Chipotle's Raising Prices For The First Time Since E. Coli Outbreak

Chipotle has been walking on egg shells after an infamous E. Coli outbreak caused them to take big hits to their image, stock, and overall reputation. Since then, the price of beef went up and other restaurants slightly raised menu prices. Chipotle, however, stayed put — until now.

About 20 percent of Chipotle restaurants around the country raised their menu prices on April 11, according to Bloomberg. Their reasoning for the increase was to “offset labor inflation.”

This is the restaurant’s first price increase in three years, and is said to be about a 5 percent increase, but the fast casual restaurant reportedly doesn’t plan to implement the hike at all of its 2,200 stores.

Chipotle $6.85
McDonald’s charge for water
Wendy’s don’t have spicy nuggets
Subway ain’t been $5 in years
🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️WHAT HAVE WE CAME TO?

— YeahhFiz🎲 (@flyguyfiz___) April 18, 2017

While periodically raising prices isn’t out of the ordinary for a restaurant, it almost feel disingenuous for Chipotle to do so especially after the disastrous 2015 and 2016 they had.

Their overall sales have still been dropping, with a 4.8 percent decrease last quarter, but they’ve at least increased their shares by 1.7 percent, as recently as Monday. So as customers still aren’t all the way back, investors are starting to gain their trust a bit.

Overall, 5 percent doesn’t sound like that big of a price hike, but we’ll see how Chipotle fans respond, or if they’ll even notice.