Business
Chipotle cuts same-store sales forecast for third straight quarter as diner visits drop again
A customer carries a Chipotle bag in San Francisco, California, US, on Friday, Jan. 31, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Chipotle Mexican Grill on Wednesday reported quarterly revenue that fell short of expectations and cut its same-store sales forecast for the third straight quarter.
Chipotle is expecting its full-year same-store sales to shrink by a low-single digit percentage in fiscal 2025. That’s a big change from February, when the burrito chain was projecting same-store sales would grow by a low- to mid-single digit percentage.
CEO Scott Boatwright said the company is seeing “consistent macroeconomic pressures.” Traffic fell by 0.8%, the third straight quarter of declines.
After the chain outperformed the broader restaurant industry in 2024, the sluggish consumer environment finally hit its restaurants this year. Chipotle’s customer base skews higher income, so it was insulated from the pullback in spending from low-income consumers that fast-food chains were reporting last year.
Here’s what the company reported compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on a survey of analysts by LSEG:
- Earnings per share: 29 cents adjusted, in line with expectations
- Revenue: $3 billion vs. $3.03 billion expected
Shares of the restaurant chain ticked slightly higher in extended trading.
Chipotle reported third-quarter net income of $382.1 million, or 29 cents per share, down from $387.4 million, or 28 cents per share, a year earlier.
Excluding slight adjustments for stock-based compensation grants and other items, the burrito chain still earned 29 cents per share.
Net sales rose 7.5% to $3 billion, fueled by new restaurants. The company opened 84 company-operated locations and two licensed international stores.
Chipotle’s same-store sales increased 0.3% in a reversal from last quarter’s decline. But the growth in sales at restaurants open at least a year came from a 1.1% bump in average check, as traffic dipped.
To revive traffic growth, Chipotle is focusing on its in-restaurant execution, marketing, digital experience and menu innovation, according to Boatwright.
Looking to 2026, Chipotle anticipates that it will open 350 to 370 new locations. That target includes 10 to 15 international restaurants operated by partners, as the company aims to expand globally.
Last month, Chipotle announced a joint venture with SPC Group, a Korea-based restaurant operator. It has also signed development deals with operators in the Middle East and Latin America.
The titans of the technology sector are ramping up their spending on artificial intelligence, as they rush to reap the benefits of an AI boom that has pushed stocks to record highs.
Earnings reports from Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft on Wednesday reaffirmed the colossal amounts of money these firms are shelling out for everything from data centres to chips, even as questions swirl about returns on the investments.
Meta said its capital expenditures for 2025 will be between $70bn (£53bn) to $72bn, up from an earlier estimate of $66bn to $72bn.
Its spending growth in 2026 is poised to be “notably larger” than this year, the company said. Meta is seeking to compete with companies like OpenAI.
On a call with analysts, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg defended the firm’s investments, saying he saw big opportunities ahead driven by AI, both in terms of new products and for honing its current business selling ads and feeding people content.
“The right thing to do is accelerate this,” he said, adding later: “We are sort of perennially operating the family of apps and ads business in a compute-starved state at this point.”
Google and YouTube owner Alphabet similarly raised its forecast for this year to $91bn to $93bn, up from an earlier outlook of $85bn in the summer, in the latest sign of its increasingly lofty spending goals,
That estimate is nearly double the capital expenditures that the company reported for 2024.
Microsoft’s capital expenditures in the quarter through to 30 September, including on data centres, totalled $34.9bn, the company reported on Wednesday – a larger spending figure than analysts had expected, and up from $24 billion in the previous quarter.
“We continue to increase our investments in AI across both capital and talent to meet the massive opportunity ahead,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said.
Azure, the firm’s cloud computing unit, and Microsoft’s other AI products have a “real-world impact”, Mr Nadella said.
Exuberance among investors about massive AI spending has helped all three tech firms outperform the broader S&P 500 index.
But Wall Street is also focused on whether these firms’ investments are starting to yield tangible returns.
The two things holding up the US economy in the last several months have been consumers and AI-related business investments, said Aditya Bhave, senior US economist at Bank of America.
“To the extent that the latter remains strong, it’s a bullish signal for GDP growth,” he said.
Imran Rahman-Jones,Technology reporter and
Lily Jamali,North America Technology correspondent
Getty ImagesWebsites for Heathrow, NatWest and Minecraft returned to service late on Wednesday after experiencing problems amid a global Microsoft outage.
Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports of issues with a number of websites around the world over several hours.
Microsoft said some users of Microsoft 365 saw delays with Outlook among other services, but by 21:00GMT, many websites that went down were once again accessible after the company restored a prior update.
The company’s Azure cloud computing platform, which underpins large parts of the internet, had reported a “degradation of some services” at 16:00 GMT.
It said this was due to “DNS issues” – the same root cause of the huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week.
Amazon said AWS was operating normally.
