As someone who looks for digital stories that I think are relevant to our Latino USA audience community, a few of my colleagues let me know about an August 3 New York Times story called “Bodegas Declining in Manhattan as Rents Rise and Chains Grow,” which stated this: “Despite [bodegas’] profitability, stores are being squeezed out of the neighborhoods they call home. Once lonely grocery outposts in a dangerous city, their colorful awnings part of the streetscape, they are now losing customers to chain stores.”

A few paragraphs later, the New York Times included a quote from Ramón Murphy, who heads up the Bodega Association of the United States: “The most important thing we do is not stopping bodegas from closing, but figuring out how many we can keep.”

If the name Ramón Murphy sounds familiar, he is the very same Ramón Murphy of the Red Apple Deli, the very same bodega our team featured this past February when several Latino USA producers spent an entire day at Murphy’s bodega. At the end of the show, our team asked Murphy about the future for bodegas and (not surprisingly) gentrification, high rents and displacement were all themes Murphy talked about in our February show. Here is that segment:

Here is the full show: