“You going to just stare at that coffee?” Lillian asked.
I smiled at being caught in an unguarded state of preoccupation with my dark thoughts. Then I took a sip of the decaf.
“It’s good. Tastes like the real thing,” I said, and this time I was telling the truth.
“Nothing hard about making a good cup of coffee,” Lillian said to this customer as she lit up another cigarette.
And that statement provided something of an answer to my questions about Lillian and her business. Because the coffee at the Metro Diner didn’t have to be as good as it was, nor did the excellent food served there have to be so carefully prepared or so reasonably priced. That was not how we did things where I happened to work. The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product –– Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price –– Everything.
I had to take a long distance road across the US for work in the spring. I planned my hotel for the night to be around a Chipotle along the way. It’s one of the few options that isn’t synthetic and doesn’t make me feel the awful “I’m traveling for work trash diet” feeling. Some actual vegetables and protein at least. Didn’t have time to seek out local places and delivery is hit or miss. Is it possible their prices are up because the cost of “actual food” has gone up? Beyond that you’re eating low quality borderline carnival food (sugar, cheese blob, deep fried) and mono sodium glutamate loaded Christian faith based chicken sandwich offerings.
The food seems to have become worse and worse too.
I’m pretty sure the last several times I’ve eaten chipotle, across several states, I’ve been given hard rice and cold meat. I don’t remember it being that common a decade ago.
It's strange to me to see Chipotle as the face of this. You can still get a chicken burrito which has 60g of protein and 1000 calories for just about $10. In my opinion, the only issue with their food is that the sodium is a bit high which is pretty unavoidable with fast food.
A similar burrito from any other local place near me is $15 or more. These might be a bit healthier but it's 50% more expensive.
You can definitely meal prep everything for a Chipotle burrito or bowl for about half the price meal but that doesn't factor in the time to grocery shop and cook (and also buy tortillas from Chipotle because for some reason you can't get them as a consumer from any wholesaler...). I opt for making burritos that can be frozen instead and it's nice having a freezer filled with 3-4 different options that take 5 minutes to defrost/reheat in the microwave. @stealth_health_life on instagram has a bunch of great recipes but it's also not really hard to just prep individual burrito fillings and make your own.
Chicken burrito costs $11.50 without any additions before taxes where I am. Closer to $12.85 with taxes.
Chipotle lists its portion size for protein to be 4oz which roughly translates to 27g of protein IF they don’t skimp on the portions (which they usually do. Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein, it’s very hard to get what you’re suggesting at Chipotle anymore.
On the other hand, the Mexican truck down the street sells $3 street tacos with way more meat.
The family-owned Mexican restaurant literally across the street from the nearest Chipotle sells their burritos starting at 7.99, 9.99 if you want to add a full side order of rice and beans. I can get two full meals for almost the same price as Chipotle. Sounds like OP’s local places are ripping them off.
>Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein
Rice and beans are decentish sources of protein, according to their website https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator/burrito (which is I'm sure generous, but probably not fraudulently so) a bean, cheese, and rice burrito is 23g of protein, and if you add chicken you get to 58g.
> You can still get a chicken burrito which has 60g of protein and 1000 calories for just about $10.
I am not sure where you live, but here in Atlanta that's about 30g of protein (still about 1000 calories depending on free additions) at almost $15 after tax. Or I could go to a local mexican place and get a similar burrito for less than $10.
Thank God taco trucks have become practically ubiquitous, even in small cities and suburbs. Not always cheaper than Chipotle, but definitely better quality (and usually cheaper..)
Make sure to eat at one with their food license displayed or readily visible. Botulism is not cool, and food trucks are already hard to regulate. I love food trucks though.
These were Brian Niccol decisions before he parachuted over to his ~$100M pay package at Starbucks as their CEO.
