Day: August 10, 2025

The night before they went shopping for a dress for the 2023 Miss Teen USA pageant, UmaSofia Srivastava‘s mother had a dream. Her then-16-year-old daughter was wearing a purple gown — and a crown.

That dream came true, complete with the purple dress, but there was no premonition of what would come next.

Eight months after winning her title, Srivastava and Noelia Voigt became the first Miss Teen USA and Miss USA to step down in the organization’s 72-year history.

Bound by strict nondisclosure agreements, the two couldn’t reveal much, but their mothers spoke up for them, sharing that the pageant queens had endured “eight months of torture and abuse” under the leadership of Miss USA CEO Laylah Rose — allegations that Rose has denied.

It’s been a long-standing tradition for the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA winners to take a farewell walk across the stage before they crown their successors. Voigt and Srivastava never got that chance — until last week. On August 2, they said goodbye to their pageant careers at the brand-new Miss All-American competition in Charleston, South Carolina.

In their first joint interview since the historic resignations, Voigt and Srivastava spoke to Business Insider about coping with the aftermath, what comes next, and why they still believe in pageants.

A fresh start

On August 1, the night before their farewell walk, Voigt, 25, and Srivastava, 18, sat across from me at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center, where dress rehearsals for the inaugural Miss All-American pageant — with 117 contestants from 28 states — were in full swing.

Across the parking lot was a sold-out Embassy Suites, where contestant headshots fluttered across balconies like flags. Well-meaning parents politely interrupted our conversation every so often, asking for directions or where they could drop off an emergency box of tampons.

As ambassadors for the new national pageant, Voigt and Srivastava were able to experience the entrenched traditions they gave up when they resigned in May 2024. They even took part in the sashing ceremony, bequeathing the contestants with white ribbons emblazoned with the name of their respective hometowns.

“It’s a stark contrast from what we experienced before,” Voigt said as we discussed the new pageant. “There were many times during the week where Uma and I would just look at each other and be like, ‘Wow, this is really what it should be.'”

Running Miss All-American is another Miss USA alum. Paula Miles was a director for multiple state pageants with the Miss USA organization for 45 years before she resigned in June due to Rose’s leadership. At the time, her son Ryan Miles, who served as codirector, told me it had been the “worst year of our professional life.”

“For her to walk away from something she built and the amount of lives she’s changed, she wanted people’s eyes to be open for what the organization has become,” he said in July 2024.

The Miles family wasn’t ready to leave the world of pageants. So they revived the defunct Miss Teen All-American pageant — which helped launch Halle Berry‘s career after she won in 1985 — and added the titles of Miss All-American and Miss All-American Junior.

Voigt said it was a “no-brainer” when they asked her and Srivastava to join as national ambassadors.

“I didn’t even need time to think about it,” Voigt said. “They recognized that we did not get the ending we were hoping for. It wasn’t even something we thought would be a possibility.”

“And we were OK with that,” Srivastava added. “We knew what we were stepping away from. All the people on this team really understood what we were going through, and I think that’s why it’s been so beautiful for all of us.”

“It’s like a big reunion and a safe place for all of us to heal from a dream that didn’t quite work out, but to work on creating something that does,” Srivastava said.

New year, same problems

Voigt and Srivastava became invisible during their reigns as Miss USA and Miss Teen USA. Their mothers, Barbara Srivastava and Jackeline Voigt, said Rose repeatedly refused to book appearances for their daughters and impersonated them in comments on the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA social-media pages.

Jackeline Voigt said Rose’s communication was “so abusive, so aggressive,” it would leave her daughter “shaking just to see a text or a call or an email from Laylah.”

In her official Miss USA resignation letter, Voigt detailed the “detrimental mental and emotional toll” of her time as Miss USA, saying that she had been prescribed two anxiety medications due to Rose’s constant harassment.

“I’ve never ever in my life been on anti-anxiety medication,” Voigt said in Charleston. “It wasn’t something that came out of nowhere. It was a byproduct of the situation that we were in. I felt like I had to put on a facade to represent the organization because I had this title, but I didn’t agree with what was going on.”

Rose reacted to what she called “false allegations made by individuals speaking on behalf of our former titleholder” in a statement sent to ABC News in May 2024.

“Such behavior is not accepted, and we can assure you that if such behavior ever occurred, we would take immediate steps to protect our titleholder and provide access to appropriate resources,” she added.

