A lot of restaurants have a box for your business card, and you’re supposed to put your card in, and you often get a chance at winning free food. What is the purpose of this? What does the restaurant get out of it?
I’d say marketing info. It might be worth it to them to give away some food in exchange for knowing a little more about their customer base- where do they work, what do they do, etc. For example if 75% of their cards are from businesses on the west side of town, they may want to make that side their priority for their next expansion.
Almost all of those boxes are from people that want to harvest names for hard-pitch marketing schemes.
The restaurant gets nothing.
For the rare box that is actually owned by the restaurant, it’s just a gimmick to get you back, playing on everyone’s desire for a free lunch. (each time you go back, you drop in a card, for another chance to win - if you don’t go back, you can’t “play” again"
then why would the restaurants let this marketing company put a box in their space? and why would the restaurant offer their food as a prize for winning the drawing?
you could easily drop 400 cards into the box whenever you’re there if you wanted to up your chances of winning.
Two words - good publicity. Why does any business ever give anything away below cost price? It’s not just about immediate footfall, it’s about the restaurant having an image that extends beyond taking customers’ money. In the longer term, there are benefits from being seen as a ‘nice place’ rather than just an efficient business.
Many time, the winner of the free meal will bring some friends with, so the restaurant sells meals to them.
Plus the winner will probably be pleased enough to come back more often in the future.
I read the fine print on one of these things once - it admitted that anyone who dropped their name into the box would be hit up for attending marketing seminars. After attending the sales pitch, they’d have a CHANCE to win a free meal in the form of a voucher - presumably worth ten bucks or whatever a basic meal at that restaurant is worth.
The restaurant doesn’t offer food. My assumption is that the restaurant is completely uninvolved with the box, other that providing space for it next to the free weekly newsrags and gumball machines or some other corner near the door that they don’t really care about. There might be some sort of kickback arrangement where the restaurant gets a buck for everyone that shows up at the marketing pitch, but that’s not disclosed on the box.
I’ve never seen these boxes at “good” restaurants - just at the level of Denny’s or Sizzler and below.
Fun trick:
Take a bunch out of the box and call the numbers. Have them all meet at the restaurant for a “free meal”. Hilarity ensues.
I’ve seen plenty of 'em. I’m not sure your experience is quite as representative of the whole as you think.
There are plenty of places who still pay for current addresses of businesses for targeted advertising/direct mail purposes. IIRC its about $0.25 per name.
I used to have a girlfriend who worked in a nightclub. They had a similar box for business cards to win an office party at the club. The thing was, it included free food, music (and I guess other stuff too - I don’t recall), but not drinks. So they made money on the ‘free’ office party.
Oh, and the other thing: everybody ‘won’. They didn’t have any drawing, they called everyone who put in a business card and offered them the office party ‘prize’. (Heck, they made money on them, why not try to give them to everyone). 
I tossed my business card into one of those boxes once, mainly because my job almost never takes me out of the office so I still have about 492 of my original 500 business cards.
Anyway, a week later I started getting calls from some headhunting firm asking me if I was interested in changing jobs, what I did, etc. They obviously didn’t know me from Adam though or have a real reason why they thought I’d be in the market for a new job.
I don’t have any real evidence beyond the circumstantial but I assume my card went to the firm and was used for marketing purposes.
And you’d have an even better chance of winning if you came back the next day at lunchtime and dropped in 400 more cards.
A friend of ours put her business card in one of these boxes and had it picked out. She “won” a free lunch for herself, and as many friends as she could drag along. We got invited.
A slick yuppie guy pitched an investment plan. We were all asked to fill out a form with all our personal info (!!!). Hubby and I both filled ours full of bogus data. Consequently, we were the only ones in the bunch not to get alot of annoying phone calls.
We did get a free lunch.
I won a “free” party at a local place by dropping a card in a box once - as someone earlier said, they make money on the booze. We got two free each (along with the food) and everything after that you had to pay for - no one left after only two, obviously, so they made cash on that.
And frankly, we’ve been back to the place a few times - and I probably wouldn’t have gone back if I hadn’t won the party.
I throw business cards into the bowl at resturants all the time. I usually win the free lunch, but then they want to talk to me about hosing corporate events and the like. It’s a free lunch with a soft sell attached.