MAUMEE, Ohio — The 25-year-old who cooked the chicken that went into the burrito bowl Hillary Clinton ordered at the Chipotle here on Monday makes $8.20 an hour and splits rent with two roommates.

The 29-year-old general manager used to work three jobs and now is thrilled to be able to have just this one.


The young woman who was at the cash register was the only employee on duty at the time who thought she recognized her. She considered asking if anybody had ever told her she “looked like Hillary Clinton.” But she didn’t. It was 1:20 p.m., at the tail end of “peak time,” lunch rush.

They were busy.

“I didn’t see any blatantly obvious Secret Service guys,” Dylan Digby, the cook, said Tuesday at the fast-casual storefront on Conant Street.

“I was running around doing all kind of manager stuff,” said Jef Chiet, 35, the assistant general manager.

“We were just trying to do our jobs,” Charles Wright, the general manager.

This wasn’t a campaign stop, only a pit stop en route to Iowa, where scheduled events were waiting; what it was, though, was the kind of situation Clinton has said she wants in the early going of her presidential push — intimate interactions with “everyday” people.

In her official announcement on Sunday and since, Clinton has said “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” that “people are struggling,” that she wants to “stand up and fight for people so they cannot just get by, but they get ahead and stay ahead.”

Wage stagnation. Raising the minimum wage. Income inequality. The realistic prospects of the working families in this country in 2015. These are the issues that are at the forefront heading into this election cycle.

If 2008 was about ending the recession and 2012 was about easing unemployment, said Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2016 will be about not only jobs but what kinds of jobs.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, the minimum wage in Ohio is $8.10. The average wage for hourly workers at the approximately 1,800 Chipotles is $10.10, according to Chris Arnold, a company spokesman. “Our compensation tends to be competitive or better,” he said, than Chipotle’s fast-food and fast-casual competitors. Concerning the nationwide protests this week calling for $15 an hour, though, Chipotle isn’t currently “taking a position.”

Clinton, according to an aide, is “for an increase in the minimum wage, and she wants to have a conversation about the right target and timeline.”

Here on Monday at least, she didn’t say much, except order her food, said Digby, Chiet and Wright. They were just doing their jobs. She just wanted some lunch. She didn’t leave a tip.

It was the middle of the day in the middle of the country. The four of them could have had lots to talk about.

This town, too, a Rust Belt suburb of Toledo, population 14,000 or so, would have been a good place to do it. “Maumee,” said the mayor, Rich Carr, “is probably about as much of a cross-section of the country as you can get.”

It exists because of the river to its east that gives it its name. The economic arc here is familiar and representative: Over the past century-plus, activity moved up from the river, first into town, then outside of town, morphing from shipping to manufacturing to services, from docks to factories to distribution centers. The biggest employer used to be Ford. The biggest employer now: UPS. Interstates are the new rivers.

Drive around and the landscape is McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Five Guys and the Hampton Inn and the Comfort Inn and Long John Silver’s and Applebee’s and KFC.

And Chipotle.

Manager Charles Wright at Chipotle wasn't aware clinton was There till I called him. He pulled the security photo pic.twitter.com/wCIJlVpm9a — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 13, 2015

“There’s a movement stirring in America,” Clinton said last year. “You can see it in the fast-food and domestic workers all across our country, who ask for nothing more than a living wage and a fair shot.”

What do they want?

More than raises.

Digby, the 25-year-old who cooked the chicken that went into Clinton’s burrito bowl, grew up in West Toledo and worked for four years as a teller at Charter One bank, he said, without getting a promotion. He’s excited he’s getting bumped up to kitchen manager at the end of this month.

“Previously, this was my second job,” he said. He left the bank and stuck with Chipotle. “They advance you here.” He talked about the corporate ladder, stair steps he can see, from crew to kitchen manager to service manager to apprentice, which is company lingo for assistant general manager, to general manager and so on.

Wright, the 29-year-old general manager, graduated high school near Cleveland to go to the University of Toledo, he said, first full-time, then part-time, then not at all. “It was hard to balance work and school, and bills had to be paid.” He worked at Old Navy, at UPS and at Chipotle, sometimes all in the same day. He’s single, he has no kids, he lives with his brother, and he got promoted to general manager about six months ago.

“This,” he said, “is my one job.”

Chiet, meanwhile, which rhymes with “try it,” is the assistant general manager, or apprentice, who got Clinton her drink — first a blackberry Izze, which she decided she didn’t want after she read the ingredients, so he replaced it with an iced tea.

He’s from Florida, went to high school in Sunrise, lived and worked in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando and Tampa, doing construction, doing demolition, being a carpenter, being a painter, cleaning office buildings, filling music equipment orders at a warehouse for SamAsh.com, working at a Pizza Hut, a Red Lobster and a Dairy Queen.

But he has a family, literally, because of Chipotle. He started working for Chipotle, in Chicago, a little more than three years ago, and met a co-worker named Jessica Davis. Now they’re married, with a son, Dax Jefferson Chiet, who just turned 2. Chiet, who has, on his upper right arm, a tattoo of his son’s footprints as a newborn, is the apprentice at his Chipotle, and his wife is the apprentice at a different Chipotle, a few miles north. She has a tattoo of the chili pepper in the Chipotle logo — he’s thinking about getting one.

“Here, my wife and my child,” Chiet said. “That’s my life.”

He could be in an ad for Chipotle.

Jef Chiet is the assistant general manager at the Maumee, Ohio, Chipotle. | Michael Kruse / POLITICO

“I’m not living paycheck to paycheck, which is amazing,” he said.

Together, as aspiring managers, they make roughly $70,000 a year. They pay $800 a month in rent for a three-bedroom house in Toledo. He pays $400 a month in student loans, still, left over from a short, unfinished stint at ITT Tech in Florida. They have no child care costs because her twin sister lives with them and watches their son, which is a huge help because they both can work 50 hours a week, no overtime because they’re salaried, and on occasion are both gone 12 to 14 hours in a day.

At the end of this month, they said, they’re moving to the suburbs of Detroit, to work at new stores, where they have identified opportunities to be general managers. They’ll go without her sister. On Wednesday, as fast-food workers from New York to Chicago to San Francisco protested about their low wages, and as Clinton talked to more everyday people in Iowa, Jef Chiet and Jessica Davis spent their day off looking for apartments and daycare, hopeful but anxious.