> In 2018, Niccol became the CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, replacing founder Steve Ells. Although Niccol had moved west to Newport Beach, California to join Taco Bell, he did not move back east to Denver when he joined Chipotle. Rather, under his leadership, Chipotle moved its headquarters from Denver to Newport Beach. During his tenure, he helped double Chipotle's revenue while its profits increased almost seven times. The stock price of Chipotle has increased by almost eight times under Niccol. Niccol also increased salaries for Chipotle's retail staff and expanded employee benefits. In 2023, Niccol's total compensation at Chipotle was $22.5 million, or 1,354 times the median employee pay at Chipotle for that year.
As govt inflation rates are often reported lower than actual, there's a good chance real inflation (or perhaps food inflation) was higher, and in spitting distance of 45%.
All takeout food did. I struggle to find why Chipotle would be considered expensive relative to other takeout options. You're getting chicken and 10 additional whole foods options for $10, when most other Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, taqueria, etc. options are at least a few $ more.
In the East Bay, I've noticed that the chain restaurants are consistently more expensive. Chipotle is more expensive than the taqueria down the street, not by a lot, but by a buck or two. And the bigger chains jacked up prices by more than the more regional ones: Subway costs the same as Togo's. McDonald's costs more than In n Out.
Businesses have found that people are willing to spend ~$20 on a fast/fast-casual lunch, and now most everybody charges that amount. But the national chains are also aiming for food consistency between locations, which means that my Chipotle and McDonald's meal is going to be only as good as they can economically make it in a blasted food desert like Indianapolis, whereas the local restaurants and regional chains can take advantage of me living less than 200 miles of 40% of the country's fresh produce production.
The fast food / fast-casual segments are losing price differentiation, and the fast food options are losing on quality.
That’s interesting because I’m in the East Bay Area too and have the opposite experience.
Chipotle burrito is $10.50, 80% of taquerias are $15 burritos.
In N out double double meal is $11, but McDonalds app has free fries so a Double Quarter (with 2x meat), fries, and drink is $9…
I just looked it up. At my local Chipotle, a burrito is $13.65 + $2.50 guac + $2.80 for chips and salsa + $2.85 drink, comes out just over $21.80 before tax. Tacqueria around the corner, Super fajitas burrito $15.49 + free chips and salsa + $3.75 for a drink, comes out to $19.25 before tax.
If you consider guacamole an extravagance, the more basic burrito at the tacqueria is $13.49, so the gap shrinks, but is still in the tacqueria's favor.
Between the two, Chipotle's chips are better, but everything else is a downgrade quality wise.
And I don't think it's reasonable to include coupons in McDonald's pricing. I'm not installing malware on my phone to save the $3 a McDonald's fry costs.
Other fast food options have recently marketed and offered cheaper options. Chipotle doesn't have a very deep menu. I see they sell a single taco for around $4 but not many other "value" options.
That’s kind of why Chillis is doing pretty well. It costs almost the same as McDonalds and for a few bucks extra, you’d get a reasonable sit down experience.
They're also benefiting from being practically the last man standing in the family dining segment. They're not in a menu category that was going to butt up against nicer sit-down dining places (if Olive Garden, for example, raised their prices much they'd be running up against sit down Italian places, likewise for Red Lobster and nicer seafood). And they adapted well to the COVID-era takeout boom, which suggests that they were actually serving food people would choose to eat, not merely offering the sit down experience like say Applebees.
All the expensive local run city restaurants benefited from inflation.
The McDonalds burger went from $12 to $18, but it's still the same terrible product. The hipster burger joint price went from $20 to $22, and that is a dramatically better burger.
The difference is that the local burger place doesn't have to show a 7% increase in profit year after year in perpetuity. Their price was set for "I can live a modest life off the profit and pay my employees a wage competitive enough to actually staff my restaurant, and therefore also end up with people more competent than your average fast food worker". That gives you more value per dollar, because more of your dollar is being spent on actual product and service rather than paying absurd and unjustifiable salaries to an entire building full of overpaid "management" and administration in the highest cost of living part of the country. Fewer shareholders to pay too.
So instead of the price delta between absolute trash and quality being $8, now it's $4.
I am told inflation is a bad thing, but it is making lots of small business that we desperately want and need much more competitive. A smaller business has far less pricing power and therefore less ability to pass on a cost increase.
