Chipotle Delivery Absolutely Should Not Exist and I Can’t Stop Using It

How a Fast Casual Delivery Service Highlights a Key Contradiction At Capitalism’s Core

I open up my Chromebook. A few clicks and I’m on Chipotle’s homepage choosing “Delivery”. My address is saved thanks to Google’s cookies.

My mouse glides over glossy thumbnails, dropping down here and there to pluck food stuffs out of the heavens (that’s what the cloud is right?) like an emperor king. I am a Cromulon demanding maximum effort out of minimum wage employees.

I hand off my laptop to my partner who checks a few boxes, asks, “did you get chips and guac?”, and hands it back.

I hover over the payment field, where all of my credit cards, some of Jayme’s, and some I haven’t used in years, pop up, offering themselves as tribute.

I select one and get irritated that I can’t remember the CVV code, causing me to get off the couch, walk over to my coat, root around in its pockets, find my wallet, get the right card out…they call this convenience?

Within two minutes I’ve ordered more food than 650 million people will be able to acquire, on a given day, this entire year.

 Current estimates are that nearly 690 million people are hungry, or 8.9 percent of the world population – up by 10 million people in one year and by nearly 60 million in five years.

United Nations

And while humanity’s food supply chain has reached a level of efficiency that have only existed for <1% of our entire existence, every step in that chain is a painfully, purposefully siloed mess maximized to extort productivity and funnel profit upwards, leaving everyone actually conducting its transactions in varying degrees of discomfort: from annoyance and frustration, to scraping for survival on a non-living wage.

The typical Chipotle Crew Member salary is $11. Crew Member salaries at Chipotle can range from $8 – $16. This estimate is based upon 250 Chipotle Crew Member salary report(s) provided by employees or estimated based upon statistical methods.

Glassdoor

So while the first description of my experience ordering Chipotle online reads almost like an ad for America’s 12th largest restaurant chain, my next description will not.

Nas and My Order

I spit a story backwards, it starts at the ending

Nas, “Rewind”

I hang up.

A woman in a call center somewhere, working for what actual company I cannot gather, tells me she can’t place another order for me, but she can refund me the price of one item.

I pick up my phone, dial a phone number and reach a corporate phone tree.

A man in a truck tells me to, “call the store” and that there’s nothing he can do about it.

I look in the bag that I’m holding in my hands, no guac. I yell out to the man getting in his car.

I pick up the brown paper bag sitting on my stoop, it feels light.

I get off the couch and walk to my front door.

A knock on my front door. A man walks away from it, gets back in his car, and drives to Chipotle.

A man picks up an order from Chipotle, maybe several, that his phone has told him are ready, the addresses of the orderers all angry dots on a glowing map, hungry and expectant.

A man knocks on a front door, walks away from it, gets back in his car, and drives to Chipotle.

A team of people receive an order via computer. They do their best to fulfill it, but none of them is responsible for the order as a whole, only a small part of it: the rice and beans, the cheese and salsa, the chips.

I click “Order” on the Chipotle site.

I turn the right credit card over and type the numbers into my laptop.

I find my wallet in my jacket.

I get off the couch in a huff.

The Dehumanization of The Chain

In the story I just related, every step in the food preparation and delivery process is purposefully separated, autonomy of the individual deliberately divorced: the driver can’t go back to the restaurant and get you the thing you paid him to bring you, the operator can’t call the restaurant and re-order it for you, you must simply start the entire process over again.

Henry Ford would be envious.

When Ford Motor Company famously doubled the pay of its factory workers overnight, in the beginning of 1914, it did so, not out of the kindness of its benevolent heart, not even out of a now-mythologized self-interest: that doubling the pay of his workers made them all, suddenly, eligible customers.

Henry Ford gave his factory workers a raise in 1914 because in 1913 his company had to hire 52,000 people just to maintain it’s staff of 14,000. The turnover was that incessant, the work that unbearable.

