Memberships Replace Gift Cards

Memberships turn restaurant monetization from a one time liability into a repeat purchase engine. A gift card brings in cash once, then often comes back as a wave of redemptions when the dining room fills up again, with no new spend attached. A membership fee, by contrast, gets paid up front, then unlocks discounts or perks only when the customer places more orders, which spreads the cost across many visits and keeps demand flowing through the restaurant's own channels.

• ChowNow tested this directly in 2020 with a simple annual membership product. Diners paid about $100 up front and got an ongoing discount for a year. The key difference from a gift card was that the restaurant only gave up margin when a member came back and spent again, instead of owing a fixed meal value later.
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• This fits the broader shift from pure online ordering to owned customer monetization. ChowNow is built around lower fee direct ordering, while Lunchbox sells ecommerce, loyalty, and customer marketing. Memberships sit naturally beside email, push, and loyalty because they give restaurants a reason to keep nudging the same customer back into higher frequency ordering.
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• The operational challenge is that most restaurants will not keep a side program alive unless it is simple and material. Evidence from the ChowNow interview suggests many pandemic era subscription experiments faded once dining rooms reopened, which means the winning version of memberships will need to run with very little staff effort and tie directly to everyday ordering behavior.
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The next step is restaurant software turning memberships from a crisis era cash flow hack into a permanent CRM layer. As platforms bundle ordering, loyalty, and messaging, the strongest products will make memberships feel less like prepaid discounts and more like a local club, with perks that drive frequent direct orders, better retention, and less dependence on marketplaces.