And yet, somewhere in the last few years, the word has crept into the local vocabulary like a transplant who insists on calling it "San Fran." One SF resident recently put it bluntly: "I have never heard anyone actually call a corner store a bodega here."

They're not wrong. "Bodega" is a distinctly New York term — rooted in the Spanish-speaking communities of the East Coast, referring to a very specific kind of neighborhood shop with a very specific cultural lineage. San Francisco's corner stores have their own identity, shaped by the city's Chinese, Latino, and Filipino communities, among others. They don't need a borrowed brand.

So what happened? The internet happened. Instagram happened. The aesthetic of the urban corner store — fluorescent lighting, a cat lounging on the counter, a random assortment of goods that somehow always includes both plantains and Tide Pods — became content. And "bodega cat" just sounds better in a caption than "corner store cat."

This isn't exactly a crisis. Nobody's losing sleep over vocabulary drift. But it's a small, telling example of how cultural flattening works: a hyper-online generation adopts the most marketable version of a concept regardless of local context. Every city becomes one undifferentiated "vibe."

San Francisco used to be fiercely proud of what made it different. Our corner stores are part of that. They're run by families who've been in their neighborhoods for decades — often despite rising rents and regulatory headaches that would make your head spin. They deserve to be recognized for what they actually are, not repackaged into someone else's aesthetic.

Call it what it is. Support your corner store. Pet the corner store cat.