Originally Posted by
cordelli
It's something the restaurant has to request. It's sort of a loan from the Rewards Network to the restaurant, where they take the payments back as people in the network dine there. I always look at a restaurant that joins as one that is possibly heading into financial trouble if they need to go that route to borrow money. While I'm not 100% sure, I think there may be just a marketing deal now too, where there is no "loan" just promotioins and the rest on the network. Either way it costs the restaurant money, so unless they need the business they probably won't be interested.
I think that this is at least partially true - you do see a number of newly-opeing restaurants that don't last very long (both as RN members and also in the sense of remaining open for business).
But there are some other, long-term places that seem to go onto RN for (seemingly) marketing-driven reasons. Two examples in my area: Tijuana Taxi, a two-location local Tex-Mex restaurant / sports bar, has been a steady RN member over the last 5 years or more. The place is packed during fall-wintwe sports events and generally on weekends, but less busy during spring-summer. I could see them deciding to offer RN year-round, so that their RN-driven customers don't need to guess or worry that the restaurant is playing the "only available some days" game.
A second local chain, Quarterdeck (s seafood restaurant-cum-sports bar), put their eight locations on RN last spring. At the same time, they launched their own in-house Loyalty Card scheme. By late fall, all of the Quarterdeck locations had left RN. It's another place that doesn't seem to lack for customers, so my guess is that Quarterdeck used RN to launch the in-house program. When you think about it, getting Rewards-driven customers to try the place, and also getting them on the premises so that they could be enrolled into the in-house loyalty scheme, was a pretty good idea.