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Nearly one year after announcing the closing of the only In-N-Out Burger location in Oakland, California, company President Lynsi Snyder revealed what led to the decision.

Speaking with PragerU host Marissa Streit, Snyder detailed how “dangerous” the location had become for staff and the “huge” decision to shutter a store for the first time in the food chain’s nearly eight-decade history.

“It was just absolutely dangerous. There was, out of 365 days, almost 300 days there was some type of event,” Snyder said of the closure, citing rampant crime in the California city that forced the restaurant to close in March.

“Car burglaries, violence, fights, theft, you name it,” said the businesswoman who is the only grandchild of Harry and Esther Snyder, who founded the eatery in 1948. “There was actually gunshots [that] went through the store, there was a stabbing, there was a lot.”

“And you’ve never shut a restaurant down so this must have been pretty hard,” Streit noted.

“It was huge,” Snyder affirmed. “But, for the safety of our associates, we just felt like, this is not okay.”

“The amount of time it would take the police to get there, too, was alarming,” she added.

A series of NBC reports in 2023 found that “Oakland’s 911 wait times were the worst out of any city or county’s 911 center in the state. Its average wait times were commonly three to four times higher than the state mandate.”

Small business owners in Oakland were fed up with rampant crime and threatened to stop paying their taxes unless officials did something to turn things around. Back in 2023, over 200 Oakland business owners took part in a one-day “strike” to protest, shutting their doors for a period of time to bring attention to the lack of action by city officials.

At the announced closing of the In-N-Out Burger location in January, COO Denny Warnick said the company took “repeated steps to create safer conditions,” but staff and customers were still “regularly victimized by car break-ins, property damage, theft, and armed robberies.”

“We are grateful for the local community, which has supported us for over 18 years, and we recognize that this closure negatively impacts our Associates and their families,” Warnick said at the time. “Additionally, this location remains a busy and profitable one for the company, but our top priority must be the safety and well-being of our Customers and Associates – we cannot ask them to visit or work in an unsafe environment.”

Frieda Powers
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