How NYC’s Bodegas Are Adapting to Life After Covid-19

Harlem native Jean Franco Molina, 22, remembers the lunches his mother used to buy for him at the bodega — a ham sandwich, salted chips, and a bottle of water — when she didn’t have time to fix his school meal in the morning. Since then, Molina says, bodegas have been literally and metaphorically “nourishing” him and his neighborhood.

“For the people around my block and I, bodegas are this universal experience where, as institutions, they become much more than just a place to get food: they become embodiments of community,” says Molina.

Even after moving over 100 streets downtown for his education at New York University, bodegas were a place Molina could feel at home and meet up with his high school friends. “I’ll be at the bodega,’ we always say to each other, and kick back for hours outside the one closest to all of us,” he explains.

Bodegas have been staples of New York City in ways that go far beyond their role as convenience stores, as it may seem to the untrained tourist eye. No matter where you’re from, it’s likely your hometown has a similar indispensable urban institution, be it London’s chip shops, Athens’ bakeries, Berlin’s biergartens, or any other soul-warming establishment you grew up around. Others may not understand the glorification behind these spots — but you know that they’ll be the first place you miss when you’ve been away from home for too long.

For most New Yorkers, this is what bodegas represent, and perhaps even for visitors too. When watching a movie, one needs not research the filming location once they encounter archetypal bodega imagery: the scene of steaming filter coffee being poured into Anthora paper cups adorned with the decades-old blue and golden illustration declaring ‘We Are Happy to Serve You’ is arguably as iconic as the Empire State Building — albeit much less talked about. And when someone first steps foot into the shops that they may not know are at the heart and soul of the city, they get to smell this overwhelming scent of joe mixed with Boar’s Head bacon and eggs frying with cheese, as the bodeguero — the bodega owner — creates something short of a percussion symphony as steel spatulas graze the griddle in a ballet-like manner. One of the cheapest performances you can catch in this town.

Jay Awos, who opened Jasper’s Deli in Riverdale, Bronx in 2007, believes this solidarity and camaraderie between his bodega and their close ties to the neighborhood are part of Jasper’s identity. “We know everyone by name and get personal with them,” Awos says.

“I think this is why we were able to more or less survive the pandemic: people saw us as a neighborhood joint that they felt connected to and wanted to help,” Awos adds.

Despite their enduring relevance and connections to the community, however, the coronavirus pandemic has left numerous bodegueros struggling in its wake. Out of the city’s estimated 16,000 bodegas, a dramatic number — in the hundreds — have closed their doors during the pandemic. This phenomenon is hard to miss when walking down any street lined with old bodegas reduced to skeletons of brick and cardboard.

Even though the exact hit bodegas have endured is hard to estimate due to intricacies with the city’s official census procedures, various other figures paint a devastating story. According to the New York State Department of Labor, the city has seen a net employment decrease of 13% for ‘Grocery and Related Product Merchants’ from March 2020 to March 2021, as consumer spending plummeted by 44% over the same time period. As early as July 2020, landlords of ‘mixed-use apartment buildings’ reported that they were collecting 60% less rent from commercial tenants. At around the same time, when unemployment rates in the city were rising to dizzying figures nearing 20% — meaning that almost one million households couldn’t afford basic necessities — it was predicted that one third of the city’s small businesses would never open again.

But the declining rates of coronavirus cases and the mass vaccination efforts that the city has undertaken have paved the way for it to reopen soon. With the end of the pandemic looming, bodegas have had to switch gears as they adapt to a new ecosystem for small businesses.

Saved by Deliveries

Walking the stairs down to Punjabi Deli feels like entering grandma’s house — an unassuming deep green sign nestled along the bewildering bustle of Houston Street leads one to an extremely narrow but incredibly homely room. Stacks of gold and white jars full of shelled gram, roasted corn, and rewari fill the shelves above white tiles splattered with a sea of Polaroids depicting seemingly random customers that make one immediately feel welcome. The laughs and banter among workers cover the buzzing sound of fridges in the back.

