Why Bodega Failed

In case you were on Mars last week, a funny thing happened: two guys launched a startup called Bodega, and the world recoiled in disgust.

I think it’s a tiny but near perfect case study of everything: economics, the future, business, society, and how the old way of it all just isn’t working. Sit with me and let’s discuss it for a moment.

When we cry, “that soulless vending machine can’t replace my local bodega!”, what do we really mean? We mean that the local bodega is a little source of well-being and real wealth, in a landscape that mostly doesn’t offer much. We’ll come back to that part. First, the real wealth and well-being. You walk into your local bodega, and having a little daily chat makes you happy, connected, alive: short-term emotional well-being. Your bodega covers you for a staple when you’re out of cash that week: that’s real wealth, aka social capital, more durable and powerful than immediate well-being.

So when we decry trendy hipsterized vending machines, we’re really saying: “we value our well-being — and machines can’t really give it to us”. We’re wiser than we know: well-being is a res humana, a human affair. Only humans can ever really expand our possibility. And yet in a society of Bodegas versus bodegas, everyone’s potential well-being — human possibility itself—goes up in smoke. Poof. It’s just gone.

Now your average economist’s rejoinder would probably be: “well, if people value well-being so much, then pay extra for it”. Ah, but. And it’s a big but. What if we can’t? What if, just as Bodega undervalues our well-being, so the well-being that we create on the job is undervalued, too? After all, the average person doesn’t often earn anything extra for being a humane, wise, just, good teacher, doctor, lawyer, and so on. And there’s a bigger problem. What if we can’t buy well-being because it’s just not there to buy? What if there are deep racial biases, for example? And if people aren’t incentivized for creating it, then of course it itself will be undersupplied. So you can’t go to the mall and buy well-being like a product: it’s something that needs lasting human involvement to be created. Thus, in vast sectors of the economy, for many groups of people, from food to energy to transport, well-being is undersupplied to the point that it’s vanished.

So the idea that well-being is a luxury is fatally flawed from the very beginning. It leads us down a slippery slope of more and more socially useless things, or nihilism. What’s really “created” by Bodega? More efficiency. That’s all that apps really create these days: they’re more efficient ways to get the same old things done, from hailing taxis to buying groceries. But efficiency is often the enemy of well-being, pushed too far, too hard, too fast. If everything’s perfectly efficient, there’s no time, room, space, to linger, care, teach, craft, rebel, defy, love — just imagine treating your kids with perfect efficiency. So it’s better to say that the economy is destroying well-being than that it’s creating efficiency — because the former is the end of the latter. We want efficiency only when and if it really benefits us as human beings, not for it’s own sake.

So. Bodega has good economics, but poor eudaimonics: it’s net effects on well-being and wealth are negative. It causes what I call the Omega and Theta of societies to decline: though it earns an income, that income comes at the price of lower well-being and real-wealth, which represent destroyed human potential itself.

In that way, Bodega might seem tiny, but it’s a perfect example the biggest issue in the world today in that way: a paradigm that maximizes income, at the expense of life itself.

So how do we fix it? Well, imagine you’re Bodega. You’re two guys sitting in a room dreaming up ideas for a startup. The problem’s already in the tools you use to think, conceptualize, see. What’s the point of your idea? The purpose? What is it there to do, really? Unfortunately, before you ever sat down and thought about a “business”, you already believed, without ever really thinking about it, that there’s only thing that you can maximize — “income”. So there you are, guys in a room, who are already doomed to all the dynamics above, like a kind of Greek tragedy waiting to unfold. But should you doom yourself that way?

You shouldn’t. While you might think that income is like the Old Testament — given to us by God on stone tablets, it’s not. It’s just a social construction. We count some things (like minimal labor costs in the US, versus many more obligations to protect workers in the EU), and leave others out (like air pollution, climate change, mistrust, and so on). So the real problem is that we only have one construct to maximize — and though we know that construct is profoundly, absolutely inadequate to create the kinds of companies, cities, towns, countries we want, we don’t have any alternative. That’s why I created constructs like Omega and Theta. Now, I don’t say they’re the right or only or canonical ones. Go out and make your own, call them whatever you like. Let a million flowers bloom.

The problem is that the old way is broken, and yet, we have armies of people only employing it to try and better a world that it broke. That’s just not going to work. If that old shibboleth, “innovation” means anything today, it’s that. Changing this broken paradigm.

What happens when we don’t? Well, it’s pretty simple. People hate us. Why? Because the failure of the old paradigm isn’t something abstract, or something I’ve made up. It’s very real, and people live it every single day. If all you can do is give them same old broken way, but worse, well. I hope you like the Marquis de Sade, because you’re going to have to, just like Bodega, get ready for some extreme punishment.

Umair