Other sites that were impacted in the UK include supermarket Asda and mobile phone operator O2 – while in the US, people reported issues accessing the websites of coffee chain Starbucks and retailer Kroger.
The M&S website remained unavailable late on Wednesday even after many others returned online.
Microsoft said business Microsoft 365 customers experienced problems.
Some web pages on Microsoft also directed users to an error notifications that read “Uh oh! Something went wrong with the previous request.”
The tech giant resorted to posting updates to a thread on X after some users reported they could not access the service status page.
While NatWest’s website was temporarily impacted, the bank’s mobile banking, web chat, and telephone customer services remained available during the outage.
Meanwhile, business at the Scottish Parliament was suspended because of technical issues with the parliament’s online voting system.
The outage prompted a postponement of debate over land reform legislation that could allow Scotland to intervene in private sales and require large estates to be broken up.
A senior Scottish Parliament source told BBC News they believed the problems were related to the Microsoft outage.
Azure’s crucial role online
Exactly how much of the internet was impacted is unclear, but estimates typically put Microsoft Azure at around 20% of the global cloud market.
The firm said it believed the outage was a result of “an inadvertent configuration change”.
In other words, a behind-the-scenes system was changed, with unintended consequences.
The concentration of cloud services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google means an outage like this “can cripple hundreds, if not thousands of applications and systems,” said Dr Saqib Kakvi, from Royal Holloway University.
“Due to cost of hosting web content, economic forces lead to consolidation of resources into a few very large players, but it is effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets.”
Recent outages have laid bare the fragility of the modern-day internet, according to engineering professor Gregory Falco of Cornell University.
“When we think of Azure or AWS, we think of a monolithic piece of technology infrastructure but the reality is that it’s thousands if not tens of thousands of little pieces of a puzzle that are all interwoven together,” said Mr Falco.
He noted that some of those pieces are managed by the companies themselves while others are overseen by third parties such as CrowdStrike, which last year deployed a software update that affected more than eight million computers run on Microsoft systems.
Last Updated:
US Fed Meeting Outcome: In a second consecutive rate cut, the US Federal Reserve on October 29 reduced its key interest rates by another 25 basis points (bps) to 3.75%-4.00%.
US Federal Reserve’s latest interest rate decision.
US Fed Rate Cut, US Fed Meeting Latest News: The US Federal Reserve on October 29 reduced its key interest rates by another 25 basis points (bps) to 3.75%-4.00%, in line with market expectations. This is the second consecutive rate cut following the last reduction in September 2025, when the US central bank announced a similar 25 bps reduction after a gap of nine months.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) approved the rate cut with a 10-2 majority. Governor Stephen Miran dissented, arguing for a steeper half-point reduction, while Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid also voted against the move, favouring no rate cut at all.
“In support of its goals and in light of the shift in the balance of risks, the Committee decided to lower the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/4 percentage point to 3-3/4 to 4 percent,” the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) said in a statement on October 29.
It added that uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated. The Committee is attentive to the risks to both sides of its dual mandate and judges that downside risks to employment rose in recent months.
“Available indicators suggest that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace. Job gains have slowed this year, and the unemployment rate has edged up but remained low through August; more recent indicators are consistent with these developments. Inflation has moved up since earlier in the year and remains somewhat elevated,” the FOMC stated.
US Fed to Halt Quantitative Tightening from December 1
Alongside the rate cut, the Federal Reserve announced that it will end the reduction of its asset holdings, a process known as quantitative tightening, effective December 1.
The post-meeting statement did not provide any direction on what the committee’s plans are for December.
The next US Fed meeting will take place on December 9-10, and the decision will be announced on December 10.
In September, the US central bank’s officials expected two more cuts this year, according to the ‘dot plot’.
The Fed had reduced borrowing costs three times last year till December 2024. But, it then put any further cuts on hold to evaluate the impact of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on the economy. The US central bank kept its key interest rates unchanged at 4.25%-4.50% for five times in a row till the previous July 2025 policy review.
Currently, CPI inflation in the US stands at 3%, which was cooler than expected by most analysts. The US Fed targets to bring in the retail inflation rate at 2%.
US Fed Rate Cut: How Will It Impact Indian Markets?
Currently, the Nifty futures (GIFT Nifty) are trading nearly 90 points lower at 26,166, suggesting a gap-down opening on Thursday.
For Indian markets, the US Fed rate cut is positive for sectors like IT, pharma, and other export-oriented industries.
Haris is Deputy News Editor (Business) at news18.com. He writes on various issues related to personal finance, markets, economy and companies. Having over a decade of experience in financial journalism, Haris h…Read More
Haris is Deputy News Editor (Business) at news18.com. He writes on various issues related to personal finance, markets, economy and companies. Having over a decade of experience in financial journalism, Haris h… Read More
October 29, 2025, 23:32 IST
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