Chipotle Goes on Hiring Spree of 15,000 Amid Strong Growth
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The quality over the last 3 years has been abismal though regardless of which location I go to. The food prep stations are always a mess by the end of day - verging on health hazard. The meat seems to have gone down in quality too. Every time I’ve eaten there in the last 2 years I’ve thought to myself “god chipotle sucks now I’ll never eat here again”
But every other month or so I’m by a chipotle, trying not to eat complete garbage, in a time crunch, and trying not to spend $17 on processed food and chipotle is there waiting to disappoint me. Again.
There are a ton of healthy fast casual places that would meet this description — Cava, Sweetgreen, et cetera. They're certainly not as widespread as Chipotle, though.
Chipotle restaurants seem to have a lifecycle: they open, work really hard to get a decent reputation, and then slowly rot. I suspect that management gives the employees free reign to create a good customer experience for the first year or two, then eventually starts turning the profit screws -- trimming lobby and bathroom cleaning, skimping on the employee count at peak times, etc -- and soon enough the restaurant becomes a horrorshow to enter on a weeknight, with long and unmoving lines, piles of trash looming over the receptacles, filthy tables, and poorly stocked ingredients on the line.
It would be really interesting to hear the low-level employee experience of someone who's been working at Chipotle since before the Taco Bell CEO started the transformation into... Taco Bell.
Huh? Why do you claim cheese and sour cream are unhealthy?
For active people and those trying to gain weight, it's a godsend.
As someone who gets at least ~30% of their daily calories from dairy, that sounds backwards. Nutrient dense animal products (especially cheese and thick yogurts, maybe less so sour cream) are the healthiest things you can eat. The 1980's-borne thinking that says otherwise had only produced obesity epidemics.
So I'd say you can get a pretty healthy meal if you skip the rice, double the meat, and always get cheese and sour cream.
I am not surprised you get 30% of your daily calories from dairy; drinking a single glass of whole milk contains 200 calories. A small amount of cheese in addition to that and you're pushing 30-40% of your daily calories with ease.
So spread it over 2 meals? I'm getting the max amount of calories I can when I eat out, because I want value for my money. If I can get 1500 calories for $10, why not?
> A small amount of cheese in addition to that and you're pushing 30-40% of your daily calories with ease.
200 calories is only 10% of your daily calorie requirements, even less if you're a healthy, active adult male. A small amount of cheese does not equal 20-30% of daily calories.
But they were one of the few big chains to actually have an outbreak of food poisoning from contaminated food
https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...
Just to provide a concrete example, there's a convenience store near my woodworking shop that doesn't even have a website, but they do counter-service lunch & dinner and they make a killer burrito. I never would've found it other than randomly searching "lunch" on Google Maps one afternoon and walking over to give it a shot.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Joe's+Market+%26+Deli/@44....
I can’t agree. It used to be within reason, never good value. I went last year, just wanted to splurge and not cook that night, but was made to wait an unreasonable amount of time while the kids running the place chatted with their friends and when I finally ordered and payed, was shocked that it was nearly 15 dollars for burrito! A burrito, especially the simpler ones I eat without the unhealthy cheese, guacamole etc… cost at most a few dollars to make, even with premium ingredients. That’s without economies of scale, which chipotle obviously has. The most amazing part of that outing was seeing high school kids in there ordering this high priced food as though it were a regular event for them. Not even a special “night out” or Friday night date, just “another day, another 15 dollar burrito bowl.”
No wonder kids are in debt and can’t pay off their college tuition loans! 15 dollar burritos is hard no from me.
I do not understand how restaurants make the economics of avocados work for them. 1 avocado is worth at least $1, if not $2 (was $2+ a lot of last year) at Costco. And there is a good chance the avocado will not be all usable. I assume they are adding a filler ingredient to fluff it up? Or ignoring the bad parts?
A $2 markup for guac seems like it would not yield much profit.
As someone who likes to mispronounce things to play with words (and annoy my friends), I appreciate this. She's (probably) not doing it on purpose like I do but I've pronounced chipotle many different ways "chi-potal" being one of them. Fun!
“Q: Where do hiccups come from? A: Rainbows?”
They go great with chab-liss.
I’ve eaten it a few times since, with mixed results.
If this is the case, I wonder how long the stock market will take to internalize this. I work for a large legacy F500 company that is internally a disaster and ticking time bomb, yet I look at the stock price and cannot believe how it continues to slowly go up.
It really made me realize the stock market has no actual clue on how companies are really doing. Its all a bunch of nonsense.
This is why I think about other industries that have already internally collapsed but the world hasn't realized it yet.