Srivastava said it was tough watching some people try to “weaponize” Voigt’s mental health in the aftermath of their resignations and claim the pageant queens were “crazy” or “difficult to work with.”

“Since that time, we’ve been able to work with a great number of organizations that we love, and I think it’s a testament that we’ve been able to maintain relationships both before and after our time with the Miss USA organization,” Srivastava added.

After Voigt and Srivastava resigned, the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA 2024 pageants went on as usual. The Miss Universe Organization, which oversees the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants, did not investigate the allegations against Rose.

Rose and representatives for Miss USA and Miss Universe did not respond to requests for comment on this story. However, in a statement sent to Business Insider in July 2024, a spokesperson for Miss Universe said the organization was a “beacon of women empowerment and diversity” and remained committed to “promoting inclusion, transparency, and integrity, which will not be swayed by unfounded allegations.”

Bound by their nondisclosure agreements, Voigt and Srivastava hoped stepping down would send a message that they no longer believed in the Miss USA organization. They said little seemed to change.

“We thought it would have more of an impact,” Srivastava said. “It stopped a lot of girls from competing, but it didn’t fully put an end to what the issue was. We wish it had done more.”

Voigt said she doesn’t see how Miss USA will continue to move forward if nothing changes at the organization.

“Things will either stay the same or they’ll get worse, but I don’t see the opposite happening,” she said. “We were just the first to go through it. We saw a lot, we heard a lot, and we experienced a lot.”

“The truth comes out eventually,” Voigt continued. “Sometimes, it just takes longer than we want. People’s eyes are opening, and the rose-colored glasses — no pun intended — are starting to come off.”

Fighting for a different future

The week in Charleston was healing for Voigt and Srivastava. They took part in a mental health panel with the Miss All-American contestants, and Srivastava shared her past struggles with suicidal ideation and self-harm while being bullied in school.

“It was the first time I had ever shared that in a pageant space, and it was so well-received,” Srivastava said. “I think we should do more of that. Pageant girls are so much more than the gowns. We have ideas, and hearts, and minds — everything Jo March said in ‘Little Women.'”

“There were so many girls that came up to me and Uma after the panel and thanked us for talking about those things, because they do relate,” Voigt added. “If you’re touting women’s empowerment, you have to empower the women to talk about these hard things.”

Voigt and Srivastava credit pageantry for giving them the confidence to speak up. It’s why they still believe in the future of pageants.

“It makes me emotional to remember the girl that I was when I first started because I was so shy,” said Voigt, who began competing when she was 16. “I’m so grateful for my whole journey, and that we’re coming at this full-circle moment and getting to close our chapters with grace.”

The soul-searching that followed their resignations has led to unexpected career paths for the pageant queens. Voigt plans to attend nursing school, and Srivastava is attending New York University next spring to study marketing and music business.

“In the short term, it seemed bleak, I’m not going to lie,” Srivastava said of the period after they relinquished their crowns. “Both of us were kind of waffling about what we were going to do next, but it gave us time to step back and redefine our lives and what we wanted to do in the future.”

“The fact that now, a year later, this is our closing chapter for this era in our lives is really wonderful to see,” she added, “because sometimes things take time.”

When it came time to decide what to wear for their farewell walk, Voigt and Srivastava chose to go back to the beginning. Voigt shone in the sparkling gold gown from the night she was named Miss USA, and Srivastava brought back that winning purple dress her mother had once dreamed.

As their parents wiped away tears and the crowd rose for a standing ovation, Voigt and Srivastava said goodbye to their pageant careers.

“I didn’t lose a crown,” Voigt said that night. “I reclaimed my voice.”

In 2017, Jacob Schneider, then 16, landed his first job at a Chipotle in Lawrence, Kansas. It offered “decent” pay for a person his age, he says, above minimum wage, as well as robust training. “I learned how to do my job really fast,” he tells me.

“I didn’t notice a lot of bad things at first,” he says. But eventually, he felt, training quality started to decline. Breaks got shorter. Equipment would break and not get fixed; a cooler was out of operation for about a year, Schneider says. “A lot of corners were being cut over time.”

The deterioration took its toll. “The morale of the whole store was basically terrible,” he says. When he started, people rarely talked about leaving. By last year, the most common topic he and his coworkers discussed was how much they wished they could quit. “It was just getting worse and worse and worse.”

