Looking for the perfect gift for your favorite New York City-based coffee junkie? A new upstart called CUPS has one intriguing possibility: A subscription-based monthly service that allows for unlimited beverages from 40 independent coffee shops scattered around the city.
A basic CUPS membership, which provides unlimited coffee and tea, will be available for $45 a month; an "unlimited espresso subscription," which includes mixed drinks like lattes and iced coffees, will set you back $85 a month. Most of the participating coffee retailers are centered in downtown Manhattan, though CUPS' official website promises that "Midtown, Uptown, and Brooklyn are right around the corner."
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To use the app, subscribers pick a coffee shop from a list, choose a drink, and retrieve a code, which the barista then uses to record the transaction. CUPS later reimburses the coffee shop for each beverage, at a discount. If the customer buys more than $45 worth of coffee per month, he comes out ahead; if he spends less, CUPS keeps the change. The coffee shops don't pay anything to participate, so in their worst-case scenario, either no one comes in or they sell a lot of discounted drinks. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
The story also explains that the average American drinks 1.7 cups of coffee per day, which sounds ridiculously low — but maybe an unlimited coffee service is just the thing to help us get those weak numbers up.
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