NYT article on In-N-Out Burger.
August 14, 2002
The Secret Behind a Burger Cult
By TOM McNICHOL
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - THE 166th In-N-Out Burger restaurant
opened quietly last Tuesday morning on Century Boulevard,
hard by the Hollywood Park racetrack. There were no "Grand
Opening" banners flapping in the breeze, no food giveaways
and no advertisements promoting the event.
Still, for a quiet opening, there was a lot of noise. By
lunchtime, the restaurant was filled with patrons, and the
line of cars at the drive-through window snaked into the
street. An In-N-Out employee was assigned just to direct
traffic.
"As soon as I drove by and saw it was open, I called my son
Sean, who loves In-N-Out," said Margaret Beters, a city
employee, who said she lives nearby. "This is dinner," she
said, holding up a white bag containing two double
cheeseburgers, one with grilled onions and one without.
In-N-Out, founded on the West Coast in 1948, is that rarest
of chain restaurants: one with a cult following. Exalted
both by hamburger fans and those who normally shun fast
food, it has built its reputation on the rock of two
beliefs: fast food should be made from scratch, and the
whims of the customer should be entertained.
Even Eric Schlosser, author of the muckraking book "Fast
Food Nation," is a fan.
"I think they're great," said Mr. Schlosser, whose less
appetizing findings included that some ground beef destined
for fast-food restaurants had been contaminated with bits
of cattle spinal cord. "It isn't health food, but it's food
with integrity. It's the real deal," he said.
There are In-N-Out restaurants in just three states:
California, Arizona and Nevada. There are no freezers,
microwaves or heat lamps at any of them. None of the food
is ever frozen, no meal is prepared until the customer
orders it, and nothing costs more than $2.50. The fries are
cut by hand in the store, rather than being machine-cut,
fried, flash-frozen, vacuum-sealed and shipped hundreds of
miles from a processing plant. The shakes are made from ice
cream.
"They're sort of the unchain," said Allan Hickok, a senior
research analyst who tracks the restaurant industry for
U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. "They have a kind of quirky
appeal that's made them a strong regional player."
When an In-N-Out opened in suburban San Francisco in
January, there were lines out the door for months. When one
opened in Scottsdale, Ariz., there was a four-hour wait for
food, and news helicopters whirled above the parking lot.
For a fast-food restaurant, nothing about In-N-Out is
particularly fast. Made-to-order meals take time, and it's
not unusual to wait 10 minutes for a burger, an eternity in
fast-food time.
The In-N-Out menu offers four items: hamburger,
cheeseburger, Double-Double burger and fries. (That Double
Double, at 670 calories and 41 grams of fat, is basically a
coronary thrombosis on a gently toasted bun.) But patrons
can customize the burgers, by adding or subtracting
toppings like pickles, tomatoes and grilled onions. They
can even eliminate the meat altogether.
Over the years, this trend has evolved into what's become
known as the Secret Menu - a list of popular burger
variations that don't appear on the menu but are passed
along by word of mouth. For example, a burger ordered
Animal Style comes doused with mustard and pickles, extra
special sauce and grilled onions. The Wish Burger is
somewhat simpler to parse - a vegetarian option, without
meat or cheese. And the Protein Style burger replaces the
bun with a piece of fresh lettuce, for those on a
low-carbohydrate diet. And then there's the mighty 4-by-4,
with four meat patties and four slices of cheese.
The Secret Menu is not an In-N-Out marketing creation, and
its popularity appears genuinely to mystify the company's
officers.
"We've never called it the Secret Menu," said Carl Van
Fleet, the chain's vice president for operations. "We've
always prepared a burger any way you want. Our customers
came up with the names like `Animal Style.' "
Web sites extol the pleasures of the restaurant's
from-scratch cuisine and detail the Secret Menu. The Web
sites also raise questions about In-N-Out's burger wrappers
and cups, which bear small-print biblical citations, to
Nahum 1:7, John 3:16, Proverbs 3:5 and John 14:6, for
example.
"They don't bother me," said Kurt Gardner, a production
manager who moved to Brooklyn from California in 1999. "I
think they have about as much intrinsic interest to
customers as the comics that come with Bazooka Joe gum."
The citations, said an In-N-Out spokesman, are printed in
memory of Rich Snyder, a son of the founders, whose
initiative led to their first being used. He died in a
private plane crash in 1993 in Orange County. The citations
have no larger meaning, the spokesman said.
IN-N-OUT BURGER was founded just northeast of here, in
Baldwin Park, by a husband-and-wife team, Harry and Esther
Snyder, the same year McDonald's opened its first
drive-through restaurant in San Bernardino. In-N-Out has
never franchised and remains privately owned by Mrs.
Snyder, who is now 81. The company does not release
financial data, but Restaurants and Institutions, a trade
publication, estimates that it did $160 million in sales in
2001, growing at a healthy clip of 10 percent a year.
McDonald's, meanwhile, had $40.6 billion in sales last
year.
It would be easy to dismiss In-N-Out's popularity as a
California fad, a cult in a region given to cultish
behavior. But food trends in the United States tend to
track west to east. And while company officials said that
the company has no plans to move east, it is worth noting
that the fast-food industry was hatched in Southern
California right alongside In-N-Out.
McDonald's, Taco Bell, Carl's Jr. and Jack in the Box all
started in California and grew into national chains. Fifty
years and billions of burgers later, fast-food restaurants
have infiltrated every nook, cranny and strip mall in
America, with more than 300,000 outlets nationwide.
But the ubiquity of the restaurants, once seen as a
convenience, has for a growing minority of consumers become
tiresome. And while the industry is still very good at
selling ground beef, the sizzle is fading fast. McDonald's
reported six consecutive quarterly earnings declines in the
last seven.
Some of McDonald's woes can be traced to an initiative
begun in 1998 that had restaurants custom-making sandwiches
and even toasting the buns, as In-N-Out has long done. That
turned out to be too expensive and unwieldy to roll out to
its 13,000 American outlets, and only served to weaken one
of McDonald's chief draws - fast service.
In-N-Out, meanwhile, has been doing the same thing for 50
years. It's just that lately, consumer tastes are moving
their way.
Is the chain smart or just lucky?
"That's a good question," Mr. Van Fleet said. "I guess a
bit of both."
In any event, luck or not, it was working last Tuesday.
Back at the opening of In-N-Out's newest restaurant, one
woman attested to the chain's powerful attraction.
"I was supposed to go to Target, but when I saw this was
open, I said `Uh-uh, I'm stopping,' " said Jameelah Ellis,
24, a teacher in Los Angeles, as she tucked into a
cheeseburger. "The grilled bun," she added. "That's the
best part."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company . |