The Ford company paid people more because it cost them too much not too.

The gig economy has no such problem.

If Henry Ford’s Sociological Department had the tools that today’s assembly line administrators do, they probably wouldn’t have had to do surprise house visits of their employees, inquisitioning them as to the cleanliness of their homes and the enschoolment of their children.

If Ford could have invented the gig economy he would have.

An assembly line where each worker is an independent contractor, using their own tools on the job, for whose wear and tear they are not compensated, one new applicant jumping on the line as soon as another quits, none receiving benefits or job security of any kind. It’s a capitalist’s dream.

Standing in line at Chipotle, on the days where my phone had run out of battery, I would often be overcome with the feeling, trite as it might be, that I was cattle being herded through small gates, down narrow metal-railinged halls winding their way to a feed trough.

And during one of these restless moments, in one of these long lines, I couldn’t help but think about the person who was making the most money from this entire, stressful scene.

They were nowhere to be seen.

All the wealth created from all the work being done in a Chipotle is physically, or electronically, shipped out of the store: to its owner(s), to the corporation.

All the tension being felt – by staff feeling the pressure to serve a growing line of customers, by hungry customers growing more impatient with each order, all of us sensing something we can’t quite define, a lack of personal space perhaps, the same frustration at not-moving felt in a traffic jam – is all to make sure the people already making the bulk of the wealth from this operation, are making as much wealth as mathematically possible.

Chipotle has done Ford one better: it has turned its customers into the assembly line.

Now food delivery services are doing Chipotle one better: hiding the assembly line altogether by subdividing each section into entirely different companies.

And while I think the call center rep works for a different company than the person putting cheese on my burrito bowl, we all work for Amazon.

Not really, but I swear my Chipotle order was once delivered by a guy in an Amazon Prime truck.

Looking into that connection further, I found this cross-promotional effort, that several media outlets “reported” on (they’re really just ads in article form) with headline similar to, “Chipotle giving out free Amazon Echoes — if you have this name”.

(Chipotle), which brought in $1.2 billion in revenue this year, announced customers can now order food for delivery or pickup using Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa. The chain will give away free Amazon Echoes as a part of the promotion.

Fox Business

Say it with me, “synergy”.

When in line at a Chipotle, the assembly line is very clear.

With Chipotle delivery, it becomes obscured.

This obfuscation provides an even more important function: hiding the assembly line’s administrators, to the point where its hard to find out who they are, or conceptualize that they exist at all.

The system feels chaotic because it is designed to be chaotic. This benefits ownership at the expense of everyone else. A sentence that, due to its complete and unrelenting Americanism, might as well be in our constitution.

On the factory floor, the foreman would literally oversee the means of production, either walking the floor or peering down on it from stalked catwalks.

In the factory of our food delivery service, we cannot see our overseers, we cannot even see the factory. Our engine building team is a completely different company from our brake building team, our brake building team a completely different company from our suspension building team. All of them driving down the cost of each other’s labor by competing.

Chipotle is officially delivered by DoorDash, the same company that could never seem to find the door of our last apartment, once leaving the food an entire block behind us.

DoorDash, at the time I stopped using it, even had a fun feature where you got no information on the driver other than their first name. So you couldn’t text and say, “hey, I think you dropped my food off at the wrong place”. You know, human communication between two people involved in a transaction.

Instead, you had to instant message with a different single named employee from wherever-corporate-customer-service-warehouse.

I don’t blame the drivers. They may not care about what they’re doing, and I am probably a bit overly touchy about people playing with my food, but at the end of the day, they don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

There’s is a position with no power, determined by the powerful we never see.

