DISQUS

They are currently rolling it out in Denver, then Colorado, then the world. There's a chance that they'll stop since people are complaining, but who knows.

I wrote about this earlier: http://chipotlog.com/snack/greg/2009/04/chipotles-new-menu-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end and http://chipotlog.com/image-galleries/stores/colorado-denver-140-steele-street/announcing-pozole

I agree with you that both the vans and the chipotle website are really cool, but they also leave me a bit depressed about the future of the internet.

It's really great having these sites, but it's really awful when companies build them using technologies that will exlude people. Flash (the technology behind both sites you listed) is not usable for blind individuals and is difficult for vision impaired users to modify to make it readable.

The result is that search engines also have a hard time finding the data. In the chipotle faq is an entry about gluten free, but doing a search for that information returns zero results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Achipotle....

My message is that these tools should be built using Ajax in a manner that degrades to plain text - otherwise you shut out both vision impaired users and search engines. Neither is a segment you want to lose.

Oh yeah, and who needs tofu when you have beans, veggies and guacamole?

Max Wood - I agree with most of what you have to say (especially about the McDonald's ownership!) but you went too far in the part about _all_ of their meats being "natural...". They are definitely headed in that direction, but the businessweek article you cite points out that only a percent of their meats are actually free range and/or natural. It's a long road to actually having all "free range, hormone free, grain fed, _natural_ meats" and chipotle is headed down it, but it will be a little longer. I guess the best we can do is eat more burritos to let them know we like their "food with integrity".