Image by Domo, via Unsplash
Late Night, Loosies, and the Plug Behind the Plexiglass
It’s late on a Thursday night. The metal gate is halfway down over the bodega entrance, but the lights are still on inside. The cat perched on a stack of Arizona Iced Tea gives a bored glance as it licks its paw. The buzzer rings out—once, twice, three times. The guy in the back emerges, slides cash under the bulletproof partition, and hands over a discreet package from behind a display of chips and cookies. A ritual that went unrecognized until it started disappearing.
In New York City’s rapidly evolving cannabis landscape, the bodega plug has become an endangered species. As weed goes mainstream, the familiar transaction at the corner store risks extinction, replaced by branded dispensaries and digital payments. But the bodega plug is more than a mere cannabis dealer—he’s a community institution.
The Plug as Neighborhood Fixture
Pre-legalization, scoring a bag was a social ritual as much as a business transaction. The plug was often a trusted figure, someone woven into the fabric of the neighborhood. Buying weed, whether as a local or just passing through, meant engaging with the bodega ecosystem—making small talk, petting the cat, maybe grabbing a sandwich. It was a human interaction, not just a quick hit of capitalism.
Where the Chips Were Stale but the Community Was Fresh
Corner stores themselves operate as hyperlocal engines of resilience, open 24/7, serving immigrant communities, and adding texture to increasingly homogenized blocks. Bodegas have long served as vital community hubs, especially in neighborhoods lacking larger grocery stores, providing essential goods and fostering local connections.
But those anchors are losing their grip. The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant challenges for New York City’s bodegas, with reports indicating that hundreds faced closures due to decreased sales and other pandemic-related strains. For many, the weed side hustle made the difference between sinking and swimming..
Between 2019 and 2021, New York City experienced a net loss of over 4,000 private establishments, a 1.5% decline from its pre-pandemic base of approximately 275,000 businesses. Bodegas are among the hardest hit. When the rent spikes and new neighbors flood the block, the affordable loosie is the first casualty and the affordable eighth is the second.
Image courtesy of Ronny Coste via Unsplash
Cannabis Went Corporate, and All We Got Was This Designer Eighth
Today, bud is more likely to come in a pastel-hued pouch than a nickel bag cloaked in a bodega napkin. The legal weed industry has rebranded cannabis with its own celebrity sponsors and venture capital firms.
Meanwhile, social equity efforts like New York’s CAURD program, meant to prioritize those impacted by the War on Drugs, have stalled out. As of early 2025, officials have approved less than 2% of the nearly 7,000 adult-use license applications in New York, with the rest still pending, per the state’s Office of Cannabis Management.
Progress or Erasure?
Some see this shift as pure progress – the shadow economy stepping into the light, with product consistency, tax revenue, and reduced arrests. The old system, where buying a joint meant risking a record, is hard to romanticize.
But in the rush to legitimize weed, the rituals and relationships that carried cannabis culture for decades are being paved over instead of honored.
“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them,” wrote urban theorist Jane Jacobs. The same could be said of certain customs and local characters. Standardization, even in the name of improvement, has a way of sanding down the texture of a place.
This is why many advocate for frameworks that don’t criminalize informal operators, but instead offer them safe pathways into the legal market through funding, expungement, and inclusion. Imagine if new dispensaries felt like real community hubs owned by locals, decorated with neighborhood input, employing familiar faces instead of just cookie-cutter chains.
Organizations such as Supernova Women and The Bronx Community Foundation are already pushing for cannabis business models rooted in local culture and ownership. In this vision, the bodega plug isn’t just a relic of the past, but a valued piece of the future. Across the country, grassroots advocates are pushing to make that future possible by lowering barriers and centering the voices of legacy operators.
Love the Past Without Living in It
Nostalgia can be a trap, flattening nuance into rosy snapshots of a grittier past. It would be a mistake to glamorize the risks and insecurity of prohibition-era weed culture. But there’s a difference between romanticizing the old world and appreciating the human elements—the neighborhood ties, the creativity and resilience of the informal economy.
Legalizing a substance doesn’t have to mean sanitizing and forgetting everything that came before. There are models for transition that don’t bulldoze the legacy market, but actually bring it into the light. But that requires grappling with the real people and places impacted, not just slapping a new coat of paint on an old storefront.
The Vanishing Middleman
The archetypal weed guy isn’t just a dealer, he’s a street saint, an underground therapist, a keeper of the neighborhood rhythm. He’s the guy who remembers customers’ dog names, asks about family members, hooks it up when someone’s low on cash. He makes commerce feel like community.
As the city changes, he risks disappearing into the haze of memory, another character displaced by QR codes and credit card chips. Progress is never smooth or simple. Something is always gained and lost at once. But, without taking stock of what’s being left behind, we risk paving over the very details that make a block feel like home.
An Ode to the OGs in the Corner Stores
So consider this a love letter of sorts, a raised lighter salute, to the real ones, the OGs, the handshake deals in the produce aisle. To the last bodega plugs still holding on, still buzzing customers in, one crinkly brown bag at a time.
May they not be forgotten as the city moves forward because it’s the characters in the margins that make a neighborhood feel like more than just a place. Without them, we all lose a little piece of what makes New York, New York.
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