Rapha Store NYC - anyone else have negative, and pompous experience?

[redir]

Forgive my ignorance but does Rapha sell other stuff besides cycling stuff? Because if so that might explain the comment. And does their shop in NYC actually sell bikes too?

[R3awak3n]

Originally Posted by Sin2Win

This sums it up There are some employees from the Meatpacking still at the soho store. However the quality of the products has gone down and the prices are high. Add in the moneyed NYC cycling snobs that often overrun the place and you're better off ordering online if you are dead set on the brand.

Disagree. Go to the store, get a coffee and browse around.

[jpritchet74]

Originally Posted by R3awak3n

Disagree. Go to the store, get a coffee and browse around.

This is the way.

[professerr]

Rapha retail stores are. so. awkward.

And I'll take my coffee at a cafe, thanks.

[Mr. Pink]

Originally Posted by Eli Bingham

Glad to hear the Soho Rapha store still exists after COVID. Good spot, though I liked the Meatpacking District location a lot more years back - I think the rent hikes chased them out of there.

If you think that place has unacceptable ‘tude, good luck in pretty much any NYC bike shop.

Cracks me up when people talk about meatpacking rents. I drove a cab in 78 and worked that area at night, because they all lived uptown. The things I saw and got burned into my memory. And it wasn't beef on a hook.

[zzy]

... more meat in the street?

[Mr B]

Rapha left Gansevoort because that end of the block was being redeveloped.

[19wisconsin64]

Rapha NYC has always been an excellent place to have a good cup of coffee and watch current or retro races....or chill in the back outside area. Lots of good cycling community-building came from this place.

Feel bad the original poster had a bad experience. So.....didn't know if the original poster answered if they found what they were looking for. In the way-back time (80's) when I cycled the back roads of Wisconsin I wore tights in varying thickness over my cycling shorts. Still looking for a nice durable pair of unpadded black "lycra" tights too!

[R3awak3n]

Originally Posted by professerr

Rapha retail stores are. so. awkward.

And I'll take my coffee at a cafe, thanks.

The rapha coffee is better than a good percentage of the cafes around Soho.

[Mr. Pink]

Go to Little Italy around the corner. Italians dont drink lousy coffee.

[R3awak3n]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pink

Go to Little Italy around the corner. Italians dont drink lousy coffee.

They kinda do. There is good coffee in Italy but not all Italian coffee is good and most certainly not in little Italy

[jkbrwn]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pink

Go to Little Italy around the corner. Italians dont drink lousy coffee.

Coffee at Rapha is serious business. Always has been and always will be. Coffee in Little Italy is not serious business. In fact, the whole restaurant and cafe scene in Little Italy is pretty average IMO. Just tourist traps. On top of that, there’s a reason people at espresso bars in Italy add an entire sachet of sugar to their €1 bitter, dark espresso that was roasted in a huge industrial roastery over a year ago. It’s because it doesn’t taste good.

[Toddykins]

Originally Posted by Mr. Pink

Go to Little Italy around the corner. Italians dont drink lousy coffee.

After you have fought your way through the tourists, you will find that they do.
While I applaud Italy for having fostered the growth of espresso culture, the idea that Italians don’t do bad coffee is wildly inaccurate. If we are generalizing, Australia does the best (third wave) coffee. Don’t @ me.

I too like sitting at the rapha cafe, but if I am on the go in that immediate vicinity I would give a slight nod to La Colombe.

[Hank Scorpio]

I have been to the NYC shop several times and never experienced the attitude the OP mentioned. I remember one time talking with one of the sales guys about the Palace collab and upstate gravel routes for about a hour. No pressure to buy at all. The last time I was in was just last week. I dealt with Neil who was very helpful and again wasn’t giving me the high pressure sales tactic. Wound up talking with him about a Team Dream t-shirt I was wearing that he had as well. Nice guys. Glad you went back and scooped up a jazzy new shirt. They didn’t have the Strata jersey i wanted in stock but they did order it for me for delivery.

[MaraudingWalrus]

Originally Posted by R3awak3n

Good that you went back and gave a second chance, I think people need to do that more often because people do have off days and maybe a store that has 5 employees and only 1 sucks.

I really appreciate that view. It's also worth commenting that a lot of times that 1 employee who sucks is on a rotating basis.

At the shop I worked in for years there were really just two of us in there. And I'd say of the two employees, 0.15 employees sucked. Neither of us sucked all the time, or even most of the time, frankly most of the time we were pretty alright bordering on great...but sometimes one of us was having a bad day or bad half hour for whatever reason, and on that day 50% of the employees sucked. If we'd just finished arguing about something, for maybe 15 minutes afterwards 100% of employees sucked. And on any given occasion when one of us did suck, it probably wasn't for the whole day, just for part of it until we got back on track. The person at the shop isn't a customer service robot - sometimes they'll get knocked off track by something and it takes a bit for them to get back to where they should be.