For 26 years, Singh Kulwinder ran his bodega 24/7. “I didn’t even have a key to this place!” he says. “My doors were always open and before the pandemic there were tons of people coming in and out at all times. Now, the city freezes after 10pm,” Kulwinder explains.

After a five-month break starting March 2020 where Punjabi Deli was shut, it re-opened with limited hours, and it’s now no longer open late at night.

Bodegas highly rely on neighboring foot traffic; thus when schools, gyms, and entertainment venues closed down for months — some of which remain shut today — bodegas saw their earnings get slashed to a fraction of what they used to be. “My business has decreased by about 60%,” says Kulwinder.

But the cheerful, gentle-faced man isn’t too worried. With the city slowly reopening, Kulwinder might soon start to see once again the hungry flocks of Lower East Side socialites and party-goers storming his shop for a chickpea curry at three in the morning. Travel restrictions are loosening and cultural spots are resuming business — with Mayor Bill de Blasio planning a $30 million campaign to kickstart tourism in June — which will soon bring back increased footfall which may improve revenues for bodegas.

The cozy bodega iKraveit Foods is nestled in a quiet residential neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, where low neighboring traffic wasn’t as large of an issue. The store feels like a friendly boys’ club, with televisions blasting football matches passionately narrated in Arabic as the clerk hungrily catches glimpses in between servicing customers.

Shukri Mubarez’ father came to the U.S. from Yemen in the 1980s and opened a bodega in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, which Mubarez started helping with when he arrived himself at age 11. Since then, after receiving a degree in economics, he’s devoted himself to running his own bodega, iKraveit, which he opened in 2015.

“When you work at a bodega, you have to know everyone that comes in. If you’re not a people person, you can’t survive,” Mubarez says. “You see every version of your customers. You become a part of their life as much as they become part of yours.”

Lately, issues have arisen due to this neighborly and trustworthy nature of the bodegas: a lot of them operate on an honor system, where a worker may put something on a customer’s tab if they can’t pay for it. The financial impact from the pandemic has meant customers’ inability to immediately pay increased significantly.

Mubarez appreciates every single customer that walks through his doors and is thus a firm believer in this honor system. “If you’re hungry, you can just come and we’ll give you something,” he says.

“Some people take advantage of this for sure,” he adds, but stresses that the pandemic didn’t increase the incidence of people putting payments ‘on tab’ for him. “This is a neighborhood where people are mostly educated and retained their jobs,” Mubarez explains. “I do have cousins, however, especially in Manhattan, who have entire books to keep track of who owes what. For them, it definitely got worse in the past year.”

Ultimately, he said his cousins are confident this phenomenon will get better as offices start to reopen, which is set to begin en masse on May 19th. “They used to get a lot of corporate office workers who all left Manhattan during the pandemic. Once they start going back, however, business is bound to get better.”

As these office workers move back to Manhattan, the outlook is looking brighter for Kulwinder and his ability to finance Punjabi too. Businesses are opening up, and unemployment is slowly but steadily decreasing. And as this May will see at least 80,000 city workers returning to their offices, it’s not unrealistic to expect an uptick in bodega sales. Bodegas in busy streets may also benefit from the Open Streets Initiative, claims Jeremy Unger, the communications and legislative director for Councilwoman Carlina Rivera who represents Council District 2 (East Village, Flatiron, Gramercy Park, Rose Hill, Kips Bay, Murray Hill, and the Lower East Side), which will allow more city dwellers to roam outside freely and offer their business to bodegas.

Mubarez says he benefited from remote work as his bodega is surrounded by residential homes. He’s not worried about everyone going back to the office, however. “The biggest thing I learned is how important deliveries are,” he says.

“Our in-store business decreased significantly, but it was all offset by the increase in delivery orders,” he says. “People want convenience, and any bodega that wants to survive has to offer delivery. And since delivery apps have been competing with each other during the pandemic, we’re actually getting much better terms with them right now,” he adds.

