/** Chipotle. Just a few thoughts.
On the topic of reducing friction in other people’s lives:
One day I went into Chipotle a while back and was waiting in line.
The person 2 people in front of me walked up to the counter, and the employee said “What would you like?” where the person said “A bowl.” The employee asked “white or brown rice?”, the person said “White,” the employee asked “pinto or black beans?”, the person said black beans, and so on. This was also during the “lunch hour” and there was a long line of people ordering in.
Thought for a bit, then when it was my turn, I walked up and said “A bowl with white, pinto, and chicken,” to just make it much smoother. You could say “A bowl with extra white rice, pinto, and double chicken” or even add veggies in there (which I do sometimes).
It’s smooth, clean, friction-less.
In detail, script is:
“Hello, (how are you), can I get a bowl with a tortilla on the side…(correctly timed pause)…with white, pinto, and chicken (referencing white rice, pinto beans, and chicken)…(correctly timed pause until either they slide it down OR take it down themselves to the rest of the trimmings)…medium (referring to salsa), corn, cheese, guac and that’s it.
By the time they are on medium salsa, they know you don’t want lettuce and so are good with giving you a decent portion of corn/cheese/guac, also because the guac is smushed and you need not the space for lettuce.
It’s smooth.
Make it smoother. Proactively say “That’s all” or “That’s it” to the last employee at the cashier (because they’ll ask “Anything else?” referencing a drink or chips) if you don’t want a drink/chips. Chipotle, being an excellent modern business, now allows you to add your Chipotle rewards card to Apple wallet and open it beforehand so you can scan the barcode, then quickly switch to Apple Pay with Face ID and scan in the same area, and you are good to go!
It speeds up the process, the server need not ask you the same forbidden questions they’ve been repeating all day for the past 9-18 months they’ve been there, and everyone walks away from that interaction a little happier than usual.
I’ve had multiple employees either say “Thank you” right after I order or express gratitude for something as small as this.
Thinking about where else this exists.
Similar to the driving example seen in the post “Preparation and Friction - 4/19/23” under the second embedded arrow drop-down of “Context/Random Background Thoughts (long!)”.
On the topic of things staying consistent:
I was discussing with someone recently this idea of consistency, maintenance, and maintaining high quality of products. A few points I want to mention.
It feels that product-wise it is generally difficult to maintain the same quality of product, given said product is high-quality and maintained as that over a long period of time.
Sometimes I’d feel one would prefer that something does not change because it is already high-quality but its natural inertia over multiple years is to decrease in quality.
For example, In-N-Out. Sure, the burger may be slightly different than it was 5-10 years ago, but I largely believe the quality and state of the burger is largely the same as it was 10 years ago. I think this is rare.
My mother had noticed that recently Amazon has been intending packages to reach on, say, Saturday, and all markers suggest it will come Saturday, but it comes Sunday or Monday. It’s neither here nor there, but she brought up to me that she feels the 1- or 2-day shipping she’d become accustomed to per Amazon’s offering has been faltering. I don’t know if that gets better or worse over time. Take this with a grain of salt too.
With any organization, the more it grows, naturally it gets more messy. Makes it difficult to stay consistent. Or, another way to think of it, is balancing the need to evolve and change and improve…with consistency and not fixing that which isn’t broken.
In my head, I thought I had more to add on Chipotle, but these two points are so important that I’ll end it here so one can really soak in the greater effects of these points.
Chipotle also has a lot of other interesting business quirks, such as turning a reputation around (from 2015/2016 E. coli outbreak from Chipotle, some info here). How the app is designed for mobile ordering. How they test new product offerings (like new types of chicken…).
Quick fun second-order question. You’d actually want to trust the Chipotle health standards/lettuce quality HIGHER after such an incident, right? But wait a minute…they just had an incident of widespread contamination, so does that positively or negatively influence future events? Will Chipotle have higher quality standards and fewer contaminations for the following 5-10 years (excluding randomness) OR does this signify the first of many more similar events to come? Interesting food for thought (haha).
tl;dr There are often places to reduce friction in life, positively affecting you and those around you. Also, consistency is really interesting to see.
Cheers,
Vish
Published on May 27, 2023.