Alison Leiby's Bodega Tweet

Overview

Alison Leiby's Bodega Tweet refers to a joke tweeted by TV writer Alison Leiby that celebrated bodegas in New York City, asking, "People who live outside of NYC and don't have bodegas: where do you go to buy two Diet Cokes, a roll of paper towels, and oh also lemme get some peanut butter m&ms since I'm here, why not?" The tweet was heavily ratioed, as people interpreted the tweet to mean that Leiby was taking an elitist New York City attitude and implying delis, corner stores, and other common grocery institutions don't exist across America. It also inspired memes and local news coverage.

Background

On November 30th, 2020, Alison Leiby^[1] tweeted, "People who live outside of NYC and don't have bodegas: where do you go to buy two Diet Cokes, a roll of paper towels, and oh also lemme get some peanut butter m&ms since I'm here, why not." The tweet was intended as a joke about impulsively buying candy,^[2] but many did not interpret it that way, leading to it being ratioed with 21,500 quote-tweets to 2,400 retweets (shown below).

Developments

The tweet generated strong negative responses from people interpreting it as a form of New York City elitism. User @NifMuhammed^[3] joked, "a good question, thank you for asking -- first I have to go to the fields and prepare my gentle, hard-working oxen to ford the river, which is hard after heavy rain. then it's 12 hard miles on foot, sometimes stepping over the bones of unlucky souls who never got their diet cokes," gaining over 490 retweets and 6,000 likes (shown below, left). User @Karynthia^[4] tweeted a list of other common places across the country where all the items listed could be purchased, gaining over 40 retweets and 790 likes (shown below, right).

The backlash from the tweet led it to be covered in a segment on NY1 the following day (shown below).

Celebrities including Chrissy Teigen and Padma Lakshmi joined the conversation as well. Lakshmi^[5] defended Leiby, trying to point out that the joke was intended to be about impulse buying (shown below, left). Ashley Feinberg^[6] noted that the situation was similar to one she predicted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in America, gaining over 100 retweets and 1,700 likes (shown below, right).

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References