In fact, modernizing their strategies might be key for bodegas, claims Esther Trakinsi, a food studies professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. “It’s a question of investing in their business. Further upgrading their stores will ease a lot of trouble,” she adds.

Scarce Supply

For all types of grocery stores, the pandemic presented difficulties with maintaining supply, especially of perishable and sanitary items, as people resorted to bulk buying. This has, however, been worse for bodegas as supermarkets usually have first access to these products from suppliers. Right now, not only are bodega workers struggling to pay their rents and electricity bills, but food is going bad.

“For the first two months of lockdown, we struggled a lot with keeping enough masks, hand sanitizer, and other disinfecting home products,” explains Mubarez.

In addition, the pandemic seems to have made it harder for bodegas to access health food specifically, as evidenced by the Shop Healthy NYC program’s Retail Challenge. The challenge aims to encourage bodegas to stock and promote healthy options through marketing and advertising. Bodegas who can maintain this for over a month ‘receive a recognition award from the Borough President’s Office,’ but the amount that got this accolade has fallen sharply in 2020, exhibiting the difficulties coronavirus brought to not only general supply, but especially health food supply.

However, community organizations like the Yemeni American Merchants Association (YAMA) are stepping in to help, so that bodegas can diversify and restock. Badr Fuad, the Director of Merchants Services for YAMA explains that the association’s mission is to “advocate, educate, and connect with resources Yemeni Americans, especially bodega workers.” Through unofficial channels, bodegas can reach out to the association who then help them find affordable produce to stock.

The issue of access to health food permeates food ecosystems far wider than bodegas. “A lot of areas with many minority citizens don’t have supermarkets that provide the right choices,” Fuad says. These neighborhoods — such as the South Bronx and East Harlem — are often referred to as ‘food deserts’, where bodegas are the only sources of nutrition. These neighborhoods have historically had higher densities of people of color, and when bodegas don’t offer fresh fruit and vegetables, legumes, and other healthy options, “this reinforces the racial divides of opportunities for food security,” explains Trakinski.

Despite the difficulties that the pandemic has brought in storing and supplying healthy food, however, several city-wide options are available for bodegueros. Many already participate in the Healthy Bodega Initiative, which focuses on ‘business strategies, food handling, and marketing/promotion practices to increase supply and demand for healthier food and beverages for customers.’

Various other campaigns that help bodegas stock healthy supplies are underway and owners can find numerous resources locally. For bodegas that have been hit by a loss in supply during the pandemic, these initiatives may be extremely helpful for their recovery in the coming months — both financially and in terms of the promotion of public health in their communities.

According to Mubarez, however, for any bodega to benefit from city initiatives, there must be wider spread of information about them. “The city needs to be better at raising awareness,” he says.

The Safety Net of Communal Aid

Some organizations are indeed stepping in to raise this awareness — such as United Bodegas of America who pool compiled resources where bodegueros can easily learn how to get help.

The kinship among bodegueros who derive safety and security through their communities’ relationships goes back decades. It’s also a quintessential element of NYC migration. Referring to Dominican immigrants, Christian Krohn-Hanses, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oslo and author of “Making New York Dominican: Small Business, Politics, and Everyday Life,” explains that “people have used the family both to organize and give form to the emigration process and to try to raise capital after they have arrived,” where family refers to “members of a chain” of immigrants who help one another land on their feet in the city.

This was the case for Mubarez too, when YAMA helped him get vaccinated. “YAMA has practically been begging to get me vaccinated!” he says, highlighting the importance of grassroots organizations in public health. He also adds that the association has arranged for vaccination-related resources to be available in Arabic, which can help older bodega owners find access.

Owners like Awos and Kulwinder have been able to provide their employees with PPE themselves, but many others have had to rely on the aforementioned mutual aid groups. Several have mounted extraordinary efforts to donate PPE: President of the Bodega and Small Business Group Francisco Marte spearheaded the initiative to give over 40,000 masks to bodegas across the city. YAMA has also “partnered with the city and delivered masks, gloves, and hand sanitizers to over 500 bodegas,” says Fuad.

