In-N-Out Burger

by Stacy Perman

  Around 1973, some ten years after Harry installed the chain’s first on-site butcher, he opened the chain’s warehouse and purchased its first semitrailer. The new commissary allowed the Snyders to ensure strict quality control even as the chain continued to grow. With the meat patties prepared there, the buns baked at the facility, and the lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and potatoes delivered and inspected there, In-N-Out could distribute (by refrigerated semi) its fresh ingredients to each store daily even as the chain moved to extend its geographic reach. It proved to be a winning strategy that worked in tandem with Harry’s slow-growth model.

  Also around 1973, Harry purchased In-N-Out’s first mobile cookout trailer. Gleaming and portable, the trailers were small In-N-Out Burgers on wheels. They contained refrigerators and grills and could be rented for parties and events. When a store lost power or needed a supplemental grill, the trailers could be dispatched to just about anywhere. The net effect of the trailers was that they also helped to broaden the geographically limited chain’s footprint while providing a moving billboard as they traveled the Southland. In the years to come, hiring an In-N-Out trailer for a private event would come to be seen as sign of cool all over Southern California.

  On the surface, Harry’s moves were all deceptively simple. They weren’t meant to radically alter In-N-Out’s operations or hasten its ability to grow fast and far. Rather, Harry put into play a series of initiatives that could efficiently maintain the chain’s traditional standards of “Quality, Cleanliness, and Service” in a rocket-fueled fast-food world.

  The rampant expansion that marked the beginning of the previous decade had, by the early 1970s, begun to reach its saturation point. The big companies figured out that they could apply capital (theirs and that of their franchises), corporate management, and distribution systems and thereby blanket markets. That in turn would allow them to advertise nationally and efficiently. Soon, chains were locked in competition to secure prime locations and penetrate market share on the local, regional, and national levels. Two years after General Foods purchased Burger Chef, the chain swelled rapidly to twenty-four hundred locations in forty-three states and overseas before its operations began to sputter. In 1972, General Foods took a $75 million loss on Burger Chef, and a decade later sold the chain to Imasco for $44 million, which converted many of the restaurants into the Hardee’s chain.

  Many of the assets that made fast food attractive to consumers and investors alike began to implode. The recession tied to the 1973 oil crisis battered the industry. Stock prices plummeted and many concepts failed. McDonald’s actually picked up the pace of its rollout during the economic downturn to ensure its primacy following the shakeout. Since In-N-Out never followed the strategies or trends of its competitors, it was barely affected by the cyclical turn of events that first catapulted fast food to success and then savaged the industry. The Snyders’ choices had positioned In-N-Out as a brand that could withstand the numerous industry hits and downturns to come—that is, as long as it stuck to its winning formula.

  The industry had based its economic model in large part on profitability through aggressive growth. The strategy left many franchisees alienated, and franchising, which had helped to fuel the rapid expansion only a few years earlier, began to falter. As Robert McKay, the general manager of Taco Bell, told Forbes magazine, “Everyone wanted franchises in the mid-sixties. Then came the shakeout a few years later, and franchising no longer was the easy game it once was.” To sustain growth, fast-food chains began penetrating foreign markets.

  At the same time that a series of hits and downturns gripped the fast-food industry, beef prices were rising sharply. In order to maintain and reclaim customers and spike softening sales, the chains began to tinker with their classic menus. Over the next few years, nearly all of them began to introduce new items. McDonald’s added its Quarter Pounder; in a bid to grab both the breakfast market and children’s appetites, it also introduced the now-famous Egg McMuffin and later the Happy Meal. Wendy’s began offering stuffed baked potatoes, salads, and chicken breast sandwiches. Over at the Carl’s Jr. restaurants, Carl Karcher decided to launch a few fast-food firsts of his own. He began installing salad bars and he offered free refills on soft drinks. Although the addition of new items brought an initial surge in interest, it also introduced a new level of operational complexity with dubious long-term returns. Still, the strategy would be repeated over the years in an effort to shore up sagging sales. The race for the new American fast food marked a point of no return.

