wrose99

I think iDine is going to go down for this- those poor restaurants, iDine comes along and offers them cash up front, which must be very tempting, and then the contract just says that the money will be repaid by claiming a percentage of sales from diners who use registered credit cards. The restaurants have no way of knowing this means that they will have to pay the money back.

Sure, the terms of the deal peg essentially peg the repayment schedule as a percentage of the restaurant's sales, something no bank would ever do, but it's just not fair for iDine to offer that deal to unsophisticated restaurant companies. Just like with investments, there should be some kind of test to make sure the restaurant companies understand the contract before they can take iDine's money.

Sneaky iDine then goes out and spends all kinds of money to try to make the restaurant's sales go up so they get repaid faster- giving away all these miles plus bonus promotions designed to get people to go to the restaurant and spend more money. iDine has a lot of nerve doing that; it should be ashamed of itself for taking advantage of those restaurant companies by making their sales go up like that, just so iDine can get repaid faster.

Hopefully the outcome of this suit will be that iDine has to give its money back to the restaurants and then they can repay iDine when they want to, no matter how much additional business iDine sends to them.

The real problem is that banks are mean and won't lend money to restaurants. If banks could be required to give money to restaurants then the restaurants wouldn't have to take money from iDine.