It’s Not A Good Thing

In Stephen Meyer’s Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland, he writes,

An Illinois college student in the Ford plant noted, “a deadening effect, particularly upon a man’s mental life” and “the repetitive nature or autonomy of his work”. He added: “You cannot get interested in screwing screw number 6421 into some housing or doing some similar job, hour after hour, and day after day”. For many workers, the loss of control over work tasks and routines, an important feature of craft production, was the most disconcerting feature of the new industrial system. One machine operator rhetorically asked journalist Robert Cruden: Am I bossed around? No, I don’t need to be. The machine I’m on goes at such a terrific speed that I can’t help stepping on it in order to keep up with the machine. It’s my boss”

Source

The machine was the boss of industrial age, the app is now the boss of the gig economy.

While calculations vary, even a conservative (in favor of Uber the company) estimate, says Uber wages fall “below the mandated minimum wage in nine of 20 major markets, including the three largest (Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York).”

Uber drivers get pinged about their next pick-up while they’re dropping off their current rider. Each Uber driver is essentially in competition with every other Uber driver in the area, each one of them driving down the wages of the other, and in turn, of themselves.

What is surge pricing but an app determining there is more demand than supply at the moment? This means, inherently, that when there is more labor supply than demand (when less people are booking rides), the compensation for that labor goes down.

All of this maximizes profit for owners who are, again, nowhere to be seen.

It’s a great system at minimizing downtime and cost. It’s a terrible system for humans to be a part of.

Why Can’t I Stop Using It?

Maybe it’s the 40-hours-at-work work week, followed by the 5-10 hour weekly commute time, on top of the (at least) 5 hours of house work and several hours of life-sustaining exercise week, in addition to the idea that I should, somewhere in all that work, find time to, you know, enjoy life, that keeps me from being able to do All The Things (oh, and you’re supposed to have a side hustle too).

Google something along the lines of “cost of convenience” and you’ll find think pieces on what you, as an individual can do, to stop paying so much for convenience. You can go minimalist to get out of your rut in order to stop emptying your wallet faster than you think.

We may never stop blaming individuals for our systemic failings in America.

And yes, a majority of adults not having enough time and energy to work, do the work of life, and also enjoy life each week, is a failing of a wealthy society.

During this pandemic, I have made a concerted effort to stop ordering from chains as much as possible.

I understand that chains still employ local people, who are dependent on those wages, but the dehumanization of the process is too much to stomach sometimes.

James Baldwin, talking to Margaret Mead on the topic of housing projects replacing neighborhoods, said, “The anonymity of it is a tremendous insult. People won’t bear it. People will become monstrous before they can bear it.” and I can’t stop thinking about it. Anonymity as insult.

I in no way mean to compare my situation with that of a person in poverty being more-or-less forced into public housing, and I’m not about to become monstrous over the mistakes of a fast casual food delivery service.

But trying to get guacamole on a Tuesday is a small glimpse into the very large machinery running our lives.

I’m tired, overworked, and Chipotle, to be fair, makes a consistently tasty product. From an opportunity cost perspective, it’s often the most affordable option on busy days that turn into busy evenings.

Personal responsibility is great. But to paraphrase Kanye West, “having (personal responsibility) ain’t everything, not having it is“.

Recognizing our personal limits, and recognizing our powerlessness in a larger system, is important to, perhaps ironically, reclaiming our humanity.

By recognizing our dehumanization, we are humanized.

None of us have as much autonomy as we are told is our birthright as Americans. Acknowledging our powerlessness allows us to, maybe one day, correctly identify the powerful.

Yes, my purchasing of Chipotle delivery is part of the problem. But I, along with many, if not most Americans, are put in situations where the quick meal solution is the most affordable (in multiple respects).

Am I privileged to complain about cheap, fast, relatively tasty food being more readily available than ever? Absolutely.

But my privilege to complain in no way absolves the powerful from creating systems that purposefully obscure their own responsibility, while they preach self-reliance, and actively work to thrust all the responsibility of their company onto its least paid employees.

Self-responsibility for the individual, shirking responsibility onto the individual for the mega-corporation. I wonder why that’s not a more popular saying, it rolls right off the tongue.