California
Chipotle will pass the California minimum wage hike on to customers
Chipotle has tweaked its menu prices for food inflation—but it still needs to revise it for rising labor costs.
Last week, Chipotle’s menu boards started showing slightly higher prices. At one Brooklyn eatery, a $10.95 chicken burrito bowl’s price suddenly cost $11.35—without extra guac, cheese, or anything. The Mexican grill chain also hiked prices for soft drinks, as Reddit users pointed out. But this hike “does not consider any part of the California wages that’ll happen next year,” chief financial officer Jack Hartung said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26.
Starting in April 2024, fast food workers employed at quick-serve restaurants that have 60 locations or more in California will be eligible for a minimum wage of $20 per hour, up from the current $15.50. For Chipotle, the jump will be a little less jarring considering it already pays $17 as starting wage in the state. But the effect won’t be insignificant.
Around 15% of Chipotle’s 3,300 stores are located in California. The minimum wage increase will add between 2.5% and 3% to the company’s overall labor costs.
While Chipotle hasn’t disclosed the exact level of pricing to combat this cost pressure, it’s sure that it won’t absorb it all. For customers, “it’s going to be a mid- to high-single-digit price increase, but we are definitely going to pass this on,” the CFO said.
A brief roundup of Chipotle’s four price increases in two years
Worker pay triggered menu pricing changes in October 2021 as well. Back then, it attributed a 4% hike in menu prices to hourly wages for employees rising to $15 an hour.
Between then and now, the company has raised prices three more times, including earlier this month, citing inflation and rising ingredient costs. However, it claims that the benefit from last year’s menu price increases was “mostly offset by inflation across several food costs,” including beef, cheese, and avocado, as well as high gas prices.
Chipotle’s financial results, by the digits
11%: Year-on-year increase in sales, to reach $2.5 billion
37%: Digital sales made via the Chipotle website, Chipotle app or third-party delivery aggregators
285-315: Stores Chipotle expects to open in 2024, with 80% of them having digital order drive-thru pickup lane “Chipotlanes”
114,000: Total number of Chipotle employees
3%: Chipotle’s price increase earlier this month
Quotable: Demand for Chipotle’s holds strong
“The consumer is clearly under pressure with inflation over the past year and pretty much everything with gas and groceries and really across the board higher interest rates. We continue to do well not just across our income levels, but with the lower income. They’re holding up really well. They’re really hanging in there at about the same level as our medium and high income levels.”
—CFO Jack Hartung on the Oct. 26 earnings call
One more thing: Chipotle isn’t worried about Ozempic or Wegovy
The rising popularity of weight-management drugs like Ozempic and WeGovy has dimmed the outlook for several food companies—especially fast- and junk-food. Walmart, far instance, warned of a slight pullback in sales as baskets evolved. Packaged food giant Conagra said it’ll consider changing portion sizes if the obesity drugs have an impact. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola have downplayed the threat, but they do have plenty of low-cal options on offer.
Industry watchers are encouraging fast-food chains like Domino’s Pizza, McDonald’s, KFC, and Krispy Kreme to rethink their menu offerings, tilting toward a healthier palate. Chipotle, which claims to have seen no material impact from the drugs yet, says its food already complements weight-loss goals.
“Our food is a good solution. Because it’s clean, it’s not fried,” CEO Brian Niccols said on the earnings call. “It allows people then to customize a meal that would fit their diet that they’re trying to achieve, whether they’re on GLP-1 drugs or whether they’re on a keto diet, or a Whole30 diet, or insert the lifestyle diet that they’re on, or the lifestyle drug that they might be on. The good news is we’re positioned to be able to customize that diet for you with clean food done in a very healthy way.”
California
4-year-old California boy found safe after spending night alone in wilderness
FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. — A 4-year-old boy from Torrance, California was found safe Friday morning after he spent the night in the wilderness in Fresno County, California.
Christian Ramirez went missing Thursday morning from a campground.
Search teams found him Friday about a quarter-mile from where he disappeared.
