Over the last weekend, In-N-Out scion Lynsi Snyder ignited a backlash after being interviewed on the podcast Relatable by Allie Beth Stuckey to discuss, among other things, her fast food company’s expansion into Tennessee. Snyder, who inherited In-N-Out from her father, who inherited it from his, declared she is relocating to a Nashville suburb and noted a number of company execs are also making the move.
“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here,” Snyder said on the podcast. “Doing business is not easy here.”
And with that, Snyder stepped into an extremely dumb culture war. Again.
Conservatives “fleeing” California is a well-worn trope, and Snyder set off a backlash — including calls for a boycott — from a subset of people online who blamed her for dipping into tired stereotypes about the state being too woke or too regulated to run a meat and potatoes business in 2025.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Yes, California is a tough place to raise a family and run a small business, given the soaring cost of living. But is it really “not easy” for Snyder, who inherited the company in her twenties and gained full ownership of the whole thing at 35, becoming one of the youngest female billionaires in the world?
Of course, maybe she’s just taking pity on all of her beloved associates. Snyder responded to the viral reaction with measured words on Monday evening, reiterating in an Instagram post that life in the Golden State can be “tough,” but that the push into Tennessee is intended to provide more opportunities for employees.
“This doesn't have to do with my love or loyalty to the state [of California] and our customers," she said in the post. "But I love our associates and I [want to] offer them this."
Given In-N-Out’s history and Snyder’s newfound tendency to wade into some charged ideological debates, I’m not really inclined to take her pragmatic explanation on faith. We’re watching a truly great burger chain — one that the late Anthony Bourdain declared as his “favorite restaurant in L.A.” — shoot itself in the foot, and it’s happening because of Snyder, not in spite of her.
Personally, I couldn’t care less that In-N-Out prints Bible verse numbers on their packaging or donates to Republicans during an election cycle. (Welcome to billionaire democracy.) I think calls to boycott the company are at best naive and at worst the laziest strain of performative liberalism.
There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism — what matters to me is that In-N-Out has kept making affordable burgers, offering a fair wage, and maintaining insanely high employee satisfaction rates. That’s the formula that has kept us in love with In-N-Out this entire time, especially as McDonald’s and Burger King have leaned on innovations like prison labor and exploiting kids in their mission to serve us increasingly overpriced, constantly shrinking pucks of crap.
Do note that the formula decidedly does not include an In-N-Out CEO stirring the pot by giving interviews to right-wing disinformation sites like PragerU. But Snyder has made a conscious decision to speak publicly and purposefully as a lifelong evangelical Republican who seemingly can’t help flirting with culture-war takes.
On Relatable, she name-checked her friend Kid Rock — a brave warrior in the trans Bud Light panic — for encouraging her decision to move to Nashville. Last year, Snyder went media-viral for closing the lone In-N-Out in Oakland and blaming it entirely on crime. (Maybe she should’ve hung on a little longer and seen rates of all crime in Oakland plummet over 2024.) Before that, Synder fought the state’s COVID precautions, and told Stuckey she feels that In-N-Out should have pushed back harder and put up with “all of the legal backlash,” even by temporarily shutting stores down.
Her comments have consistently fed into the right-wing frenzy about how much of a hellscape Commiefornia is. Even if everyone else’s eyeballs can see that literally every In-N-Out location has a line of cars that wraps around the block, seemingly at all hours.
Again, expanding to Tennessee isn’t the problem. Trying to win conservative meme Bingo — and negging the very state that made her a billionaire while doing so — is.
Snyder’s recent media controversies show a rising confidence in her own ideals as not just the head of In-N-Out, but as a kind of Republican businesswoman thought-leader. In the same way she is expanding the reach of her burger business, she’s growing her profile as an ideologue. As a fan of her burgers but not her beliefs, I worry that her rise as an influencer — after years of quietly leading the company as a media recluse — will lead to In-N-Out’s decline, especially as more branches open across America in states without the same high wage rates or worker protections as California.
I guess we’ll see. For now, Snyder is choosing the same strategy as Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, et.al., announcing a transition from California while remaining indebted to all the opportunity, credibility, and capital the state gave them.