  Soon the chains turned on one another. They undercut each other on price and tried to outdo each other with promotional giveaways, movie tie-ins, and a host of prize bonanzas. They erected colorful children’s playgrounds. Even their ad campaigns began to reflect a showdown. Burger King launched its “Have It Your Way” campaign specifically to showcase that its customers could order their burgers individually. It was a public snub of the redoubtable McDonald’s. Jack in the Box brashly goaded the industry leader with a series of ads in 1975 that ended with its employees shouting “Watch out, McDonald’s! Watch out, McDonald’s! Watch out, McDonald’s!” The first salvo in what would be a recurrent battle labeled the “Burger Wars” had been fired.

  In-N-Out Burger stayed largely removed from the war zone; this was not In-N-Out’s fight. The family-owned burger chain didn’t advertise, didn’t undercut on price, didn’t sacrifice quality, and didn’t change the menu. At In-N-Out Burger, there were no sideshows.

  As the atmosphere within the industry became increasingly competitive, its once picture-postcard Americana reputation soon began to sour. Those quirky individual stands and diners that had characterized the industry’s start had given way to a formula of uniformity and homogeneity. Many chains faced growing opposition from neighborhoods across America. The resistance stemmed from what residents viewed as the compounded hazards of traffic, litter, crime, drugs, and delinquent teenagers; communities also objected to the chain restaurants on aesthetic grounds. In some areas, local ordinances forbade fast-food restaurants from opening near schools, churches, or even hospitals.

  This backlash was directed at the industry as a whole, but its dominant player, McDonald’s, took the brunt of the criticism. During this time, the residents of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, dotted the roads with homemade signs that read “No McDonalds Keep Woods Hole Franchise-free.” In 1975, three community groups protested the efforts of one McDonald’s franchiser to open in or near residential neighborhoods in Manhattan with the slogan: “We Deserve a Break Today. Stop McDonald’s.”

  Many Americans were openly hostile to the practices of an industry that they felt trampled all over the landscape, the environment, the human body, and labor practices, all for a quick buck. Early critic of media manipulation Vance Packard, who wrote the 1957 best seller The Hidden Persuaders, complained sixteen years later to Time magazine about the ruinous effect that fast food was having on American values: “This is what our country is all about—blandness and standardization.” Fast food’s enormous popularity was seen by many as the starting point for the culture’s decline.

  Although seemingly impervious to many if not most of the poison darts targeting fast food, In-N-Out was not totally insulated from the larger standing of the industry, especially as the chain moved outside of its traditional home base in the San Gabriel Valley. The growing reputation of fast-food restaurants as teenage hangouts synonymous with unruliness, as well as crime magnets and totems of cultural imperialism, had inspired a strong disapproval across Southern California. “There was a lot of resistance to hamburger stands,” contended Russell Blewett, who was elected Baldwin Park’s mayor in 1972. “A lot of cities didn’t like them. They thought they attracted a bad element.”

  In-N-Out didn’t fall into neglect or become a hub of juvenile delinquency largely due to the efforts of Harry Snyder. Blewett, who called Harry “a Tough Dutch,” first met Snyder when he was about ten years old. At the time, Harry gave Blewett a job sweeping u
p the In-N-Out parking lot on weekends. “He paid me in hamburgers and drinks,” he recalled. Despite the thirty-year age gap, the two men became friends. “We forged a friendship. He liked me and I liked him.” While other chains took to hiring security guards and implementing curfews for youngsters under eighteen to foil potential troublemakers, Harry “took things into his own hands,” remembered Blewett. “He was very much about problem solving before it became a problem.”

  When Harry was interested in opening one of his drive-throughs in Rancho Cucamonga, a dry, dusty city on the edge of the Mojave Desert in San Bernardino where the Mojave Trail, the old Spanish Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, Route 66, and El Camino Real met thirty-nine miles east of Los Angeles, he called Blewett for help. In Blewett’s version of the tale, at the time, Rancho Cucamonga was especially opposed to the idea of a new drive-through coming to town. “We had a meeting with the city’s planning staff,” he remembered. “And there was this planner just out of Cal Poly [College]. He was greener than grass. He said, ‘I think your hamburger stands are ugly.’” With that Harry turned red and jumped to his feet and let loose with a string of expletives. After calming down, Harry turned to the young planner and demanded, “How many millions are you worth? How many successful businesses do you run?”

