As you know, thousands of Yemeni bodega workers across the city yesterday fed their cats, turned off their coffee pots, shut their gates and went on strike at noon to protest Trump’s Muslim travel ban. The strike and subsequent rally at Borough Hall were met with cheers of solidarity by most New Yorkers. But as New Yorkers asked their Yemini neighbors what they can do to help, the rest of the country was asking: “What the hell is a bodega?”
Twitter users across the country (and some abroad) were stumped when hearing news about the bodega strike yesterday, because they had never heard the word before. Merriam-Webster, better known as the official dictionary of the resistance, reported a spike in people looking up “bodega” yesterday too. We know we’re in our New York bubble here, with our own languages and habits and various ways of telling people to get the f outta here, so let’s take a minute to appreciate the parts of the country that have never known the joy of a store where you can get a hot sandwich, a six-pack, condoms AND mysterious endurance pills at 4am, even during a hurricane. We doubt any of you took your bodega for granted, but you’ll appreciate it even more now.
It’s not just on Twitter: The dictionary noticed it too:
We are here to help educate so let the Bodega Boys themselves Desus and Mero (not Taylor Swift) explain:
Aw remember this? How young we were then: