Red Robin’s Arbitration Clause Gets Grilled Over Confusing Opt-In

A customer signs up for your rewards program, checks a box, and clicks submit. From a business perspective, that moment often feels like a completed contract. From a legal perspective, a recent case shows it may not be.

In Preminger v. Red Robin Int’l, Inc., No. 3:25-cv-772-WWB-MCR, 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 74334 (M.D. Fla. Apr. 6, 2026), a federal court refused to enforce an arbitration clause tied to the restaurant’s online loyalty program. The decision turns on a simple but important question: did the user actually agree to arbitrate? The court said no.

The facts are familiar. The plaintiff signed up for Red Robin’s loyalty program and opted into text messages. Later, he sued over unwanted texts under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Red Robin pointed to an arbitration clause in its SMS terms and asked the court to move the case out of court and into arbitration.

The problem was not the clause itself. It was how the website presented it.

On the signup page, users were told that by submitting, they confirmed they had read the “Terms and Conditions.” That sounds straightforward. But that link led to one set of terms, the loyalty program terms, which did not contain an arbitration clause. The arbitration clause was buried in a different document, accessible through a separate “SMS Terms & Conditions” link.

Nothing required the user to open that second link. Nothing clearly told the user that this separate document contained additional, legally significant terms. And nothing tied the act of clicking “submit” to agreement with that second set of terms. That structure drove the outcome.

Because the user was not required to affirmatively accept the SMS terms, the court treated them as a “browsewrap” agreement. In plain terms, that means the terms were available but not clearly agreed to. That shifts the analysis to whether the website gave enough notice that a reasonable user would understand there were additional terms worth reviewing.

The court walked through that question carefully. It acknowledged that the SMS terms link was not hidden. It was visible, in a different color, and located near the opt-in language. In many cases, that level of visibility is enough. But here, context mattered more than visibility.

The page presented two different “terms and conditions” links, both styled similarly, both appearing relevant, but only one was tied to the user’s acknowledgment. One contained no arbitration clause. The other did. The site did not explain the difference.

From a user’s perspective, that creates a predictable outcome. A reasonable person might click the link they are told to read, assume they have done what is required, and move on. They would have no reason to suspect that a second, similarly labeled link contains additional terms that fundamentally change their legal rights.

The court focused on that disconnect. It found that an ordinary user could reasonably believe the two links referred to the same or overlapping terms. As a result, the design did not put a reasonably prudent person on notice of the arbitration clause.

That finding ended the analysis. No notice meant no meaningful assent. And no assent meant no enforceable arbitration agreement.

For business owners, the takeaway is not that arbitration clauses are difficult to enforce. It is that the details of your signup flow matter more than the words in your terms.

If you want users bound to arbitration, the path to those terms must be clear and direct. The terms you highlight and the terms that contain key provisions need to be the same document. If you split terms across multiple links, you need to clearly distinguish them and make it obvious that each carries independent legal weight.

Most importantly, your design should match how real users behave. Courts are not looking for technical access to terms. They are asking whether a normal person, moving quickly through a signup page, would understand that they are entering into a binding agreement and where to find its key terms. In this case, the answer was no. And that was enough to keep the dispute in court.