In-N-Out Burger (12 page)

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 up 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.

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.

 

It was Harry and Esther's intention to keep In-N-Out Burger a private, family-run business for succeeding generations of Snyders. Harry Snyder had very particular ideas about family and business; he had no interest in seeing his sweat equity disappear into some big company's idea of what In-N-Out Burger could be. On this point, he and Esther were in sync. His company was his family, but only his family had his blood. Esther was already into her mid-fifties; clearly, Harry's cancer hastened the need to set up a succession plan.

Successful family firms are often erected through the sheer will and force of a specific individual. The challenge for Harry was the challenge of all patriarchs—to pass on the company he built to someone who would be able to maintain its success without abandoning the unique culture that had made it a winning hand in the first place and to keep it in the family for successive generations.

Usually, that someone is the firstborn child. In-N-Out was both Guy and Rich's birthright. The drive-through was for a time practically their front yard, and they had each worked almost every position in the
company, starting with picking up its trash. By having their boys work at an early age, the Snyders had hoped to instill in them a sense of responsibility and ownership. However, all things being equal, the brothers did not demonstrate equal promise to fill Harry's shoes. Perhaps it was because Harry was the classic self-made man, but he wasn't going to simply bestow leadership. His successor would have to earn it.

Guy felt strongly about the family business. But for some time, Guy had demonstrated that if he could be anywhere it would be behind the wheel of one of his dragsters chasing down a quarter-mile of asphalt. Furthermore, his recurrent troubles scarcely made him a strong candidate to take over the business; the crash in Mexico was hardly a ringing endorsement. Guy the so-called wild child had grown into something of a rebellious adult, exhibiting the kind of destructive behavior that prevented him from being named his father's heir and haunted him for the rest of his life. In some ways, his accident and its aftermath set the stage for the company's succession plan, which arrived sooner than anyone could have predicted.

Rich often accompanied Harry during his rounds of doctor's visits and treatments. Already close, the hours that father and son spent together seemed to bring them even closer. The pair spoke frequently about the business. Apparently, Harry used the time to relay to his son his thoughts and his goals concerning its operations, and his ideas for In-N-Out's future. Harry also reportedly recorded many of these discussions in a series of home movies. It was clear that Harry wanted In-N-Out Burger to continue, no matter what happened to him.

Even as Harry became gravely ill, he continued to make plans for In-N-Out. And the future as Harry saw it looked a lot like the past, with a limited expansion into the outlying communities beyond the San Gabriel Valley. In 1975, store number seventeen opened in Santa Ana, the chain's first drive-through in Orange County. About ten miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, Santa Ana was a growing city, one of the largest in Orange County. Orange County was the home of Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. A longtime Republican stronghold in California, it was also known for its famous beaches—one of them, Huntington, was famously dubbed “Surf City USA.”

A year later in 1976, when McDonald's posted $3 billion in sales and opened restaurant number 4,000 in Montreal, In-N-Out opened its eighteenth store in Woodland Hills, a suburb in the southwest San Fernando Valley near the 101 Freeway on Ventura Boulevard. It was another ace spot for the chain. Originally part of the El Camino Real (the Royal Highway) that linked twenty-one Spanish missions, Ventura Boulevard was also one of the main east-west thoroughfares in the Valley and was the original U.S. Route 101 before the freeway was built. The Woodland Hills location, like most In-N-Out Burgers, was positioned to take advantage of the maximum amount of traffic. Heavily traveled, the 101 Freeway in Southern California followed the Pacific Coast to the beaches running down to Hollywood and up to San Francisco and onto Oregon in the north. Additionally, the busy boulevard was flanked with numerous small shops and businesses. This was the third In-N-Out to open in the San Fernando Valley in five years, and customers from all points of the northwest valley made special trips just to eat at the new location.

The Woodland Hills drive-through was the last In-N-Out Burger opening that Harry Snyder oversaw. He died on December 14, 1976; he was sixty-three years old. Harry's funeral was held three days later at 10:00 a.m. at the white colonial-style Church of Our Heritage on the sprawling grounds of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park and Mortuary in Covina Hills. It was a fitting final resting place for Harry as well as a slightly odd one.

Like In-N-Out, Forest Lawn, a chain of cemetery parks, was a uniquely Southern California phenomenon. Just as Harry Snyder re-made American dining with his drive-through burger chain, Hubert Eaton, the founder of Forest Lawn, had revolutionized the funeral industry. In 1917, the somewhat eccentric Missouri-born businessman created a chain of memorial parks across the Southland that broke with what he believed was the usual dreary and depressing cemetery setting. Featuring scrupulously manicured grounds lined with trees, fountains, music drifting out of speakers hidden in rose bushes, and grave markers flush to the ground to give them more of a park feel,
Forest Lawn parks were built to be as “unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as Eternal Life is unlike Death.”
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