Online orders have exploded in an overwhelming mix of takeout and delivery, resulting in a lucrative additional revenue source for fast-food restaurants—and a lot of stressed-out workers and frustrated customers.
For more than three years, Patrick Rodriguez has worked at a Chipotle restaurant at the northern tip of Manhattan, a vital food lifeline during the pandemic for the nurses and doctors who work a block away at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Last week, Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. CMG, +1.77% Chief Executive Brian Niccol said on the company’s earnings call that the company has reached nearly $2.7 billion in online revenue so far this year, close to its total $2.8 billion in online sales all of last year. “It’s like being ripped into two,” Rodriguez said. Because his location is so understaffed, he said there’s a person on the digital-make line, which handles online orders, while he often is solo on the main line that serves in-store customers. That means preparing orders and handling the cash register by himself.
“It’s just become part of the way people are ordering food. And the staffing hasn’t matched the increased workload,” Pastreich said. Morales called the police twice, but nobody came until he and his employees flagged down a couple of officers they saw driving by. Those officers eventually calmed the man down, who by then had been raging for 15 minutes.
“In a few minor instances, there have been challenges with available labor so we made adjustments in these restaurants to temporarily accommodate the needs of the business,” she added. Those adjustments included changing hours of operations or having stores switch to digital-only orders during certain times. Chipotle did not quickly respond to a request for comment about Wednesday’s employee walkout at one of its Manhattan locations.
“People would just stare at us, angry,” he said. “Orders were coming in faster than they could be made. We would frequently see orders of 75, 80, 90 items within a 15-minute time span.” “We get several orders within each 10-minute interval and we often have people coming in saying, ‘the app said my order was ready’ then getting annoyed when they have to wait for their food,” said Pranav Iyer, who works at a Chipotle in Davie, Fla. “Even when the order is placed at 11:57 a.m., the promise time will still be listed at 12 p.m.”
There are also ingredient shortages at the Chipotle restaurant in Vallejo, Calif., says an employee who has worked at the location for a little over a month. As workers struggle with being asked to do more in less time, Niccol, the CEO, marveled during the company’s earnings call at what he said was an improvement in how long it takes for online orders to be fulfilled by Chipotle employees. “The time from your order to actually your food being ready is now less than 10 minutes in our business, so we’ve gotten even faster at this space to make it even more convenient,” he said, adding that “a couple quarters ago that was in the 12-minute range.
“Associates who were normally on the sales floor and restocking suddenly had to pick and pack orders,” Witcher said. “Just as stores were never designed to be pick locations, neither are these places.”