11 Santa Monica Businesses Now Give Library Cardholders a Discount

Monterey Park's Bruggemeyer Library is running its own Reader Rewards deals this month, and a card costs nothing.

Show a Santa Monica library card at a wine bar, a comedy club or a Pilates studio this month and you'll get a discount. Eleven businesses are named in the Santa Monica Public Library's Read Local, Shop Local discount program, now in its second year, LAmag reported, and the list reads as a partial one.

The card is free, and that's the whole entry fee.

You sign up at a branch and hand the card over at the counter; that's the entire mechanism, no coupon, no app, no code to remember. The businesses named so far:

• Bike Attack Electric
• Crow Comedy
• Good Body Pilates
• Offhand Wine Bar
• Santa Monica History Museum
• AJA Vineyards
• Backyard Bowls
• Chick-fil-A Santa Monica
• Crossroads Trading
• Harvelle's
• Road Runner Sports

There's also a card you can only get this month, per LAmag. The special edition carries artwork by Al Mercado, a local artist, pulled from Santa Monica's Art Everywhere: Local Canvas Initiative, which places artists' work in storefronts around the city. Any of the library's five locations will issue it.

If you want to fuss over the thing once you have it, the Main Library at 601 Santa Monica Blvd. is hosting a card sleeve and lanyard decorating session on September 12, 2026.

East of downtown, Monterey Park Bruggemeyer Library is running a separate program called Reader Rewards through September 30, 2026. The deals there run from a free drink to buy-one-get-one offers at participating businesses. Sign-ups happen at the library itself, 318 S. Ramona Ave.

All of it hangs on Library Card Sign-Up Month, which the American Library Association has run every September since 1987 — partly a literacy push, partly a nudge to get students set up before the school year takes hold. This year's theme is "A Library Card Hits All the Right Notes."

Both programs stop on September 30, 2026. The card that unlocks them costs nothing, so the only deadline that matters is the walk to the branch.

Source: lamag.com, retrieved September 3, 2026.