(NEXSTAR) — If you’ve been to any U.S. city over the past few years, you might have noticed a certain coffee shop popping up in retail spaces. No, it’s not Starbucks, but something a little more odd: A Capital One Café.
These strange locations are typically bustling and look like akin to most coffee shops you’d see anywhere — except they are somehow related to a major banking corporation. We set out to figure out what’s going on with these places you’ve perhaps passed before but never stopped into.
Here’s everything you didn’t know about Capital One Cafés.
Capital One Café history
The genesis of COCs goes back all the way to 2012, when Capital One purchased ING Bank’s ING Direct USA banks. The American arm of the Dutch-owned banking corporation called its locations “cafes” instead of “branches” — according to a 2009 ING news release, the vision behind the idea was to make “saving money as simple as having a cup of coffee.”
After Capital One’s $9 billion ING Direct acquisition, they were left with many of these cafe-style spaces. Over the next decade, Capital One invested in refreshing these locations into Capital One Cafés, with full food and beverage menus, WiFi and charging stations, as reported by Yahoo! Finance.
What happens in a Capital One Café? Is it a bank?
The first and most obvious question: Can you do banking at Capital One Cafés?
As explained by Capital One, customers of its bank can access ATMs inside the cafe locations, in addition to managing their accounts and getting other financial advice from what it calls Café Ambassadors. Per the company, anyone can meet with what it calls “Money & Life mentors,” which can help with one-on-one pre-booked financial goal assessments.
Though anyone can visit a COC, customers of the bank do get 50% off purchases when paying with their Capital One cards, according to the company.
In addition to its normal cafe operations, Capital One says its café locations also have community rooms, which can be reserved for free use by nonprofits, alumni groups and student clubs.
The internet’s fascination
Despite apparently being just ordinary cafes with additional banking options for Capital One customers, the concept of a COC remains a fixture of fascination across the internet. The “joke” is that these locations are seemingly so random, always crowded and “vibeless.”
One post on X from January quipped: “Ladies please never settle for less than somebody who brings you a cup of capital one cafe coffee in the morning,” while another from last year reads, “Your father and I met at the Capital One Café.”
Another frequent joke is taking pictures of people in line outside the COCs, with captions like, “New York’s hottest club is the Capital One Café,” or, from another user, “Let’s meet at the Capital One Café for brunch, if you can get in, that is.”
Meanwhile, many others online acknowledged the oddity of encountering these spaces but appreciate that they operate as “third places,” where customers are allowed to work and relax in an environment that encourages it. The idea of “third places” (which means places to hang out at that aren’t work or home) has taken off online more and more over the years. A certain major coffee retailer has been noted by customers in the past few years for making several changes to its locations’ environments, which make hanging out less ideal and more uncomfortable. Recently, the company also updated its policy requiring anyone using their seating, tables or bathrooms to be a paying customer — a reversal of the company’s previous M.O.
There are currently about 60 Capital One Cafés across 18 states and the District of Columbia.
