It’s no secret that consumers are rethinking their spending habits right now. Food costs are continuing to rise, everyday Americans are feeling serious pain at the gas pump, and inflation is once again surging. As usual, restaurants are taking it on the chin.
According to the National Restaurant Association (NRA), 39% of restaurants said their sales declined in March of 2026, up from 27% reporting declines in February. Customer traffic is slowing, especially among lower- and middle-income consumers.
This doesn’t mean consumers aren’t willing to spend money at restaurants. But it does mean that Americans are thinking twice about how and where they spend their money.
Your loyalty program could be the key to keeping your restaurant top-of-mind when customers decide to dine out or order in. Consumers still have a healthy appetite for dining out, but they are placing a greater emphasis on value, innovation, and personalization.
Julia Bigwood, senior strategist for pioneering restaurant loyalty program Paytronix, explains, “Your restaurant loyalty program is one of the best ways to provide a more personalized and heightened guest experience.”
A recent article from the New York Times says that 24% of surveyed consumers are going out for dinner less often. The article also says that 29% of consumers are dining out less frequently as groups. If it seems like your regulars aren’t coming in quite as regularly, you’re probably not imagining it.
We’re all feeling the pinch. The NRA reports that menu prices are up 3.6% year-over-year from April 2025. That may be well below the 8.8% peak we saw in March 2023, which was the fastest rate of menu price increase in over 20 years. But it still represents a sustained trend of rising prices.
Some of your regulars simply have a threshold for what they can afford at a time when inflation is outpacing income growth.
But there are other factors at play, and if you want to bring your regulars back and even nurture new regulars, these are the factors you’ll really want to pay attention to. The reality is that people are still frequenting restaurants but consumer behaviors are changing in a number of important ways.
Obviously there’s nothing we can do about high food costs or the stress consumers are feeling at the gas station. But the facts above suggest there are real opportunities to retain your best customers and nurture new regulars. Customer loyalty for restaurants may be the key to seizing these opportunities.
But as Julia explains, a restaurant loyalty program is really just one building block in your customer retention structure. She notes, “Paytronix is known for loyalty programs and that is our bread and butter. But we also do gift cards, messaging, and mobile apps. We have an online ordering system. So most of our clients will use us for everything under the sun.”
This all-in-one approach to loyalty and personalized restaurant marketing is growing in popularity, “Because it makes it super easy to have one vendor that does everything,” says Julia. But how exactly do all of those features translate into more regulars? Julia shares a few tips for getting the most out of your restaurant loyalty program.
It’s all about placing your loyalty program front and center. Today, most major restaurant brands recognize the value of a good loyalty program. But as Julia points out, “When I started with Paytronix 10 years ago, McDonald's did not have a loyalty program. They sent out coupons and offers, but they had no currency. There was no method of customer identification. And that’s one of the biggest brands in the world.”
Julia notes that the pandemic truly changed the way restaurants looked at loyalty programs. At a time when any form of outreach or engagement became incredibly valuable, loyalty programs gained new popularity. As Julia points out, “Now things have changed quite a bit. Pretty much every major brand out there has a loyalty program of some kind.”
But it’s not enough to simply offer your customers a loyalty program. You have to make it an organizational priority.
As Julia explains, “You have to have a strong operational influence in order to have a successful program. One of the best-in-class loyalty programs out there is actually CVS Pharmacy. You can't go to a CVS pharmacy without them asking you for your loyalty card, and that is why they're so successful. It’s because they have such a strong operational influence.”
In addition to making sure your customers are seeing your loyalty program, you need to be sure you’re offering them rewards they actually want. Companies like Paytronix let you customize your loyalty program.
One popular option is a points-based system, where your customers accumulate points that can be redeemed for rewards or discounts. Another popular option is a tiered-membership program, where customers can unlock increasingly valuable rewards as they spend more in your restaurant.
The best approach for your restaurant really depends on who your customers are and what they prefer.
“One of the big things that we look at is how you're marketing to your guests,” Julia notes. “What types of offers are you giving them? Are you giving them the right offers at the right time?”
Julia also stresses the importance of creating a loyalty program that offers customers enough tangible value to actually weigh into their decision-making. As Julia explains it, “From the brand experience perspective, you have to think about how your program is different. What are you offering to make a guest choose you over another brand?”
A good loyalty program should do more than just offer your customers discounts and rewards. It should come jam-packed with opportunities for you to collect and analyze valuable restaurant guest data.
As Julia notes, “We do reporting. We do custom dashboards. We do custom data pulls — all sorts of fun stuff to help you look at the data, see what your loyal guests are doing, how they’re acting, and what we can do about it.
“There's a saying that the top 20% of your customers will account for 80% of your spend. We have the data to prove that this is absolutely true,” Julia pointed out. “So it’s imperative to understand what your top members look like.
“Are they parents? Are they going out for date night? Are they going for a single visit? What types of things are they buying? What days of the week are they coming in? How much do they spend when they come in?
“There's so much information that you get from a loyalty program that you just wouldn't get in any other capacity,” Julia explained.
It’s not enough just to gather this data. Now that you have it, it’s all about what you do with it. As Julia notes, “A good loyalty program allows you to act on the data.”
Julia shares an eye-opening story about a client who was planning on cutting an item from their menu. With the help of Paytronix, the client took a deeper look at who was actually buying the menu item.
As Julia tells us, “We found that it was being purchased by their absolute top members. And if they had gotten rid of it, the top members, the people that are most important in their loyalty program, would not have been happy, and they could have lost them.”
In this one example, the client learned that rather than discontinuing the item, the right move was to promote it more actively to non-regulars. And as Julia points out “There's no way you would have known that just from a standard POS report.”
You might not be able to gather these restaurant customer insights just from a POS (point of sale) report. However, you do need a loyalty program that integrates fully with your POS system. This integration makes it possible to leverage your sales data to its fullest potential.
As Julia explains, “We integrate to all the major POS systems, and that's really where our loyalty program software becomes so powerful.”
Your POS system contains a massive amount of sales and restaurant guest data. When you give your loyalty program access to this data, you can identify trends like declining happy hour foot traffic, lower weekend sales, or less frequent visits from your once-reliable regulars.
Naturally, identifying these patterns is the first step toward correcting them. That’s where your loyalty program’s personalized outreach and targeted rewards can make a huge impact.
“We are not in the business of just giving everyone the same thing for the fun of it,” says Julia. “We're in the business of giving people the right things, things we know they're going to want, things that are going to encourage them to feel like they can come back in for a really great experience.”
Is your loyalty program doing everything it could be for your restaurant? Whether you’re considering a restaurant loyalty program for the first time, or you're considering upgrading your current program, we can help.
Schedule your free one-on-one consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech pros and we’ll walk you through exactly what you need.