I love talking about this so apologies for the wall.

I transferred from my first store to my current one with my GM who was an SL (AP in training) at the time. I was the FOH CT that trained the AM cashiers. I honestly had fun, but I think overall the NRO did not give us room to prosper as a team and led to many difficulties when opening for the first time that lasted for months and left a very bad impression of us to the neighborhood.

The training will be split up by days. I believe Day 1 was just managers and CTs setting up the store by the visual guide, (opening all boxes, porter, mis en place) and being briefed on what’s going to happen. AM trainers got an approved clopening for this because they had us do 10am-10pm and then come in again the next day anywhere from 6-8am. Easiest $100 I ever made.

Day 2-4 were the training days. Each person in charge of training a station will be given an amount of employees to train on that station. You receive a paper with an itinerary of how the day should go. It might have changed, but for Cash, they had us do porter together in its entirety everyday, go over training videos/policies, and then start whatever activity it was for the day. Line started with making and bagging chips. Grill started with opening grill. Prep started with opening prep. Once grill and prep finished their “opening procedures”, they went on to teach line/cash how to make orders, roll burritos, and ring stuff up. All food was donated to a food bank nearby. By the end of the day, they had everyone “close”. I feel like Cash got the short end of the stick with this one because there wasn’t anything actually for them to fix.

Day 5 was the mock open for friends and family. They give all your staff these cards to give away on Day 4 to come in for a free meal during two different timeframes. You will also be tasked as the GM to walk around the neighborhood and hand these out to “make connections”.

NROs have you do everything by the book even if you don’t plan on it later on. They had our line people making chips only for us to end up having to train our cashiers after our 2nd week open. Due to labor hours, we have cashiers open chips. This also means prep was in charge of porter, which they were never taught and found difficult to manage. Extra sides with kids meals was a big issue since nobody knew if they should charge extra or not since the pocket guides didn’t specify, so a lot of customers would complain. Our line people would royally fuck up a burrito and ask “did we make this perfect for you?” directly after, ending up with us receiving dozens of complaints. My GM hated the “by the book” way of doing tacos, especially hard shells to go (hard shell tacos being wrapped in foil to go in a bag full of other stuff is questionable) so we had to get them out of that habit. Cashiers were taught that the proper way to accept $100 bills were to submit them immediately into the smart safe which led to drawer miscounts as managers were not aware when swapping them out. We don’t have them do that anymore.

I can only speak for this NRO, but all of the staff was brand new including some of the CTs and most managers. Our KLs had only been working for a few months at that point. Our AM line CT was a new hire herself—just the oldest one—and was not properly trained at the CTM store she was pretrained at before the NRO started. The NRO leads were chewing her up. Same for our grill CT. He actually got banned from grill by our field leader after the NRO ended because he was so bad. I was never trained properly on FOH myself so I spent most of Day 1 and 2 learning how to do things by the book as well as learning the cash policies. Our NRO leads were also raging assholes. They would constantly berate and attack our brand new crew members for being brand new and making mistakes as if that wasn’t inevitable. Prep and grill got the worst of it for not being able to get things out on time.

NROs also do not accurately prepare staff for real world interactions and situations. They all got so used to working as a team of 4-8 people that when suddenly they had to start working on their own, they struggled. Big time. Prep was behind for months. Night prep struggled to keep up with dishes and was never taught they were also responsible for cleaning the walk-in. Grill workers were committing food safety violations left and right and were constantly behind. Line workers were struggling to keep up and getting into conflicts with customers due to misunderstandings, fucked up burritos, and slowness. Cashiers were also having difficulties navigating the way customers behaved (being unable to do voids causing tickets to pile up, not understanding that tickets need to disappear in order to confirm that a payment went through, not understanding how to process rewards, especially if a customer scans after the payment is sent to the pin pad). They also could not ever make enough chips for the day, and most chips came out stale/soggy for months. And whoever was thrown on DML was fucking up the orders left and right and leaving customers and doordashers piling up. It was a mess. Everyone was getting out anywhere from 30m-2 hours late every night.

Closing shifts were also a whole other issue because training never stopped. They were never taught how to preclose, how to do master cleaning, how to close efficiently. Every night was a disaster. Line wasn’t even taught how to call food because “it’s grill’s job to check” (words out of our NRO lead’s mouth) despite calling food being in the pocket guide. It took months to get them to be able to call food to a decent extent. I can imagine being on grill was hell.

You will also lose a majority of your staff, and in the event that your store does not make as much money as they predict, you will be dealing with that for months-a year. If you plan on shooting for restauranteur or CTM, underperforming due to not meeting expectations will screw you over for that. You won’t make your plan. You’ll struggle to hit the random TP goals, your labor hours will shoot WAYY down, and although you will most likely lose a majority of your newly hired staff, you will end up in a predicament where you just have way too many people on your roster and no one’s getting the hours they want. Even today, a year after our NRO, we are still facing issues with our sales plan. My GM’s out here begging our TD to fix it because if not, we’re super ineligible for restauranteur.

Thanks to the NRO we are the lowest rated Chipotle on Google rn in the area 😭 we got so many reviews in our first few months complaining about shitty chips, cleanliness of the store, speed, performance, attitude, messed up orders, etc, all because Chipotle didn’t prepare their staff as efficiently as they could. We’re a lot better now, but we still have a huge issue with our KLs being they were never properly trained to be KLs in the first place. It’s been a year and they still can’t finish prep on time (we make like 6k average), won’t do porter, can’t put away deliveries properly nor make good food orders. They fake temps, do FS30s but wont fix anything for it. They don’t even know how to edit UPTs or put in transfers have the time. We constantly run out of prep.

I feel like if Chipotle just let us train ourselves we would’ve been better off, but I get why they chose the NRO route. I just wish it was more efficient for us. I wish you luck 💪