If you fancy purchasing your meals with cryptocurrency and you’re in the mood for a burrito or a taco, you may want to head over to Chipotle. The Mexican fast-food chain has announced it’s now willing to let customers purchase meal items with digital currencies like bitcoin.
Chipotle Is Allowing Customers to Shop with Bitcoin
The move is pushing the goals of bitcoin and its digital counterparts closer to being achieved. What many people likely forget is that while bitcoin and many of its crypto cousins have taken on either speculative or even hedge-like statuses in recent years, many of them were initially designed to serve as payment tools. They were built to push checks, credit cards, and fiat currencies to the side, but this has been a relatively slow journey given the volatility that continues to drag them down.
It is extremely hard to understand when bitcoin and its crypto family will go up or down when it comes to their prices. Many stores and companies have been reluctant to say “yes” when it comes to accepting crypto payments for this reason, and to a degree, we can’t blame them.
Consider the following scenario: someone walks into a store and buys $50 worth of merchandise with bitcoin. For one reason or another, the store doesn’t trade the BTC into fiat right away and about 24 hours go by. From there, the price of BTC goes down and that $50 becomes $40. The customer gets to keep everything he or she bought, but the store has lost money in the end. Is this a fair situation? Not everyone thinks so.
That’s what makes enterprises like Chipotle so important. They understand the initial purposes of bitcoin and digital currencies and are trying to transform them into usable tools that everyday people can benefit from.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen many articles published talking about the growing number of businesses throughout the United States that are beginning to accept crypto. Thus far, many – while positive – have not been very mainstream, usually just a little store in the corner of some state that has an audience, though nobody outside that region would likely shop there.
A Real Mainstream Plug
Chipotle is very different in that this is a national fast-food chain that can be encountered throughout multiple states and areas of the U.S. It doesn’t matter if you’re in California, Utah, or Texas. There is a Chipotle there, and you can now walk in and spend your crypto the way it was designed to be used.
At press time, Chipotle has released a statement claiming that the restaurant is “constantly exploring innovation that will enhance our guest experience, and that includes now accepting digital currency payments with Flexa in Chipotle’s U.S. restaurants.”