  Recounting the tale, Blewett, who had at one time owned a successful floor coverings store in Baldwin Park, concluded: “I love that story. It’s about city planners. People with no brains.” In 1980, In-N-Out opened its first store in Rancho Cucamonga, followed by a second one thirteen years later.

  CHAPTER 9

  Guy and Rich Snyder were increasingly moving in different directions. Following high school, it had become evident that the Snyder brothers’ diverging interests and personalities, which had first emerged when they were youngsters, had come into sharp relief as they grew into adults. As Rich was stepping deeper into the family business, his older brother, Guy, was moving further outside it.

  A tough taskmaster of a father and a mother whose cheery outlook and blind faith held firmly to the notion that in the end things would turn out fine had bred two very different young men. From their appearance to their behavior, the Snyder brothers were like two sides of the same coin. Sandy-haired and casual regardless of the occasion, Guy favored jeans and T-shirts, while close-cropped brunet Rich always appeared to be cleanly and conservatively turned out. In a photograph of the two brothers flanking their mother sometime in the early 1970s, Guy is sporting a thick mustache and a confident smile; he is clad in a lively denim Western getup including a vest and a flowered, patterned shirt. A big silver belt buckle and silver tips on his collar completed the look. In his right hand, Guy is clasping a big cowboy hat—his left hand is cradling Esther’s shoulder. Standing slightly behind his mother’s left shoulder is a clean-shaven Rich wearing a timid smile. Wearing crisp, cream-colored trousers and a maroon pullover with a polo shirt, he looks as though he might be about to head off for a game of golf at the country club.

  Like their parents, the Snyder brothers possessed an incredible sense of generosity. They both battled shyness and weight problems at different times and in various ways. Perhaps in an effort to counterbalance their relatively introverted natures, Guy and Rich both seemed to constantly surround themselves with a group of friends and associates—but it was the brothers’ differences more than their common traits that most people noticed.

  Guy could be moody, and his moods at times had a bad-tempered edge. He could be by turns sullen, quiet, irritable, confident, fun-loving, or incredibly kind. Where Guy was taciturn, Rich was gregarious and sociable. Although Rich could be a big kid himself, his fun was always tempered by his responsible nature. According to friends, Guy seemed most comfortable on the fringe. Ardently independent, he set his own boundaries.

  As the radical 1960s passed into the hedonistic 1970s (an era later dubbed by writer Tom Wolfe “the Me Decade”), Rich held firmly to the concepts of religion, trust in government, and the nuclear family even as culture and society were shifting further and further away from those once-hallowed American ideals. As a young man, Rich found himself increasingly drawn to conservative politics. He became a great admirer of President Richard M. Nixon, who appealed to social conservatives, a moniker that Rich was rapidly taking on as his own. While all around him religion and traditional family structures were losing ground, Rich remained quite close to his parents, and rather than abandoning his spiritual beliefs, he was drawn ever closer to his Christian faith.

  Early on, it became apparent that Rich was the obvious successor to Harry. A natural entrepreneur, he was ambitious, and friends noted that Rich shared Harry’s populist touch. He was gifted with the kind of charismatic personality that moved people to follow his lead. At seventeen, Rich began taking care of In-N-Out’s bookkeeping. When friends would ask him to go to a movie on a Saturday night he often declined: “I’m doing the books,” he’d say.

  Rich was exceptionally organized and driven; he regularly laid out a series of personal two-year, five-year, and ten-year plans (at the top of his personal ledger were marriage and family). Each year, Rich—accompanied by friends—went away for a weekend during which they worked out their goals and expectations together. “It’s okay on goals to dream big,” Rich once said, “because if you only get half, you’ve got a lot.”

