This dissertation complicates the prevailing narratives of the corner store as a site of urban precarity, as a retail space in the last one-hundred feet of the supply chain, and as an object of racialized cultural commodification and consumption. While start-ups like the one formerly known as Bodega and Amazon’s cashier-less Go stores emphasized the convenience of automation and logistics technologies to eliminate the need for workers and make the process of convenience store shopping more efficient, their failures suggest that the corner store, also known as bodega or papi store in Latine and Black communities in Philadelphia and elsewhere, is not merely a node on a linear logistical supply chain, but a space of contingency. Through critical ethnographic fieldwork, archival analysis, and interpretative research on and with Dominican bodegas in Philadelphia, this work conceptualizes the bodega as an assemblage. Each of the three chapters focuses on a part of that assemblage – bodega imaginaries, food, and time – and the ways that Black and Caribbean people in and around this space engage in practices of refusal that reflect contingencies in urban technologies of control, surveillance, and extraction; or, alternatively, are structured by the demands of racial capitalism. I argue that the slow, embodied, and entangled practices in bodegas exemplify the frictions that platform urbanism – the merging of digital technology and capital in cities – attempts to smooth out. In other words, I explore the bodega’s cultural and historical processes and embodied practices of improvisation at the bodega situated along an archipelagic formation of Black and Caribbean diasporas that is deeply relational and dynamic. The dissertation considers how the ever-increasing reach and presence of digital technologies in urban spaces shapes the forms of sociality at the bodega that might reflect broader reconfigurations in Black and Latine urban communities and beyond, raising important questions about the meaning and material experiences of racial embodiment, racial capitalism, and the possibilities of contestation in everyday life.