Chipotle Hikes Prices in Response To Rising Employee Wages
Chipotle Mexican Grill has raised its menu prices by roughly 4 percent to cover the costs of its decision to raise employees’ wages. The restaurant chain announced in May that it would raise wages for its restaurant…
Chipotle Mexican Grill has raised its menu prices by roughly 4 percent to cover the costs of its decision to raise employees’ wages.
The restaurant chain announced in May that it would raise wages for its restaurant workers to an average of $15 an hour by the end of June, NBC News reported.
Company executives said that their customers would be the ones to pay the price of raising pay.
“It feels like the right thing, at the right time, and it feels like the industry is now going to have to either do something similar or play some kind of catch-up,” CFO Jack Hartung said at the Baird Global Consumer, Technology & Services Conference this week.
“Otherwise you’ll just lose the staffing gain.”
There are also rising ingredient costs throughout the industry as restaurant suppliers try to manage the return of demand, but the restaurant chain currently isn’t planning to raise their prices above 4 percent.
“Ingredient costs, there’s talk about it,” Hartung said. “We’ll see where that leads.”
The price hike came as the total number of job openings reached 9.3 million in May, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Labor Department numbers released Tuesday.
May’s job