Schneider was witnessing Chipotle making a sharp U-turn. Founded in 1993 by Steve Ells, a former sous chef at a San Francisco fine dining pioneer, Chipotle became an elevated fast food juggernaut with more than 3,700 locations around the world, going public in 2006. But the company suffered a series of food-borne illness outbreaks starting in 2015, when 60 people were sickened across nearly a dozen states. All restaurants closed for half a day in February 2016 to deal with food safety. Then another norovirus outbreak hit in 2017. Ells stepped down as CEO a few months later, and he was replaced by Brian Niccol, who had just served as CEO of Taco Bell.

Niccol led a dramatic turnaround. The efficiency-focused changes he put in place — including order screens, delivery, and “Chipotlanes” drive-throughs — helped the company’s annual revenue surge from $4.9 billion in 2018 to $11.3 billion in 2024.

Its stock jumped tenfold, from $6 a share in early 2018 to more than $60 when Niccol left in mid-2024 while its market cap grew from $9 billion to more than $80 billion.

As happy as these changes made shareholders, the change in culture has been much more than a vibe shift for the company’s 130,000 employees. Current and former employees say that Chipotle was once a special place to work — a cut above in fast casual dining — that has since been consumed by a fast food ethos that, for its workers, has made its restaurants barely distinguishable from a Burger King or Domino’s.

In the past few years, evidence of a downgrade for staff has been popping up around the country.

In 2022, Chipotle agreed to a $20 million settlement with New York City over claims of 599,693 violations of the city’s scheduling and paid leave laws, more than any company has paid in a worker protection settlement in the city’s history. In 2024, the company appeared in the second-place spot, behind Amazon, on the New York City Comptroller’s “Employer Wall of Shame,” where it still appears. Chipotle also agreed last year to pay $2.9 million to Seattle-based employees in a settlement over allegations of failing to give extra pay for schedule changes and retaliating against employees who didn’t take shifts they hadn’t been scheduled for — the largest settlement the city had reached since its scheduling law took effect. That same year, a study of Glassdoor reviews from more than 550 of America’s largest employers found that Chipotle had the second-highest rate of employee burnout (behind Progressive insurance).

In a statement to Business Insider, Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs officer Laurie Schalow writes, “Our employees are our greatest priority, and we are committed to providing a best-in-class work experience that includes robust training and development programs.”

Business Insider spoke with eight current and former Chipotle employees in four states whose tenures span from 2012 to the present; four of them have been involved in union organization efforts. Each told the same story, resonant with the broader allegations and superlatives: Many of the qualities that made Chipotle stand out as an employer — offering a stellar working experience where they were well-trained and valued and able to offer customers a high-quality experience — have precipitously declined.

For a fast food brand, Chipotle has lofty values. “Our purpose is to cultivate a better world,” its website states. It has long prided itself on offering only fresh food — it doesn’t have freezers at its restaurants, a rarity in an industry where the majority of ingredients are frozen. It also makes promises to its employees. “Being real means treating our people right,” reads the company’s mission statement.

“Chipotle brands themselves as the cool fast food place to work,” says Quinlan Muller, who started working at the Lawrence, Kansas, location with Schneider in 2018.

It pays better than many of its competitors: According to survey data from the Shift Project, a research venture from Harvard’s Kennedy School and UC San Francisco that tracks low-wage workers over time, Chipotle employees report earning $16 an hour on average nationwide, while Burger King and Domino’s pay $14.

Arrow Smith took a job at the Augusta, Maine, franchise a few years ago because a previous job at Dollar General “wasn’t paying me enough to survive,” and they could make a dollar or two more per hour at Chipotle, plus tips.

Anna started out at minimum wage at a location in Ohio in 2012, but quickly was making over $60,000 a year between raises and regular bonuses for exceeding sales metrics. She says she also got “excellent” health and dental benefits. She made more, in fact, than she does now in a marketing job. (She asked Business Insider to use a pseudonym because her husband still works at Chipotle.)

With the higher pay came higher expectations. “You had to be near perfect on everything,” Anna says. If she prepped produce that wasn’t cut to the right size, it would get thrown out, and she would start over. “I never worked for a fast casual or fast food restaurant that had such a high level of standards,” she says. “It was a great environment.”

