Unsafe working conditions: at the Bexley, Ohio location- the staff and management all wanted to get out of the store at the end of the day before midnight, this required extremely fast cleaning. The enchilada maker was never unplugged early enough-the end result is that I had to clean dangerously hot equipment wearing LATEX gloves-which obviously made no sense because the gloves just melted and each night pieces of the skin from my hands would be seared off.
The front-line staff stand directly in front of the grill area and all the smoke and heat from the grill blasts the staff, it's worse than working outside in the summer in the desert.
Low wages: The minimum-wage/just about minimum that new employees are paid has been proven to create a permanent lower class dependent upon government programs. A full-time employee at Chipotle should not qualify for food stamps. Also, there were employees who needed more hours to pay their bills and were not giving more hours or an explanation while new hires were brought in. If that was management's way of passively-aggressively telling the person they were not valued than that is messed up. Managers should be honest and not play around with people's livelihoods.
Contradictory "Standards": I was constantly being yelled at about my food portioning. I was trained to put a certain amount of lime-cilantro rice in each burrito. (This amount I was supposed to visually memorize because there was no measurement. I was also told that customers were to have as much rice as they wanted. When I put what I was trained was the company standard amount of rice in the burrito the customers would yell at me that I was being stingy with the rice and that the other employees always put in more. When I would add more the cooks would yell at me that I was causing them to make more rice than they were use to and "wasting" rice. When I would add meat to a burrito there was a definite amount added and then any more required the customer to pay a bit extra...except when a customer complained that I did not give them "enough" by some unseen standard and then they were given more with no charge. When I tried to give the next customer the exact amount of meat I had observed from the previous customer, the staff complained that I was giving out too much meat.
