The problem being the spread and scope of the partnerships. The loyalty card would be a really cool use-case/experiment but it would take a concerted effort, time, and large enough customer base to gain enough traction to get noticed by "money".
I know I am talking to the wind, but Steem needs a two pointed attack. One side towards the many small businesses and the other focused on the large established companies.
Powering up to reward content is a dead end for any investor not already on the platform. But then this is the problem with ALL crypto right now, real world uses.
Certainly agree with what you're saying here.
Though, I think the small~medium sized business is still the way to go. I've got some interesting ideas for how to eventually start approaching some local businesses (as well as the company that I work for) for partnerships w/ my EXHAUST project -- which I wont go into detail on.
At the end of the day though, all of these use cases ultimately rely on, at some point, the "exit" of turning STEEM into fiat (until some unlikely day when maybe grocery stores and landlords start accepting STEEM).
Maybe in the points listed in my initial comment, where I suggest that "cafe owner is now receiving STEEM rather than the nothing their loyalty cards previously got them", maybe a portion (or all) the received tokens could be burnt.
But that just raises the question of "why bother using Steem at all?". So who knows...?
The lynch pin is still the need for fiat. We are fighting a bigger problem which is crypto adoption in general. I hope you are able to get some solid integration going to help bring more uses to Steem.
I am not a salesman and have little ability to effectively communicate to a business owner the benefits of using Crypto. That's why I appreciate the efforts of those like yourself to try and push.