Philly: Please Copy This Great NYC Coffee Idea
Oh, sweet coffee gods, we beseech ye: Please bring Philly the kind of $45-a-month unlimited coffee service that’s getting started in New York City. Bloomberg Businessweek reports on CUPS:
Designed by a small team from Israel, the app is intended as an alternative to the smartphone loyalty cards offered by the likes of Starbucks . “It’s a similar service,” says Gilad Rotem, a co-founder of the startup, which is also called CUPS. “We’re offering a mobile app, prepaid plan, but it’s for independent, higher-quality coffee.”
New Yorkers will pay $45 a month for brewed, drip, pour-over, or filtered coffee (or tea). Latte drinkers will pay more: The unlimited espresso subscription costs $85 a month. Rotem says the prices are equivalent to about 22 cups, or roughly one java beverage per workday per month.
CUPS hopes to expand to 200 coffee shops in New York shortly. (Rotem already operateas a similar service, featuring 100 shops, back in Israell.) We’re not sure how the money is divvied up between the shops, but Lord knows that more than a few of us already spend more than $45 a month servicing our daily coffee habit. (And yeah, that number heads pretty well north during iced coffee season.) Can you imagine using one card to get some combination of Ultimo, Elixir, Joe’s, and La Colombe? CUPS sounds like coffee heaven —and Philly could use a little piece of heaven.
