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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Investment Strategies / Falling Knives
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Author: richinmd   😊 😞
Number: of 1198 
Subject: Re: CMG $43.12
Date: 08/02/25 4:49 PM
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No. of Recommendations: 1

I was reading on reddit about Chipotle. I thought the following message was interesting and might shed some light, assuming it is true.


Coming from a store that is both:

A: very profitable (about 33% bottom line, $6.5k ads) B: gives good portions

I can tell you that the issue is not portions. It’s corporate squeezing the training budget to the point where it’s impacting all other facets of the business. How do you grow sales at Chipotle?

Speed/quality of service

Food, both quality and portioning

Both of these require labor. The biggest factor being training. People want to be confident in what they do, they want to work in a place with high morale. Without sufficient training and labor budgets, it’s hard to keep quality employees. If you’re constantly churning new hires, of course the service is gonna suck, of course the food is gonna suck. This leads to an unhappy management staff and churn. This continues to snowball and results in new, untrained managers who have no idea how to train an ever turning door of new hires.

On a side note, my boss recently (accidentally?) shared an email showing old labor metrics when we were scheduling on menulink from 2019. A store doing $6.7k ADS earned 95 hours of labor. Now the same sales volume earned roughly 72-75 hours of labor… greed.

TLDR: a short term hit in labor (6-12 months) could result in a long term positive impact on sales through better trained and moraled teams.
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