As opposed to their current business plan of making a burrito that is half the size and twice the price?
A decade ago going to Chipotle was a treat. You'd get a fresh and honestly gigantic burrito for a pretty reasonable price. Sometimes I would stop after work and pick up burritos/bowls for the entire family.
I went a couple of years ago and it was just sad. They didn't shrink the tortilla so I ended up with a burrito that was practically double wrapped after they skimped on all of the fillings and it cost something in the double digits. I have not been back. The only good thing was in the old days the line would be pretty long and it would be a wait, but last time I went I was able to walk right up and order.
It's not like Chipotle doesn't have plenty of competition. There's a Qdoba right down the streets from mine and a Califorina Tortilla in the other. Across town there is a Cafe Rio. It feels like some middle management dweeb thought we wouldn't notice when they tried to maximize profits.
The funny thing about Chipotle is that in Denver, you have Illegal Pete’s which is kind of like Chipotle if they never went national. Somehow, with the economies of scale, Chipotle is still more expensive, has smaller portions, fewer toppings and menu options and overall an objective worse experience when it comes to food and the dining experience. I am always amazed and confused how that’s possible at all.
"Big business is better for consumers because economy of scale" has just always been a lie.
No business will pass on a cost decrease if it doesn't have to. A big business will always have more pricing power than a small business. A big business will therefore pass on fewer cost savings to consumers.
Also, making food the way Chipotle does just does not have any economy of scale. The workers making burritos don't get cheaper if you hire 100k of them.
"Economy of scale" is not some magic spell that you get when you pass 10k employees. Economy of scale is a lie that covers up that if you make huge investments, you can do enough engineering and machine work to replace humans in some parts of some processes. It is not intrinsic.
It is the norm that a business will spend a lot of money on cost reduction or process improvement and then just.... happily absorb that improved profit margin.
I’ve said this before on HN. Behind all the AI enthusiasm and evangelism on HN and tech industry in general, people forget: When most people are out of a job, AI won’t be Doordashing you $15 burrito from Chipotle that cost $30 to deliver. You need a backup plan for when things go South and so far, there doesn’t even seem to be a conversation going on about it.
No doubt. The ingredients to make a Mission-style burrito hover around $2 in quantity. Rice and beans are cheap filler and a 10-pack of 13.5-inch flour tortillas is $3.50. Prices fluctuate, but definitely not enough to justify the current fast food pricing models, which seems to assume everyone works at a FAANG company, which is increasingly not the case. Ditch Chipotle and hit La Cumbre instead.
If you're young and without a job, burritos are definitely in your price range; you just have to be willing to make it yourself. It's not hard to get close to that Mission-style burrito with a little patience and buying in bulk. Get an Instant Pot for the beans. There's a ton of recipes for decent beans on YouTube. Make your own salsa; it's not hard. Grate your own cheese (80g/burrito). Most places bulk up their burritos with rice. Use red/spanish/mexican rice, which is super simple to make. Use a 13.5-inch flour tortilla, which can be found at most restaurant supplies or your local mercado. Pro tip: use roasted veggies instead of rice. You can do it!
And, some may have the luck or guidance to know rice, beans, lentils, etc. can be bought in bulk quantities and stored long enough to be very cost-efficient.
In 2012 a single package of name brand instant ramen was 25 cents exactly, no tax on food items in my state, I literally bought one with a quarter from my car's coin tray once for a weird craving.
As of this year, that same single packet of ramen is now 50 cents.
100% inflation over 13ish years. For an item made by an assembly line out of dirt cheap components.
The commodity price of wheat has more price movement than I expected, but roughly has only gone up by 20% in the same time frame.
And what food do we as a society think is appropriate for them to afford? That is, what structure (social services, etc) do we need to have in place to enable that should-statement
We probably shouldn’t have the government lobster truck that comes by and gives everybody a fresh lobster, but people’s nutritional needs should be met. In modern society with modern agriculture, we could afford to do that just fine. I think the thing that’s really broken right now is the food environment that people have to choose from. It makes a program like snap or EBT less cost-effective in terms of getting nutrition to people.