“These local groups are much more connected to their people than the federal government, which doesn’t always know how to help best,” Mubarez says.

Others share this sentiment too: representatives from the United Bodegas of America claim that they essentially had to beg the government to support them in getting vaccines.

Food and grocery workers relying on grassroots organizations for help is nothing new. According to Steven Greenhouse, author of “Beaten Down, Worked Up,” in the early 1990s, Hispanic farmworker activists and Haitian organizers began one of the first coalitions to mobilize migrant food workers. They had a focus on “popular education,” with meetings for leadership training, agribusiness history lessons, and recreational activities about social justice. Even decades later, the impact of local communal aid groups continues to be greatly significant to bodegas and small businesses as a whole.

Washington did make some attempts to help when the pandemic first hit. Federal lawmakers allotted $310 billion to help struggling small businesses, and initiatives to inject money for food into peoples’ savings have been underway in New York. Kulwinder and Mubarez both applied for the Paycheck Protection Program, which Kulwinder says he used to keep his employees paid.

“I had six employees before the pandemic, and now I have two. Any money I was ever given went to them,” he says. For Mubarez, the program helped keep his business afloat too, but he worries for others.

“I got lucky because I already was connected to a major bank, and applying was extremely easy,” he says. “For others for whom the system isn’t as simplified, it might be a lot harder.”

Fuad echoes this, adding that “a lot of the recent Yemeni immigrants are not very tech savvy.” He explains that “many bodegas maintain their financial logistics in handwritten notebooks, and since applying for grants requires submitting information from electronic payroll systems, many bodegas we work for have been turned down for loans.”

Local New York City governmental bodies have tried to fill some of these gaps and smoothen the process of applying for and getting aid. Unger explains that his office is working on several initiatives that can help bodegueros cross bureaucratic and language-barrier hurdles.

“Our office is currently pushing for a bill called the Commercial Lease Assistance Program that provides attorneys and other services to commercial tenants to help them in the process of securing their rights,” Unger says. The program was launched in 2018 by Mayor de Blasio and the Department of Small Business Services ‘to provide free legal services related to commercial leasing’ but was scrapped in mid-2020.

Bringing this bill back could prove helpful to bodega owners and their landlords alike, owners said. “30% of the apartments in my building are vacant right now,” says Kulwinder, “so the owners of the property don’t want to reduce our rents.”

Ultimately, the pandemic has helped bring a lot of problems that plagued bodegas to light. With all the community-led efforts that the city has been putting in, the coronavirus may leave us with a stronger safety net for small businesses — and an increased awareness of their issues among governmental bodies too.

“Language and cultural humility are critical parts of any government service,” Unger says, emphasizing that when officials help small businesses, they convey a sense of connection to their community that is paramount for the equitable running of a city.

Regarding the political landscape in the coming months, Unger says “the agencies that will be proactive about helping small businesses — in contrast to those who see it as secondary work — will really prove their investment in communities,” Unger adds. Many other avenues indicative of the city’s social, economic, and political health and stability cross paths at the beloved shops.

What Comes Next

The next few months will not only be important for bodegas but will mirror and evaluate many of the inner workings of the city. “The conditions in bodegas are a barometer for where the whole city is,” explains Unger.

The larger issues the pandemic posed to the stores — supply, PPE, bureaucracy, low foot traffic, and the honor system — seem to have at least partly fading. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that these problems are nothing new — rising rents, inadequate protections for small businesses, and a fragile safety net have all existed for years. The coronavirus just exacerbated them — but it likely also taught us that change had to come, and truly mobilized society’s efforts to help bodegas.

As I leave Punjabi Deli, Pali Kulwinder, Singh’s brother who’s worked at the counter of the bodega for over 25 years, is hopeful that business will blossom again and the lessons they learned from it will be valuable. He wraps up a pea and potato samosa, and cheerfully hands it over. “Better times are coming,” he says.