Then, “boom, the next day the orders wouldn’t stop,” said the service manager of a Chipotle in the Bronx, which he says is the most popular Chipotle location in the northern borough of New York City. During one of the busiest times in the past year, his location ran out of paper the orders were being printed on so they had to borrow some from the Starbucks next door.

But some of the issues Morales has had to deal with have not been so easy to resolve. Morales recalls a day when his location was closed to in-store dining and was fulfilling only online orders. A backup with about 30 people waiting outside resulted, and one customer was getting increasingly agitated after claiming he had been waiting for his food for an hour. The customer picked up a chair and threw it, leaving a mark on one of the windows…

A look at more than 1.3 million transactions at Chipotle, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Panda Express and Burger King from January 2020 to September 2021 shows huge spikes in online spending during the beginning of the pandemic last year, according to an analysis by Edison Trends. Chipotle saw a surge of 172% in online spending from January to May last year. That spending has continued to increase for the most part since then, with McDonald’s and Chipotle seeing the most online spending by their customers, respectively…

Andrew Luettgen quit working at a Chipotle in Bloomington, Ind., in March. He said the store “kept losing people left and right,” and he was set to graduate from college anyway. The staffing shortage at his store meant he would frequently get texts from managers, asking him to work extra shifts.

“Sometimes I had already worked 40 hours,” he said. “Sometimes I just needed time to rest.”