Photo by Adam Ryan Morris.
Colectivo cafes have been buzzing in recent weeks about news of diehard customers amassing great hoards of loyalty points. Many are known simply by a nomme de café: “Half a mil Bill,” a regular at the Prospect Avenue café, is said to have racked up, you guessed it, 500,000 loyalty points on his rewards card. Another Milwaukee resident has cached a quarter-million points and isn’t spending them, and yet more Colectivo fans have broken the 100,000-chit mark. To earn so darn many, these coffee drinkers would have had to spend $5,000, $2,500 and $1,000 on coffee and repast, respectively, since each penny spent at a café results in a single reward point.
Why Half a Mil Bill and the others aren’t trading in their points for free lattes and Americanos remains a mystery, and Colectivo declined to comment on the issue. Half a million points would be enough for roughly 210 large coffees, but perhaps the bragging rights are worth more to these customers – a dash of minor celebrity with their morning coffee.
