Capital One has cafes – there are places to sit and work, you can learn more about their financial services, and cardmembers get half off beverages. Getting customers to open accounts is valuable, the real estate is expensive, but I get the theory.
Bilt Rewards has opened a cafe on the ground floor of their headquarters. It offers really good coffee and pastries. But this is more of a to go place, there’s no space for lounging, and they don’t have staff to talk to you about their program or credit card. So I’m not sure what the value proposition is?
According to Bilt Founder and CEO Ankur Jain,
Opening the Bilt Neighborhood Cafe allows us to welcome Bilt Members to the NoHo neighborhood that we call home. 31 Bond Street is where the Bilt team works day in and day out to create exclusive benefits and offerings for our Members, and now our neighbors can stop by and enjoy the Bilt Neighborhood Cafe while earning valuable Bilt Points.
When you arrive at 31 Bond Street you can’t miss the cafe.
Inside is a small coffee shop. You’ve got someone taking orders and serving pastries, and another employee crafting beverages.
The pastries are really good and there are sandwiches, too. The coffee shop is open all day.
Here’s the menu board and there are printed menus as well. Bilt members earn 8x points when paying with a credit card linked to their account.
They have Bilt swag for sale.
The coffee turns out to be excellent. I wound up having two. Here’s my flat white, with an extra shot.
When I was an intern in D.C. nearly 30 years ago, my office stopped working one day. The whole staff melted down into an argument over coffee. What began with furious exchanges over the intra-office messaging system culminated in an all-staff meeting. Everyone was complaining about the coffee in break rooms. By the end of the day leadership had relented. They would upgrade the coffee.
The argument that won was that having better coffee meant that staff wouldn’t need to leave the office during the day to go out and get coffee. It was a cheap upgrade compared to getting more time out of everyone on payroll. So maybe this is it? They didn’t have good enough coffee nearby, so they grabbed pricey New York City real estate in their building to offer it to staff themselves, and they might as well sell to the public as well to cross-subsidize their caffeine needs?
For rent day this month, Bilt was giving away free coffee and cookies to program members. Reports are there were lines around the block. I’m not sure I’d make the trip for it, but it’s a novelty, and the coffee is actually quite good.