinely didn’t understand why the name was problematic — you don’t always have the best handle on how your ideas will be received outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.""
I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".
"Thoughtfully, Fast Company asked McDonald about that. He replied, “We did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no’.”" (https://www.eater.com/2017/9/13/16302386/bodega-startup-corn...)
The problem with Bodega is not the name. It's that it doesn't carry much of an inventory. It's just another box accessed with an app for in-plant vending. Byte Foods does that.[1] TechShop SF has one of those, as do many hospitals. The vending industry term is "micro-market".
Vending machine micro-markets are a standard item from Canteen Vending.[2] They have 4500 US locations. They're also found in Swiss train stations.
The really creepy player in this industry is Three Square. In their system, employees have implanted RFID tags which identify them to the vending machines. They're in River Falls, WI, not Silicon Valley.
I find it ironic that the article claims that people in the "SV bubble" don't understand why "Bodega" is a bad name... if you took a survey, I imagine an extremely small percentage of people would find anything wrong with that name (personally, I had to Google around a good bit to find why people had a problem with it). I think you'd have to be in an ultra-pedantic PC media bubble to extract outrage out of a name like "Bodega".