  In fact, the Snyders’ birth roles seemed to be reversed. Rich was more like the prototypical achieving firstborn son, while his older brother, Guy, was the unconventional nonconformist type often associated with a second or third child. In a way, each brother seemed to absorb the overriding social mores of the era in which he grew up. Rich embodied the 1950s of their childhood with its sense of order and simplicity, while Guy took on the antiestablishment rebellion that arrived during their teenage years in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, just as the culture of 1960s collided with the ethos of the 1950s, so too did Guy and Rich clash with each other. “They fought like cats and dogs,” said one friend. As another friend put it, even as young adults, “Rich was the corporate type and Guy was the wild one.”

  Guy was restless; however, he was rarely at a loss to discover outlets for his considerable energy. He had a passion for speed—and some would say a recklessness—that he fed by racing his dragsters and riding motorcycles (and supplemented with alcohol and drugs). According to Wilbur Stites’s wife, Kim (the pair first met while she was in high school and married in 1974), Guy liked to push limits. A local girl who worked at Snyder Distributing through college, Kim said, “He was always doing what he could get away with, without getting caught. Rich was always dependable, if you ever needed anything. But Guy, you had to find him first.”

  Then came the crash. In the mid-1970s, Guy was seriously injured when he lost control of his motorcycle, exploding over the sand dunes in the California desert at Glamis, on the Mexican border. As he hit the top of a dune with its razor-sharp drop-off, rather than kicking the bike away, he tried to ride it straight down. Instead, he was pinned beneath it. Wilbur Stites, who was racing with Guy on that trip, rushed him to the hospital. Many blamed the influence of drugs or alcohol (or both), but, Stites’s wife, Kim, said that on that particular trip, Guy was “stone sober.”

  The accident had many persistent repercussions. For one, it left Guy severely injured and in chronic pain. He lost about 50 percent of the use of his right arm, and required numerous surgeries and therapy for his arm and back over the years. While hospitalized he was put on a morphine drip, which Harry insisted be removed as soon as possible. Whatever the degree of Guy’s use of chemical substances before the crash, he developed an unassailable dependency on painkillers following the accident in an effort to help him cope with the constant pain. In fact, he never entirely recovered from the accident. As Paul Althouse exclaimed, “He was the nicest guy if you got to know him. But that was really the beginning of his downhill slide.” From that point on, Guy’s life was marked by cycles of depression, drugs, and many attempts to get clean and sober. Guy had
begun his long skid into what friends referred to gently as “his troubles.”

  The situation seemed to exacerbate the already growing tensions between the Snyder brothers. However, under the strong hand of Harry, their complicated relationship appeared to remain stable. And in the short term, at least, it had little impact on the family business. In-N-Out Burger was not yet considered a major player in the fast-food industry. The private behavior of the Snyders was never aired publicly; that just wasn’t Harry’s or Esther’s style. Unlike the showy displays of numerous entrepreneurs whose antics became fodder for rumor mills and newspaper columns, the family’s personal business was rarely if ever linked publicly with the family’s professional business.

  Closer to home, even bigger changes were taking place; around 1974, Harry Snyder was diagnosed with lung cancer. The family was stunned. He had begun smoking cigarettes as a high school student in the 1930s when a pack of Chesterfields accompanied his regular game of rummy, but he had decided to quit in 1959. By then, however, the nearly thirty years of smoking had taken their toll.

  Harry would not go down without a fight. He submitted to seemingly endless rounds of medical appointments, tests, and treatment. He ate specially prepared foods. Eventually, he endured chemo-therapy; when his hair began falling out, leaving him bald, he took to wearing a wig. When his voice had dimmed to a mere whisper and he could hardly speak, Harry still managed to smile. Even as his body was succumbing to the advanced and aggressive cancer, Harry still hoped to find some kind of new or alternative treatment that might grant him a reprieve. At one point, he went down to Mexico to submit to Laetrile. An unconventional therapy not approved by the Federal Drug Administration, Laetrile, was based on using purified amygdaline, a chemical found in nuts and fruits like bitter almonds and apricots. Harry wasn’t alone; during the 1970s, many American cancer patients, seeking any flicker of hope, flew to Mexico seeking new alternatives to rid them of their disease. And at one point, Harry thought he had his cancer beat.