So the New York Times and Huffington Post picked up on a story The Star-Ledger wrote about when a Chipotle consumer noticed that his receipts were a few pennies over the actual total, rounded off to the nearest 5-cents. He said it wasn't the pennies he lost, but the principle.
On the first, dated July 13, the nine items added up to $32.93. There was $2.31 in tax. The total should have been $35.24, but next to the 'total' line on the receipt, it said $35.25. The next receipt, with the same sale date, showed a subtotal of $8.64. The tax was $0.60, so the grand total should have been $9.24. But no. With Chipotle-style math, the total was $9.25.
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The burrito chain was contacted and said they did it at high-volume stores because pennies simply slowed the line down, but they either rounded up or down. It was a wash for them. And no one's made a big deal of it until now.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.