You can try to fight it all you want, the president of In-N-Out Burger is telling America. At the end of the day, minimum wage hikes for fast food workers end up meaning higher prices for customers. Period.
You’d think this wouldn’t be rocket science. However, Californians seem to be experiencing sticker shock in the weeks since a new law took effect making the minimum wage for workers at fast-food chain restaurants $20 an hour.
The previous minimum wage for fast-food workers was $16 an hour; the change took effect April 1 thanks to a law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Restaurants closed suddenly. Fast food workers found themselves out of jobs or with severely reduced hours. And at chains like McDonald’s, Burger King and In-N-Out, significant price increases were reported.
The new law applies to eateries which don’t offer much (or any) table service and have over 60 locations nationwide. That certainly applies to all of the above — and none are so closely identified with California as In-N-Out, which was started by the Snyder family in 1948 in the Southern California suburb of Baldwin Park.
It’s still a family-run business despite being much, much bigger than it was back then; in 2010, then-27-year-old Lynsi Snyder became president of the chain, which opened its 400th store in Idaho in 2023, according to KTLA.
In an interview with NBC’s “Today” on Wednesday, Snyder said she went “toe-to-toe” with executives to stop price hikes at the iconic fast-food chain after the California law was announced.
In the end, however, reality won out.
During the interview, Snyder said she’d tried as hard as she could to keep the experience the same as it was before despite ever-increasing labor costs, including eschewing automation.
Is a high minimum wage bad?
She told “Today” that she’d said “no to mobile ordering because that greatly impacts the customer experience.
“There is a lot of things that could be cheaper, easier, but that’s not the system we go through.”
However, the forces of the market are a system that cannot be fought successfully, no matter what bureaucrats in Sacramento might say.
“I was sitting in VP meetings going toe-to-toe saying, ‘We can’t raise the prices that much, we can’t,’” Snyder, now 41, said during the interview regarding price hikes due to minimum wage increases.
“I felt such an obligation to look out for our customer.”
Alas, fighting reality simply wasn’t an option.
The New York Post reported that the price hikes at In-N-Out were “modest” compared to competitors like Burger King, with burgers up 25 cents and sodas up 5 cents.
At the very least, this got some positive reviews from customers at the chain, where the pain was felt the least.
“It’s such a nominal increase,” said Shawn Fields, 40, an In-N-Out customer interviewed by the Post. “It seems like a reasonable amount.”
Compare that to Ivan Moreno, who was ordering at Burger King — where, by way of comparison, the price of a Texas Double Whopper meal went up $1.80, or almost 12 percent.
“To be honest, I don’t like it, because then everything else goes up,” Moreno said. “These people have to make a living one way or another, but then [the restaurants] have to up their prices.”
Right. And then they don’t have jobs or meals they can afford. Good thing, California.
Snyder may be fighting “toe-to-toe” on price increases, but the fact is that the laws of economics are similar to the laws of gravity. In the end, reality always wins. The rock will fall, and the price of the value meal will rise.
You can throw the rock up in the air as far as you like or raise the minimum wage as much as you see fit under the impression that the fat cats will cover the bill, but the inevitable will always happen.
At the very least, credit Snyder with trying to hold the line — not just for the customer, but for the reputation her family’s restaurant has built up. When politicians hand a “gift” to unskilled labor and attempt to stick companies with the bill for it, however, one can only fight the tide for so long.
