> Based on all the comments in this thread about people not going to Chipolte anymore due to quality issues, I wonder if there is a slow moving collapse moving through the restaurant industry where they are losing customers permanently and haven't realized the impact yet.

Yes, very much so; in fact I would attribute this entirely to the utter disrepute that govenrments enacted during covid on this Industry. Speaking as a former Cook, the last brick and mortar in the US I worked at had a James Beard Award, the level of mediocrity that has set in the BOH culture has discouraged anyone who is self-respecting professional from ever wanting to re-enter a kitchen is prevalent: the messiness, unprofessional, outright dirty way of working has become the norm. I could rant for ours of way that is, but I attribute it most to the following:

50,000 line cooks died during covid, alongside with meat-packers, it was te most deadliest job in te US, far exceeding medial professionals who were the front-line of the pandemic itself!

Oroporations were allowed to operate while privately owned brick and mortars, many who didn't have any experience in take out, were left playing catch up and had delays with PPP, lost of staff ever-rising food and labour costs, supply chain delays etc... tis allowed corps like Chipolte to et evre nmore market sare in wat was already a a war of attrition with low profit margins.

> If this is the case, I wonder how long the stock market will take to internalize this. I work for a large legacy F500 company that is internally a disaster and ticking time bomb, yet I look at the stock price and cannot believe how it continues to slowly go up.

Personally speaking, I kind of want the restaurant Industry to collapse, it doesn't deserve to exist in it's current form and I would rather people learn to cook from YouTube videos and buy as much as tey can locally from their farmers market, ideally organic and biodynamic. In my local market CSA shares were sold out months ahead of schedule with the shortages began in 2020 and I left satisfied that this if trend could and should continue it was worth destroying the Industry once and for all--people finally had time to learn how to bake breads and it set off a social media meme.

> It really made me realize the stock market has no actual clue on how companies are really doing. Its all a bunch of nonsense.

It always has, remember that while unemployment skyrocketed so much so it overwhelmed the systems in most states and created an immense backlog, the stock market was hitting alltime highs: it was totally disconnected from reality, but because of QE and the massive bailout packages and stimulus it soard to new ATH and that money made its way into then tech darlings like pelaton or Doordash which had limited (at best) true value, but allowed softbank to cash on thier billion dollar mal-investment with a lucrative IPO!

> This is why I think about other industries that have already internally collapsed but the world hasn't realized it yet.

You're not alone, anyone who has paid attention realized that 2008 marked the last shred of sanity the markets had to function close to anything resembling reality: it kicked off a horrible set of chain reaction with dire consequences that have only gotten worse over time. I'm less concerned with tech layoffs than most around here, mainly because I knew they were coming since at least December '21 when the stock market started to turn sour and things like growth stocks in tech were seen as a bubble that had run it's course.

I'm more worried about the impact that the fed is having by wanting to push unemployment higher with ever-increasing interest rates, in Industries whose pay is way lower and hasn't kept up with inflation for decades.

That is how you have peasant revolts and things like Jan 6th occur, because the truth is Society needs cleaners, and trash men more than need investment bankers or a bloated tech staff in order to not collapse as proven by COVID.