Also, things don't suddenly collapse like that, there's always canaries in the coal mine. You can start counting how many sesame seeds they use on each bun like Peter Gregory, chase down Chipotle suppliers, keep an eye out on their commodities and quartiles - watch the commodities markets. Heck, Spot check locations and count customers. Buy credit card data. Run surveys. 'etc.
People do that, that's called the smart money. The media and retail investors notice later, who do you think they are buying their shares from before they drop?
See: Richard Thaler.
Keynes family suggested picking stocks was like going to a beauty contest and trying NOT to pick the most beautiful contestant, but instead trying to pick the one that everyone else would pick.
Yes, very much so; in fact I would attribute this entirely to the utter disrepute that govenrments enacted during covid on this Industry. Speaking as a former Cook, the last brick and mortar in the US I worked at had a James Beard Award, the level of mediocrity that has set in the BOH culture has discouraged anyone who is self-respecting professional from ever wanting to re-enter a kitchen is prevalent: the messiness, unprofessional, outright dirty way of working has become the norm. I could rant for ours of way that is, but I attribute it most to the following:
50,000 line cooks died during covid, alongside with meat-packers, it was te most deadliest job in te US, far exceeding medial professionals who were the front-line of the pandemic itself!
Oroporations were allowed to operate while privately owned brick and mortars, many who didn't have any experience in take out, were left playing catch up and had delays with PPP, lost of staff ever-rising food and labour costs, supply chain delays etc... tis allowed corps like Chipolte to et evre nmore market sare in wat was already a a war of attrition with low profit margins.
> If this is the case, I wonder how long the stock market will take to internalize this. I work for a large legacy F500 company that is internally a disaster and ticking time bomb, yet I look at the stock price and cannot believe how it continues to slowly go up.
Personally speaking, I kind of want the restaurant Industry to collapse, it doesn't deserve to exist in it's current form and I would rather people learn to cook from YouTube videos and buy as much as tey can locally from their farmers market, ideally organic and biodynamic. In my local market CSA shares were sold out months ahead of schedule with the shortages began in 2020 and I left satisfied that this if trend could and should continue it was worth destroying the Industry once and for all--people finally had time to learn how to bake breads and it set off a social media meme.
> It really made me realize the stock market has no actual clue on how companies are really doing. Its all a bunch of nonsense.
It always has, remember that while unemployment skyrocketed so much so it overwhelmed the systems in most states and created an immense backlog, the stock market was hitting alltime highs: it was totally disconnected from reality, but because of QE and the massive bailout packages and stimulus it soard to new ATH and that money made its way into then tech darlings like pelaton or Doordash which had limited (at best) true value, but allowed softbank to cash on thier billion dollar mal-investment with a lucrative IPO!
> This is why I think about other industries that have already internally collapsed but the world hasn't realized it yet.
You're not alone, anyone who has paid attention realized that 2008 marked the last shred of sanity the markets had to function close to anything resembling reality: it kicked off a horrible set of chain reaction with dire consequences that have only gotten worse over time. I'm less concerned with tech layoffs than most around here, mainly because I knew they were coming since at least December '21 when the stock market started to turn sour and things like growth stocks in tech were seen as a bubble that had run it's course.
I'm more worried about the impact that the fed is having by wanting to push unemployment higher with ever-increasing interest rates, in Industries whose pay is way lower and hasn't kept up with inflation for decades.
That is how you have peasant revolts and things like Jan 6th occur, because the truth is Society needs cleaners, and trash men more than need investment bankers or a bloated tech staff in order to not collapse as proven by COVID.
In that sense, your degree was successful, no burgers in sight.
It's no different than in 2008 when you had a glut of STEM and non-stem workers all being coaxed into hospitality and retail after promises of social mobility and incurring large debts, where sadly most have remained despite having a college/university degree. It's the unpayable debt, low to no wage growth and the frustration and apathy that festers that should be he bigger worry, because Gen Z really doesn't care what happens to the World after what they saw us millennials go through.
I think this will impact many, but just ike in 2008, most will be forgotten and wonder why the homeless problem just keeps getting worse in SV and sheepishly go about their day in their coddled bubble as they had before.
The lines and horrendously bad food/slow service have pretty much kept me eating at home.
However, I echo the comments that it's not what it once was. I blame the queso introduction, they went through three versions and still have made a good product which now looks indicative of their larger issues. I sincerely hope they turn it around.
This is all from memory from an article I read at the time.
Basically, their selling point was preparing ingredients on-site, however, they didn't seem to have the staff to do so safety and corners ended up getting cut and there was widespread food poisoning. They had to pay out millions. To rectify the situation they started preparing some ingredients in central locations ahead of time.