Chipotle

03/01/2026

Since my freshman year of high school I’ve used the term chipotleing to refer to consuming something so often that you never desire it again.

In the last year, the term has begun to take on a new meaning in my mind. I can’t stop thinking about Chipotle as one of the first examples of aggressive commercialization of the middle tier. It was bound to happen. The market is not as big as that of the bottom tier (fast food, etc), but its certainly big enough to yield. Every industry seems to be experiencing the commercialization of the middle tier. Perhaps its inevitable that at some point capital recognizes that a tier of quality exists between fast food and fine dining (or between mass-produced and bespoke, in any industry) and then engineers that tier into something scalable and repeatable. The culture is squeezed out and the earnings are distributed upwards.

The machine is working as designed, but where’s it going?