One of the challenges in running any business is balancing the wants and desires of customers (that’s you) with the expectations of ownership (that’s also you) to make a profit.

Done right, making customers happy helps to make owners a profit; maybe not immediately, but in the long run.

It actually gets easier when every customer is an owner, and most every owner (especially the smart ones) is a customer.

But it isn’t always clear how to do that. Recently, with the pandemic affecting travel providers especially hard, we’ve seen that some providers have been unable to report to us or pay us in a timely basis. It is actually happening with other stores, as well. There are a bunch of bankruptcies happening to retailers as I write this.

It’s always been our policy and (part of our terms of service) not to pay rewards to you (either stock or cash) until we’ve been paid by the stores, but we’ve not always followed that policy closely (our margins allowed us to do that). But with our pandemic pivot to maximum cash back, we no longer have that luxury.

So be aware that we do not intend to finalize rewards (pay out stock or cash to you) until we get paid by a store. Some of our reporting doesn’t make that completely clear, so we’ll be working on improving that over the next period of time.

We know that your getting paid quickly is important. But we also know that making sure you don’t get paid unless we’re pretty certain we’ll get paid is a good business practice. Obviously, we want to get paid – in that sense, our interests are exactly the same as our customers’. Thanks for your support during these exceptional times.