Those standards, the people Business Insider spoke with say, were upheld by a rigorous training program that looked more like those at the Culinary Institute of America, Ells’ alma mater, than what is typical in the fast food industry. Muller came into her job at Chipotle fresh off a short stint at another fast food company where the training barely existed. At Chipotle, she was able to get trained in lots of different positions. “It felt more fulfilling,” she says.

The training had a built-in progression to help people move from crew to managers and above. “They wanted to grow people and bring them up,” McNease says.

A new hire started out by watching training videos for each position and looking through booklets that broke down every minute aspect of the job. Then workers would watch other people do the tasks before doing the tasks themselves with a trainer to offer feedback. “It was a really in-depth process,” says Brandi McNease, who started as a crew member at a location in Augusta, Maine in 2016. Workers were trained for multiple positions, from manning the tortilla press to grilling the food in the back.

The training also had a built-in progression to help people move from crew to managers and above. “They wanted to grow people and bring them up,” McNease says. Smiling Estrella, who started working at a New York City Chipotle in 2016, was promoted from crew to kitchen leader within three years.

After the first food-borne illness outbreaks, sales volumes and the company’s stock plummeted. Ells left his perch as CEO to find someone, he said at the time, who could help the company “execute better to ensure our future success.”

Brian Niccol espoused a fast-food mindset that Chipotle had previously eschewed. “His experience and worldview is processed, profitable, and not very organic foods,” says Michael W. Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School. “He’s an MBA quantitative marketing kind of guy, good at cutting costs in supply chains.” Niccol brought in executives from Bloomin’ Brands, which owns fast casuals Outback and Carrabba’s, and Panda Restaurant Group, the owner of Panda Express.

Niccol left Chipotle last summer to become CEO of Starbucks. Chipotle’s new CEO is cut from the same cloth: Scott Boatwright, who joined in 2017, had spent the previous 18 years at Arby’s.

With Ells’ exit came a change in internal culture. “You can’t have an organizational culture of a fast food restaurant and maintain a brand image of an organic, sustainable place,” Morris says. It “doesn’t allow for the craft feeling or for the people who are passionate about food to be displaying that passion.”

Chipotle says it still conducts intensive “real culinary training.” In a video on its recruitment site, a worker named Ryan says that when he started there, “they had so many step-by-step processes on how to learn everything.” Schalow says in her statement, “We have always had new worker training, and we continuously re-assess our training program and revise it as we deem appropriate.”

Each of the workers Business Insider spoke to say that the company’s training quality has dropped off. By the time Leslie (who asked that Business Insider use a pseudonym; she still works at Chipotle) started working at a New York City location in 2019, she didn’t get to watch a video or receive any hands-on guidance before she was put to work, she says. For each task, she says, “they would explain it maybe once and that’s it.” She didn’t know how to wrap burritos for four months and figured it out by asking people to help her and watching videos during her off hours, she says.

At the Augusta store, McNease says, “It was pretty clear that what I had stepped into was a transition period that was not going in the right direction.” New hires started to be put on the floor with no training, she says. “It got to the point where you were lucky if you got to watch videos.”

The same was happening in Kansas, as new hires wouldn’t know how to do important tasks, Muller says. Thomas started working at the same Chipotle in 2022 (he also asked that I use a pseudonym). By the time he left in late 2023, he says he consistently had to correct employees on food safety procedures. In her statement, Schalow says the company’s current training program “includes food safety training, workplace and employment-related training, and a range of operational training for various roles.”

When Schneider first started, there was a strict rule enforced that no one under 18 could use a knife; later on, kids as young as 16 were doing that prep work, he says. Schalow says the company has “policies and procedures that comply with state laws for the employment of 16- and 17-year-olds.” Thomas says the focus switched from creating high-quality food to drilling down on portions — not giving customers too much. Managers “really started hammering that into us,” he says.

Employee scheduling has also been tumultuous. According to Shift Project data, three-quarters of Chipotle employees it surveyed say they get their schedules less than two weeks in advance. More than a third get their schedules with less than a week’s notice. Shifts also move frequently: Three-quarters of Chipotle employees report having received a shift timing change in the previous month; 22% had a canceled shift. When it comes to employee scheduling, “Chipotle is really at the bottom of the heap” of comparable restaurants, says Daniel Schneider, a principal investigator at The Shift Project. Kristen Harknett, another principal investigator, says that canceled shifts are “extremely disruptive,” particularly for workers who show up to a shift only to be sent home without receiving any pay.

