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The Empathy Punishment

A woman hurled a burrito bowl at a Chipotle employee. Then a judge made her walk in the victim’s shoes.

As the line of customers looked on, Hayne seemed to pause for a moment and think about leaving the restaurant and moving on, bringing a close to the kind of contentious customer-service dispute that seemed to be playing out with increasing frequency across the country, at Chipotles, rental-car desks, airport-boarding gates. (“The only thing that was warm on that food was the rice and chicken, and it had extra sour cream and extra-cold cheese on top of it.”) After the incident, Hayne went looking for Russell’s Facebook page — “I wanted to be snoopy” — and saw a photo of her at a concert two days later. Earlier this year, Chipotle workers were up in arms over a “stressful and dehumanizing” TikTok meme that encouraged people to make sure employees didn’t skimp on their burritos by filming them with their phones along the buffet line, rather than simply asking nicely for an extra scoop of carnitas.

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