Chipotle cheating you out of cash? That's what a few New Jersey residents found was happening whenever they were to their local Chipotle when they noticed their checks were rounded up to the nearest even amount.
The Consumerist, a website where "shoppers bite back" investigated a column in The Star-Ledger, which reported on Chipotle's practice of rounding the change in receipt totals for cash transactions at some restaurants. These locations do this so that cashiers don't have to handle lots of coins, which tend to slow the lines down.
The report followed up on some of its readers complaints that the restaurant had been rounding bills up in order to not deal with pennies. This is what they found according to a customer's receipts:
On the first, dated July 13, the nine items added up to $32.93. There was $2.31 in tax. The total should have been $35.24, but next to the "total" line on the receipt, it said $35.25.
The next receipt, with the same sale date, showed a subtotal of $8.64. The tax was $0.60, so the grand total should have been $9.24. But no. With Chipotle-style math, the total was $9.25.
The New Jersey resident said he figured the rounding-up practice was implemented so the lines at Chipotle would move faster and not that the chain was intentionally cheating customers.
Chipotle operates in an assembly-line style, where you place your order and then walk along the counter, choosing what you would like to be added to your burrito or whatever it is you might be having. Customers then pay at the end of the line.
Chipotle says it's not part of some scam to cheat people out of their hard-earned money, but rather a way to be more efficient and cut down on long lines. They also round down, for the record. However, most customers feel like they've been had, as the restaurant didn't necessarily make this practice common knowledge.
A spokesperson for Chipotle told the Star-Ledger that the company employs the practice to curb long lines and create greater efficiency in these high-volume locations."The idea is simply to limit the possible combinations of change on cash transactions to keep the lines moving quickly in high volume areas," spokesman Chris Arnold tells the newspaper. "It was never our intention to have a policy that was confusing or misleading."
He also explained to the New York Times that Chipotle hasn't seen any kind of profit from the practice.
Chipotle locations in New Jersey will no longer be rounding up, only down, a spokesperson told Consumerist.