When it comes to employee scheduling, “Chipotle is really at the bottom of the heap,” says Daniel Schneider of The Shift Project.

In Kansas, managers put up a printed schedule once a week on Saturday night or Sunday, say Schneider and Muller. There was no way to access it online; if someone didn’t work that day, they might not know they were supposed to show up the following one. At the Maine store, workers sometimes wouldn’t have their schedules by Sunday and would be told to show up to whatever shifts they had been scheduled for the previous Monday, says McNease.

All the workers Business Insider spoke to also say that staff was so lean that employees on any given shift weren’t able to handle the crush of customers, and that many shifts were chaotic. At the Augusta Chipotle, Smith says, “It went from awesome and well-staffed to a skeleton crew in like a month.” McNease says managers told workers to work more hours and take over more positions without extra pay. Prep tasks like chopping food with sharp knives were done by two people instead of six, she adds, leading to injuries. One coworker cut his fingers seven or eight times trying to cut meat fast enough to keep up with the line of customers, Smith says. “Every day felt like a new set of small catastrophes. We were begging for more staffing, more help, and they just wouldn’t send us anybody.”

McNease also says that food would get left out too long and dirty dishes piled up. At the Lawrence Chipotle, says Muller, there were shifts with one person working on the line in the front and a shift manager in the back cooking food. Sometimes the store would get so busy that no one would be able to properly wash dishes and bowls between uses. During the company’s earnings call in April 2025, Boatwright noted that internal research had found that some restaurants were unclean during peak hours.

Employees blame the hecticness, in part, on climbing turnover rates. In 2016, the rate was 130%, according to the company. By 2021 it had swelled to 194%, meaning nearly twice as many people left as were employed there that year. Rates have fallen since then, clocking in at 145% in 2023 and 131% last year. “We firmly believe in consistent and predictable scheduling and providing our employees with sufficient advanced notice of their schedule,” says Schalow. “Our staffing levels are the best they have been in recent years, and we continue to see record low turnover rates in our restaurants.”

The issues have trickled down to customers, who workers say have had to wait in longer lines or forgo ingredients that couldn’t be cooked and prepped in time. Last year, after a chorus of customers accused the company of skimping on portions on TikTok, a Wells Fargo restaurant analyst ordered and weighed 75 iterations of the same item at eight locations across New York City — and found a lot of variation. Niccol denied there was any directive to offer smaller portions, and announced training to ensure consistent amounts across locations — although not before a shareholder lawsuit over the matter.

“We have not changed our portion sizes, and we have reinforced proper portioning with our employees,” says Schalow. “If we did not deliver on our value, we want our guests to reach out so we can make it right.”

More and more often, customers get nasty with employees. “We’d get yelled at, screamed at,” Anna says. “It got so much worse as the years went on.” In response to the portion-skimping allegations, customers have taken to filming workers as they make their burritos. It made employees “really uncomfortable to have cameras in our faces while we were working,” Thomas says. “People were very rude about it.”

Schalow at Chipotle says, “We do not condone guests who mistreat our teams and fail to give them the respect they deserve.”

“A lot of people would lash out,” says Smith. “It got really dehumanizing.”

Anna, who had at one time loved her job so much she planned to stay as long as she could, says that the job became so disorganized and overwhelming that she quit after eight years with the company.

In April’s earnings call, Boatwright also noted that employees were “not as friendly as we probably should be in restaurant.” His solution: Urging them to greet customers with a friendly smile. “The fact is,” he said, “smiles down the line don’t slow us down.”

In recent years, a number of Chipotle workers around the country have decided to organize. In New York, Leslie was approached by SEIU 32BJ, a union that organizes primarily low-wage workers like cleaners and food service workers. She had previously been in a union while working at a nursing home, and she liked the idea of having one at Chipotle, too. Chipotle did not agree, she says.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Chipotle hates the union,” says Smiling Estrella. After he was on the news for attending a protest in New York, Chipotle accused him of forcing someone to work during his unpaid break and making employees clock out before working to close up the store. He denies it, calling the accusations “lies.” In early 2023, he was fired. “That was really freaking hard,” he says. “I went through a deep depression.” He nearly lost his apartment as he struggled to make rent, and his phone service was cut off twice.

In 2023, Chipotle was hit by seven unfair labor practice charges in New York City, the most of any employer. There are four open charges against the company sitting with the federal National Labor Relations Board for alleged behavior such as unfairly disciplining and threatening workers.