It's funny when people use lobster as an example because it used to be literal bottom tier food served to prisoners. So I hope we can do at least as good as the lobster truck.
>We probably shouldn’t have the government lobster truck that comes by and gives everybody a fresh lobster
Here in Maine, fresh lobster has frequently in a retail store been cheaper than ground beef per pound. Sometimes by as much as half the price. Our industry was catching far too much, and had frequent price problems until we started selling it to China.
You can buy lobster on EBT. Remember that a significant portion of the goal of Food Stamps is to be a subsidy to food producers. Maine's lobster industry benefits from that subsidy.
In a similar way, Susan Collins once made the US federal government buy tons of Maine blueberries for school lunch programs to improve pricing during a high yield year.
Lobster is a rare luxury in Colorado for sure, but in some coastal states it is downright abundant. If you live near a fishing community, lobster is like $2 per giant bucket, not pound. Its luxury is mostly artificial and marketing.
Food deserts are a huge problem, but they are not caused by Food Stamps. Food deserts are caused by the same thing as nearly every bad thing that affects poor people in the USA: that we allowed businesses to M&A themselves into massive conglomerates that get more rights than god and more influence and power than most countries.
Places that used to have local grocers or IGAs lost them because the wealthier members of the poor community could drive an hour away to the Walmart. The IGA didn't lose all its business, but enough to make it nonviable.
Oh that's just free market competition! Walmart was able to lower prices and collect more business by being efficient!
Are we actually better off driving an hour away to grocery shop at Walmart? Doesn't matter, Americans lost so much purchasing power that they almost didn't have a choice. Nearly all extra dollars our economy has generated since 1970ish have gone to a tiny group of connected people. Nobody could afford the local IGA anymore, because America stopped letting normal people make money. Whats worse, there are now companies like Dollar General and their entire business strategy is dropping into those communities that no longer have a local grocery store and extracting what little remaining wealth that community has to some corporate headquarters and CEO that lives 2000 miles away.
It's impossible for rural towns and small communities to exist when every dollar they spend goes out of that economy. You need to provide room in the economy for small players who don't have such """efficient""" operations because they hire locally, buy locally, work locally, etc. But it doesn't matter that they are "less efficient" because that money will cycle through that local economy and enable multiple people to actually live.
None of this is new. America has had successful businesses try to own the entire market its whole existence. Each and every time we had to break them up, and we eventually decided to police the process of Mergers entirely to just stop the problem before it hurt people. But then Reagan insisted we should just.... not do that?
So of course, now we have the expected problem and a stupidly inefficient market. Letting a company like Google or Facebook buy everyone and anyone who might choose to compete with them later is a market failure.
Good tasting (for their culture), fresh, nutritious, and calorically dense food available from somewhere at least as convenient as a grocery store. As well as some extra money to afford a few prepared meals and a few 'luxury' food items. The first to encourage socialization (i.e. you can go out with your friends/family without shame) and because life without small joys isn't.
That's probably where I would put the floor in order to avoid a population that actively desires my head on a platter.
That AI is not a bubble might be true, though that this mighty edifice glowing brightly in all freqencys of the spectrum is sitting on quick sand, is another truth.
“You going to just stare at that coffee?” Lillian asked.
I smiled at being caught in an unguarded state of preoccupation with my dark thoughts. Then I took a sip of the decaf.
“It’s good. Tastes like the real thing,” I said, and this time I was telling the truth.
“Nothing hard about making a good cup of coffee,” Lillian said to this customer as she lit up another cigarette.
And that statement provided something of an answer to my questions about Lillian and her business. Because the coffee at the Metro Diner didn’t have to be as good as it was, nor did the excellent food served there have to be so carefully prepared or so reasonably priced. That was not how we did things where I happened to work. The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product –– Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price –– Everything.
They're saying that subscription based software was inspired by this quote.
great writing style
I think from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Work_Is_Not_Yet_Done
I had to take a long distance road across the US for work in the spring. I planned my hotel for the night to be around a Chipotle along the way. It’s one of the few options that isn’t synthetic and doesn’t make me feel the awful “I’m traveling for work trash diet” feeling. Some actual vegetables and protein at least. Didn’t have time to seek out local places and delivery is hit or miss. Is it possible their prices are up because the cost of “actual food” has gone up? Beyond that you’re eating low quality borderline carnival food (sugar, cheese blob, deep fried) and mono sodium glutamate loaded Christian faith based chicken sandwich offerings.
The food seems to have become worse and worse too.
I’m pretty sure the last several times I’ve eaten chipotle, across several states, I’ve been given hard rice and cold meat. I don’t remember it being that common a decade ago.
They just can't ever get the rice right.
It's strange to me to see Chipotle as the face of this. You can still get a chicken burrito which has 60g of protein and 1000 calories for just about $10. In my opinion, the only issue with their food is that the sodium is a bit high which is pretty unavoidable with fast food.
A similar burrito from any other local place near me is $15 or more. These might be a bit healthier but it's 50% more expensive.
You can definitely meal prep everything for a Chipotle burrito or bowl for about half the price meal but that doesn't factor in the time to grocery shop and cook (and also buy tortillas from Chipotle because for some reason you can't get them as a consumer from any wholesaler...). I opt for making burritos that can be frozen instead and it's nice having a freezer filled with 3-4 different options that take 5 minutes to defrost/reheat in the microwave. @stealth_health_life on instagram has a bunch of great recipes but it's also not really hard to just prep individual burrito fillings and make your own.
Chicken burrito costs $11.50 without any additions before taxes where I am. Closer to $12.85 with taxes.
Chipotle lists its portion size for protein to be 4oz which roughly translates to 27g of protein IF they don’t skimp on the portions (which they usually do. Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein, it’s very hard to get what you’re suggesting at Chipotle anymore.
On the other hand, the Mexican truck down the street sells $3 street tacos with way more meat.
The family-owned Mexican restaurant literally across the street from the nearest Chipotle sells their burritos starting at 7.99, 9.99 if you want to add a full side order of rice and beans. I can get two full meals for almost the same price as Chipotle. Sounds like OP’s local places are ripping them off.
>Unless the rest of the ingredients make up for 33g of protein
Rice and beans are decentish sources of protein, according to their website https://www.chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator/burrito (which is I'm sure generous, but probably not fraudulently so) a bean, cheese, and rice burrito is 23g of protein, and if you add chicken you get to 58g.
> You can still get a chicken burrito which has 60g of protein and 1000 calories for just about $10.
I am not sure where you live, but here in Atlanta that's about 30g of protein (still about 1000 calories depending on free additions) at almost $15 after tax. Or I could go to a local mexican place and get a similar burrito for less than $10.
Thank God taco trucks have become practically ubiquitous, even in small cities and suburbs. Not always cheaper than Chipotle, but definitely better quality (and usually cheaper..)
Make sure to eat at one with their food license displayed or readily visible. Botulism is not cool, and food trucks are already hard to regulate. I love food trucks though.
That sounds excellent but I tend to find stuff through the internet. How do you know where they’ll be?
Chipotle raised their prices 45% in 5 years.
These were Brian Niccol decisions before he parachuted over to his ~$100M pay package at Starbucks as their CEO.
> In 2018, Niccol became the CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill, replacing founder Steve Ells. Although Niccol had moved west to Newport Beach, California to join Taco Bell, he did not move back east to Denver when he joined Chipotle. Rather, under his leadership, Chipotle moved its headquarters from Denver to Newport Beach. During his tenure, he helped double Chipotle's revenue while its profits increased almost seven times. The stock price of Chipotle has increased by almost eight times under Niccol. Niccol also increased salaries for Chipotle's retail staff and expanded employee benefits. In 2023, Niccol's total compensation at Chipotle was $22.5 million, or 1,354 times the median employee pay at Chipotle for that year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Niccol#Chipotle_Mexican_...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CMG/chipotle-mexic...
https://sherwood.news/business/chipotle-sales-grown-since-20...
(he's also staunchly anti labor/anti union)
25% official inflation is reported here, for the last five years:
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2020?amount=1
As govt inflation rates are often reported lower than actual, there's a good chance real inflation (or perhaps food inflation) was higher, and in spitting distance of 45%.
All takeout food did. I struggle to find why Chipotle would be considered expensive relative to other takeout options. You're getting chicken and 10 additional whole foods options for $10, when most other Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, taqueria, etc. options are at least a few $ more.
In the East Bay, I've noticed that the chain restaurants are consistently more expensive. Chipotle is more expensive than the taqueria down the street, not by a lot, but by a buck or two. And the bigger chains jacked up prices by more than the more regional ones: Subway costs the same as Togo's. McDonald's costs more than In n Out.
Businesses have found that people are willing to spend ~$20 on a fast/fast-casual lunch, and now most everybody charges that amount. But the national chains are also aiming for food consistency between locations, which means that my Chipotle and McDonald's meal is going to be only as good as they can economically make it in a blasted food desert like Indianapolis, whereas the local restaurants and regional chains can take advantage of me living less than 200 miles of 40% of the country's fresh produce production.
The fast food / fast-casual segments are losing price differentiation, and the fast food options are losing on quality.
That’s interesting because I’m in the East Bay Area too and have the opposite experience. Chipotle burrito is $10.50, 80% of taquerias are $15 burritos.
In N out double double meal is $11, but McDonalds app has free fries so a Double Quarter (with 2x meat), fries, and drink is $9…
I just looked it up. At my local Chipotle, a burrito is $13.65 + $2.50 guac + $2.80 for chips and salsa + $2.85 drink, comes out just over $21.80 before tax. Tacqueria around the corner, Super fajitas burrito $15.49 + free chips and salsa + $3.75 for a drink, comes out to $19.25 before tax.
If you consider guacamole an extravagance, the more basic burrito at the tacqueria is $13.49, so the gap shrinks, but is still in the tacqueria's favor.
Between the two, Chipotle's chips are better, but everything else is a downgrade quality wise.
And I don't think it's reasonable to include coupons in McDonald's pricing. I'm not installing malware on my phone to save the $3 a McDonald's fry costs.
Other fast food options have recently marketed and offered cheaper options. Chipotle doesn't have a very deep menu. I see they sell a single taco for around $4 but not many other "value" options.
That’s kind of why Chillis is doing pretty well. It costs almost the same as McDonalds and for a few bucks extra, you’d get a reasonable sit down experience.
They're also benefiting from being practically the last man standing in the family dining segment. They're not in a menu category that was going to butt up against nicer sit-down dining places (if Olive Garden, for example, raised their prices much they'd be running up against sit down Italian places, likewise for Red Lobster and nicer seafood). And they adapted well to the COVID-era takeout boom, which suggests that they were actually serving food people would choose to eat, not merely offering the sit down experience like say Applebees.
All the expensive local run city restaurants benefited from inflation.
The McDonalds burger went from $12 to $18, but it's still the same terrible product. The hipster burger joint price went from $20 to $22, and that is a dramatically better burger.
The difference is that the local burger place doesn't have to show a 7% increase in profit year after year in perpetuity. Their price was set for "I can live a modest life off the profit and pay my employees a wage competitive enough to actually staff my restaurant, and therefore also end up with people more competent than your average fast food worker". That gives you more value per dollar, because more of your dollar is being spent on actual product and service rather than paying absurd and unjustifiable salaries to an entire building full of overpaid "management" and administration in the highest cost of living part of the country. Fewer shareholders to pay too.
So instead of the price delta between absolute trash and quality being $8, now it's $4.
I am told inflation is a bad thing, but it is making lots of small business that we desperately want and need much more competitive. A smaller business has far less pricing power and therefore less ability to pass on a cost increase.
Worth noting their prices vary heavily by location. In my area it's often the more expensive option.
The other places make your food fresh and isn’t cafeteria food.
Someone tweeted it somewhere, but Chipotle should make a burrito that is half the size and half the price.
As opposed to their current business plan of making a burrito that is half the size and twice the price?
A decade ago going to Chipotle was a treat. You'd get a fresh and honestly gigantic burrito for a pretty reasonable price. Sometimes I would stop after work and pick up burritos/bowls for the entire family.
I went a couple of years ago and it was just sad. They didn't shrink the tortilla so I ended up with a burrito that was practically double wrapped after they skimped on all of the fillings and it cost something in the double digits. I have not been back. The only good thing was in the old days the line would be pretty long and it would be a wait, but last time I went I was able to walk right up and order.
It's not like Chipotle doesn't have plenty of competition. There's a Qdoba right down the streets from mine and a Califorina Tortilla in the other. Across town there is a Cafe Rio. It feels like some middle management dweeb thought we wouldn't notice when they tried to maximize profits.
The funny thing about Chipotle is that in Denver, you have Illegal Pete’s which is kind of like Chipotle if they never went national. Somehow, with the economies of scale, Chipotle is still more expensive, has smaller portions, fewer toppings and menu options and overall an objective worse experience when it comes to food and the dining experience. I am always amazed and confused how that’s possible at all.
>Somehow, with the economies of scale,
"Big business is better for consumers because economy of scale" has just always been a lie.
No business will pass on a cost decrease if it doesn't have to. A big business will always have more pricing power than a small business. A big business will therefore pass on fewer cost savings to consumers.
Also, making food the way Chipotle does just does not have any economy of scale. The workers making burritos don't get cheaper if you hire 100k of them.
"Economy of scale" is not some magic spell that you get when you pass 10k employees. Economy of scale is a lie that covers up that if you make huge investments, you can do enough engineering and machine work to replace humans in some parts of some processes. It is not intrinsic.
It is the norm that a business will spend a lot of money on cost reduction or process improvement and then just.... happily absorb that improved profit margin.
Why wouldn't they?
Lol they used to be double or even triple the size and same/less price
They make them that big because they try to justify the price.
I’ve said this before on HN. Behind all the AI enthusiasm and evangelism on HN and tech industry in general, people forget: When most people are out of a job, AI won’t be Doordashing you $15 burrito from Chipotle that cost $30 to deliver. You need a backup plan for when things go South and so far, there doesn’t even seem to be a conversation going on about it.
No doubt. The ingredients to make a Mission-style burrito hover around $2 in quantity. Rice and beans are cheap filler and a 10-pack of 13.5-inch flour tortillas is $3.50. Prices fluctuate, but definitely not enough to justify the current fast food pricing models, which seems to assume everyone works at a FAANG company, which is increasingly not the case. Ditch Chipotle and hit La Cumbre instead.
Blaming the economy or customers is not going to fix the real problem: decline in product value - quality, quantity and price.
What food can young people without jobs afford?
If you're young and without a job, burritos are definitely in your price range; you just have to be willing to make it yourself. It's not hard to get close to that Mission-style burrito with a little patience and buying in bulk. Get an Instant Pot for the beans. There's a ton of recipes for decent beans on YouTube. Make your own salsa; it's not hard. Grate your own cheese (80g/burrito). Most places bulk up their burritos with rice. Use red/spanish/mexican rice, which is super simple to make. Use a 13.5-inch flour tortilla, which can be found at most restaurant supplies or your local mercado. Pro tip: use roasted veggies instead of rice. You can do it!
Plastic wrapped instant noodles packages.
And, some may have the luck or guidance to know rice, beans, lentils, etc. can be bought in bulk quantities and stored long enough to be very cost-efficient.
Such people are not jobless very long.
In 2012 a single package of name brand instant ramen was 25 cents exactly, no tax on food items in my state, I literally bought one with a quarter from my car's coin tray once for a weird craving.
As of this year, that same single packet of ramen is now 50 cents.
100% inflation over 13ish years. For an item made by an assembly line out of dirt cheap components.
The commodity price of wheat has more price movement than I expected, but roughly has only gone up by 20% in the same time frame.
Maybe teach zhem how to cook? Much cheaper.
And what food do we as a society think is appropriate for them to afford? That is, what structure (social services, etc) do we need to have in place to enable that should-statement
We probably shouldn’t have the government lobster truck that comes by and gives everybody a fresh lobster, but people’s nutritional needs should be met. In modern society with modern agriculture, we could afford to do that just fine. I think the thing that’s really broken right now is the food environment that people have to choose from. It makes a program like snap or EBT less cost-effective in terms of getting nutrition to people.
It's funny when people use lobster as an example because it used to be literal bottom tier food served to prisoners. So I hope we can do at least as good as the lobster truck.
I guess I have weird cultural connotations then lol, but my point stands for whatever is expensive to produce.
>We probably shouldn’t have the government lobster truck that comes by and gives everybody a fresh lobster
Here in Maine, fresh lobster has frequently in a retail store been cheaper than ground beef per pound. Sometimes by as much as half the price. Our industry was catching far too much, and had frequent price problems until we started selling it to China.
You can buy lobster on EBT. Remember that a significant portion of the goal of Food Stamps is to be a subsidy to food producers. Maine's lobster industry benefits from that subsidy.
In a similar way, Susan Collins once made the US federal government buy tons of Maine blueberries for school lunch programs to improve pricing during a high yield year.
Lobster is a rare luxury in Colorado for sure, but in some coastal states it is downright abundant. If you live near a fishing community, lobster is like $2 per giant bucket, not pound. Its luxury is mostly artificial and marketing.
Food deserts are a huge problem, but they are not caused by Food Stamps. Food deserts are caused by the same thing as nearly every bad thing that affects poor people in the USA: that we allowed businesses to M&A themselves into massive conglomerates that get more rights than god and more influence and power than most countries.
Places that used to have local grocers or IGAs lost them because the wealthier members of the poor community could drive an hour away to the Walmart. The IGA didn't lose all its business, but enough to make it nonviable.
Oh that's just free market competition! Walmart was able to lower prices and collect more business by being efficient!
Are we actually better off driving an hour away to grocery shop at Walmart? Doesn't matter, Americans lost so much purchasing power that they almost didn't have a choice. Nearly all extra dollars our economy has generated since 1970ish have gone to a tiny group of connected people. Nobody could afford the local IGA anymore, because America stopped letting normal people make money. Whats worse, there are now companies like Dollar General and their entire business strategy is dropping into those communities that no longer have a local grocery store and extracting what little remaining wealth that community has to some corporate headquarters and CEO that lives 2000 miles away.
It's impossible for rural towns and small communities to exist when every dollar they spend goes out of that economy. You need to provide room in the economy for small players who don't have such """efficient""" operations because they hire locally, buy locally, work locally, etc. But it doesn't matter that they are "less efficient" because that money will cycle through that local economy and enable multiple people to actually live.
None of this is new. America has had successful businesses try to own the entire market its whole existence. Each and every time we had to break them up, and we eventually decided to police the process of Mergers entirely to just stop the problem before it hurt people. But then Reagan insisted we should just.... not do that?
So of course, now we have the expected problem and a stupidly inefficient market. Letting a company like Google or Facebook buy everyone and anyone who might choose to compete with them later is a market failure.
Good tasting (for their culture), fresh, nutritious, and calorically dense food available from somewhere at least as convenient as a grocery store. As well as some extra money to afford a few prepared meals and a few 'luxury' food items. The first to encourage socialization (i.e. you can go out with your friends/family without shame) and because life without small joys isn't.
That's probably where I would put the floor in order to avoid a population that actively desires my head on a platter.
I'm sure they can fix this buy giving the CEO another salary increase
That AI is not a bubble might be true, though that this mighty edifice glowing brightly in all freqencys of the spectrum is sitting on quick sand, is another truth.