Almost every evening, with my roommate’s dog in tow, I walk around my inner-city neighborhood for a while, usually ending up at the S&S Grocery on N.W. 16th and Youngs. One of the highlights of my day is saying hello to the guy working the night-shift, a personable young man from the Ivory Coast. I pay a buck or two for my Sugar-Free Red Bull and head home in the dying light of the Sun.
In Oklahoma City, many people like to waste their time arguing about which convenience store is better: OnCue or QuikTrip; I don’t have either in my area—and probably never will—so why bother? Instead, deep among the boarded-up houses and abandoned duplexes in my neighborhood, we’ve got Oklahoma’s own version of an East Coast bodega.
Sure, they may not have artisan pizza, premium gas or even a decent cup of coffee, but for this small cross-cut of town, the immigrant owners of S&S have stayed in the neighborhood through the good and (especially) the bad, eagerly supplying the area’s denizens with their most basic needs at an affordable price, all within walking distance of only a couple of blocks.
While many convenience stores—be them the corporate bad boys or independent little guys—often seem to stick to the visible main roads and busy intersections of town, these small bodegas are often located in the most intense of urban blighted areas, tending to stay in the middle of a neighborhood, getting to know the same faces that walk through their doors, day in, day out.