Workers at a Michigan location prevailed in forming a union. In 2022, employees at a Chipotle in Lansing overwhelmingly voted to join the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to address what they said were similar issues of understaffing and inconsistent schedules. The workers say they were barraged by captive-audience meetings and anti-union messaging; the NLRB found the company had violated labor law by trying to deny raises to the unionized workers. They are, to date, the only unionized location. More than two years later they don’t have a contract.

No other union campaign has succeeded. In March 2022, the “wheels started to fall off” at the Augusta location, McNease says. She had been trying to do training “correctly,” but struggled, particularly as people kept quitting. A gas leak in the restaurant started making people sick, and it took the company weeks to send someone out to fix it, she says. That’s when she got in touch with someone she knew who was in a union to find out more about the process. The first step, she was advised, was to talk to coworkers about forming a union. “It immediately just took off,” she says.

Employees were primed for it. “We were just tired of corporate not listening to us. We were literally begging for help,” Smith says.

On June 15, McNease sent an email on behalf of her coworkers to the restaurant’s team director, laying out their demands. It said that, since the previous December, the store had gone without training for new or existing employees, that two workers had been “routinely expected” to complete the prep tasks usually done by six, and that three or four people had to open the store, work that required seven people. These issues put not just employees but customers at risk, with food safety “compromised,” McNease wrote. If the company didn’t schedule a “full crew” to open the store by the following morning, the letter said, they wouldn’t show up to work until they had enough staff and training.

That kicked off a two-day walkout. Six days later, the workers became the first Chipotle location in the country to file for a union election with the NLRB. “Management descended on us immediately,” McNease says. Employees were called into mandatory meetings that were filled with anti-union rhetoric. The company made new hires that diluted the organizing unit, McNease says; managers screamed at people and overloaded supporters with tasks. People were sent home for slight uniform infractions and fired for “stupid reasons,” Smith says.

Then, on the same morning that the workers had an NLRB hearing to set an election date, Chipotle sent employees notice that it was shutting the store down permanently. “It was like the rug had been pulled out from under us,” McNease says. Workers settled with the company, receiving a total of $240,000 in back pay. “We fought so hard,” McNease says, “and in the end, they were able to just walk away.”

“We respect our employees’ rights to organize under the National Labor Relations Act and are committed to ensuring a fair, just and humane work environment that provides opportunities to all,” says Schalow. “We closed our Augusta, Maine restaurant because of location-specific staffing challenges of this fairly remote location and other issues, not because of any union activities of the employees there.”

Muller started talking to her coworkers about unionizing around the time McNease’s campaign faltered. She drew up a petition for the NLRB and quickly got most of her coworkers to sign. After management found out in October 2022, the company deployed similar tactics as those in Maine, she says. Higher-ups workers had never seen before showed up, employees say, pulling them into lengthy one-on-one meetings with anti-union talking points; employees felt they were disciplined or even fired for small things that had never previously raised alarm bells.

That December, one of Muller’s friends came in for a burrito bowl and some chips in the evening, and Muller offered her the chips for free before they got thrown out for the day, a practice accepted by other managers, she says. Her manager wrote her up, and she was fired for stealing. It happened just days before a deadline to have Chipotle reimburse her tuition for the semester, costing her $2,600. She was unemployed for six months. It was also emotionally difficult to lose her job. “It was kind of a part of my identity,” she says.

Muller filed complaints with the NLRB, which later found that the restaurant had punished workers who were involved in unionizing and had tried to discourage the effort, leading to a settlement that required Chipotle to post a notice about workers’ rights to organize. No one was reinstated or given back pay. The union campaign fizzled. “Everyone was scared,” Schneider says.

Nearly a year into Boatwright’s tenure as CEO, Chipotle keeps expanding — it plans to open more than 300 locations this year — though there are signs of trouble. The company’s same-store sales have declined for two consecutive quarters in 2025, the first two quarterly drops since the COVID-19 pandemic. Chipotle’s stock sits at $41.44, down 37% from a high of $66.16 last December.

After more than seven years at Chipotle, Schneider left last year after he graduated from college. He even took a pay cut to take his new job as a graphic designer. But now he feels respected and valued as a member of a team, and the person above him treats him “like a person.”

“I’ve never been happier, honestly,” he says.

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at the New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation.