President of In-N-Out Lynsi Snyder announced she will also relocate to Tennessee, along with the consolidation of In-N-Out from Irvine to Baldwin Park and expansion of its eastern headquarters outside Nashville. Snyder cited difficulty doing business and raising a family in California. This follows the exodus of Californians moving out-of-state, and is the result of decades of failure from Sacramento, especially since and because of the state’s coronavirus lockdowns. Here is what In-N-Out reveals about California’s past, present, and future.
In-N-Out was founded in Baldwin Park in 1948 by Henry Snyder. It is still family owned and run by granddaughter Lynsi Snyder since 2010. In 1994, In-N-Out moved its headquarters to Irvine and historically limited operations to California and later the Southwest, within eight hours of its distribution center in Baldwin Park.
In-N-Out sells more than hamburgers, it sells California, bringing California to Californians. Southern California’s identity after World War II was defined by fast food, cars, and explosive population growth. In-N-Out only expanded to Nevada in 1992, Arizona in 2000, and Utah in 2008, after Californians began migrating out-of-state in 1989 at the end of the Cold War.
In-N-Out’s expansion to Texas in 2011, required a second distribution center and changed everything. When I was stationed in Oklahoma, I drove three hours to the first In-N-Out in Dallas. The line was still around the block one month after the grand opening, filled with California refugees sharing stories of the Old Country. One Californian who moved for Texas Instruments said that his Texas-born children never tasted fresh In-N-Out and only had it when their grandparents carried it on the airplane. Every major airport in California except Oakland has an In-N-Out nearby and it is often the first and last meal travelers eat.
Still, In-N-Out was slow to expand beyond Texas and didn’t plan to open on the East Coast. In 2016, it opened a distribution center in Lathrop, which serves Northern California, Reno, Nevada, and Medford, Oregon. In 2020, In-N-Out opened another facility in Colorado Springs, halfway between California and Texas, and was a warning of things to come.
California’s Coronavirus lockdowns, years of fire, taxation, and cult of fear, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrats, and Los Angeles County were the final straw. Like Tesla, SpaceX, and Elon Musk, as well as over a half million other Californians who left, in 2021 Snyder re-listed and sold her home in Bradbury and accelerated In-N-Out’s expansion out-of-state. In 2023, In-N-Out announced it was expanding to Idaho and Tennessee. Critically, Boise opens up Seattle and Portland, bringing In-N-Out to Californians who now live in the Pacific Northwest. Tennessee is already one of the top states Californians are moving to and centrally located near North Carolina and eventually Florida.
Last year, I used In-N-Out as a metaphor for California’s multiple sales taxes, and no one read past that a Double-Double costs over $10 – which In-N-Out tried to keep costs down. Apologists tried to spin that it was “not that bad” or “fake news,” ignoring that the state and cities are losing 13¢ to 15¢ per hamburger in tax revenue, and isn’t small potatoes when governments complain they are broke.
In-N-Out, whose product and identity is California, cannot leave like formerly Orange County-based Carl’s Junior, which coincidentally also relocated to Tennessee in 2018. However, when the price of In-N-Out increases in California, but not Nevada or Oregon, it will be because of the cost of gas. The latest failure from Sacramento harming Californians, struggling to compete against states with low or no tax and better business and political environments. It’s more than one company or industry.
The economy that made California – and your grandchildren – are now in states like Tennessee, because of Democrats and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Matt Quan is a U.S. Air Force veteran and has a Master of Public Policy from the University of Southern California.