SEE ALSO: 2 capital murder suspects were arrested by Border Patrol and released before Texas girl’s death: ICE
Ramirez was hungry and tired, but otherwise found in good condition. He was reunited with his parents.
It’s still unclear exactly how he got separated from his family, but authorities said it appeared he wandered off while they were at the campground.
KFSN-TV contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2024 KABC Television, LLC. All rights reserved.
California
An Interview with Retired California Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye
Tani Cantil-Sakauye was the 28th Chief Justice of the State of California. The first Asian Filipina American and the second woman to serve as the state’s chief justice, she is the current president and CEO of the Public Policy Institute of California. Before sitting on the panel for “What Makes a Great California Idea?,” part of the inaugural CalMatters Ideas Festival, Cantil-Sakauye joined us in the green room to talk about humor, mediation, and the “Sackamenna Kid.”
Q:
In this event description, we referred to California as Tomorrowland. If you could create any land, what land would it be?
A:
I would call it Opportunityland, and I would like it to be a place where people could try out new things, find who they really are, find their passions and their talents instead of finding out too late, or never finding out at all, or being wistful that they had tried something else.
Q:
Can you give us an example?
A:
I was a lawyer at a time when there weren’t a lot of female prosecutors in the courtroom. And I was standing by the elevator once, and the lawyer said to me, Cantil, it looks like you’re gaining weight. And I said to him: you should talk, you have seven hairs on your head and four are loose. And so, we are friends to this day, but I always felt that insulting attorneys going into trial about their hair sort of took them off balance.
Q:
What have you learned as a mediator about navigating conflict?
A:
It takes a while, and it requires multiple steps along the way and then an assessment of how the steps are going with talking to them. So for me, and for contemporary mediation, we meet in separate rooms. It’s about getting to know not necessarily the lawyer, but the client of the lawyer. I think it’s a lot of listening and empathizing, and truly understanding and standing in the shoes of who they are, their experiences, and how it’s feeling to them now.
Q:
Was there a journalist that you particularly admired growing up?
A:
I’m old enough to remember and appreciate Herb Caen, who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. He was from Sacramento, but he was basically, professionally, in the Bay Area. And he was called the “Sackamenna Kid.” He wrote about current events and insights into politics with humor, and he had his own column. While I was aware of all the other news, Herb Caen was the piece of paper that I would always grab and read. I didn’t understand most of it, frankly, because it was all political insider stuff. But he did it in such a humorous way that was pithy and funny but meaningful; so that was what I remember. When I was growing up, there were like three TV stations. There wasn’t cable. There wasn’t streaming. There wasn’t internet. There wasn’t anything. There was like one or two newspapers, and that was it. So you know, you made your joy wherever you could find it.
California
Want to move to Nevada? California-based class teaches how
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Hundreds of thousands of people have moved to Nevada since the pandemic, and a class helps Northern California residents make informed decisions before the leap to relocate to the Silver State.
The class is titled “Exit Strategies for Leaving the Bay Area,” offered by Campbell Adult & Community Education in San Jose. Realtor Punam Navalgund created the class in 2019 and tells FOX5 that the concept was born out of necessity by a demand from clients.
“It was me hearing a need from home sellers to make more informed decisions about making their move,” Navalgund said. “There are people from all walks of life, people looking to retire, people who want to raise a family somewhere else where the cost of living isn’t as high as it is here in the Bay Area. It’s people who have a lot of equity in their homes, who aren’t really sure how much they’re going to have left at the end of the transaction,” she said.
Navalgund said students have moved to states such as Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Texas, Florida and Georgia, but Nevada remains a popular relocation destination.
“We help people build a support team here locally, as well as in their destination. So whether that’s looking for lawyers, looking for real estate agents, looking for tax professionals, financial planners, I really want people to feel secure about making that decision,” she said.
According to data from the Lee School of Business at UNLV, 355,088 people moved from California from 2020 to 2023 and 148,939 people were from California. Data came from licenses surrendered to the Nevada DMV.
Copyright 2024 KVVU. All rights reserved.
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