Chipotle Stops Keeping Customers’ Change - East Idaho News
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Chipotle Stops Keeping Customers’ Change

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GETTY B 083012 Chipotle?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1346318229338Scott Olson/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — If you’ve bought a burrito at Chipotle recently, chances are you didn’t know the popular chain was keeping your change.

At certain locations around the country, the restaurant would round the receipt up or down to the nearest nickel.

Jayson Greenberg, a West Caldwell, N.J., Chipotle customer, noticed last month that his receipts didn’t add up and confronted a manager about it.

“He said, ‘Oh, it’s a computer program.  It is just rounding numbers.  It takes a little from certain receipts and gives a little to others.  What do you want?  A few pennies?’” Greenberg told the Star Ledger.

Starting on Aug. 2, the West Caldwell location began posting a “round -.002″ on their receipts indicating how much the price had been adjusted.

Chris Arnold, a Chipotle representative, said the rounding was an effort to keep long lines moving faster.  The company has since stopped rounding the bills up but will continue to round them down, in favor of the customer.

“In an effort to keep lines moving quickly in some of our higher volume restaurants (including New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.), bills are automatically rounded down to the nearest nickel to limit the possible combinations of change that have to made.  The amount that is rounded down is highlighted on receipts to explain why the total may differ slightly than what it would otherwise be,” he told ABC News.

In July, the company posted a revenue increase of 23.2 percent to $1.33 billion for six months compared to 2011.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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