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kottke.org posts about Chipotle

Chipotle Cup Stories: Beyonce and Solange

Beyonce is mad at Solange for not sticking to the plan. What plan? I don’t want to say too much, but it involves Chipotle.

“You just stood there. I was defending you.”

“Do I need defending?”

“That’s not the point. He is a monster.”

“He is my husband.”

Beyoncé looked away, out the window at the people and the buildings, as they sped across 59th St. “I know who I married. That was my decision and I’ll live with it.”

“Of course you take his side.”

“Excuse me?” Beyoncé turned to face her sister. “Beyoncé is on Beyoncé’s side. Always. Trust that.”

(via @ftrain)


Leadership from within

In recent years, Chipotle has worked to promote their managers from within the company. And the tactic seems to be working.

The common element among the best-performing stores was a manager who had risen up from crew. So Moran started to outline a program that would retain and train the best managers, and reward them to the point where they would be thrilled to stay on.

After Flores expressed his frustration, Moran showed him his early notes for the restaurateur program, which is unique among fast food restaurants in that it ties pay and promotion to how well you mentor people, rather than store sales.

“It was a great meeting but I didn’t know what was going to happen. At most companies you meet the top execs and then you never hear from them again,” Flores says.

A few weeks after the October meeting, while vacationing in Houston, Flores got a call on his cell from Ells and Moran letting him know that he had been promoted to restaurateur and was getting a $3,000 bonus. Rather than waiting until he returned to Milwaukee to get him the check, it was delivered to him in Houston the following day. At the time his salary was around $38,000, and the bonus was meaningful.

“That’s when I knew the company was special,” Flores said.

Interesting bits of business wisdom throughout this piece.


How to hack Chipotle

This article on getting the most out of your burrito-scarfing experience at Chipotle by William Hudson at Thought Catalog was better than I thought it could be.

1/2 meat + 1/2 meat = 3/2 meat. Forgetting is natural, like Chipotle meat, so let me remind you that when you add fractions you only add the top part, when the bottom part is the same number. Therefore, when you’re asked what type of meat, and you say “half chicken and half steak”, it should equal one serving of meat. But it never does. Because a scoop of meat is kinda just a scoop of meat, and nobody in Chipotle management has yet introduced new “half” scoops with which to more precisely address this perfectly legal request. So use it. IMPORTANT: Unlike with the beans, you should make your position on the half meats clear from the beginning, otherwise they charge you for “extra meat.”

These options should all have names like the In-N-Out secret menu items: the Blinko, the Meat and a Half, the Jimmy Stewart’s Bathtub, etc. (via digg)


Chipotle: no more ad agencies

Chipotle has ditched their ad agency.

Last November, Chipotle made the decision to go it alone and bring advertising in-house. After spending at least six months selecting Butler Shine from a group of 27 agencies, Mr. Crumpacker said it didn’t make sense to take the time to pick another agency. “By the time we picked one and got them up to speed it would have been a year,” he said. “The only reasonable thing to do was to do it ourselves.”

The chain is shifting away from traditional advertising anyway, Mr. Crumpacker added, noting that advertising, generally, is becoming less important to Chipotle. Not to mention that Chipotle’s co-CEO, Steve Ells, isn’t exactly supportive of advertising. “For Chipotle, I guess I’d say [advertising] is not less important to our CEO, because he never thought it was that important,” Mr. Crumpacker said. “He’s asked me [whether] should we do advertising at all.”