In-N-Out Burger will close its first location in its 75-year history due to a wave of car break-ins and robberies at its only restaurant in Oakland, California.
In-N-Out Burger says it will close its first location in its 75-year history due to a wave of car break-ins, property damage, theft and robberies affecting customers and employees alike at its only restaurant in Oakland, California.
The fast-food burger joint in a busy corridor near Oakland International Airport will close on March 24 because even though the company has taken “repeated steps to create safer conditions our Customers and Associates are regularly victimized,” Denny Warnick, In-N-Out’s chief operating officer, said in a statement Wednesday.
People here trying to make this about masking bad business decisions etc don’t live in Oakland. I live here, it’s really bad right now.
I was joking with a friend that a lot of Oakland feels like a bad 80s dystopia film…like you know those scenes with hobos warming themselves around a burning oil drum, stripped and burned out cars everywhere, piles of trash, drug addicts and prostitutes wandering around, etc? That’s literally real life in a large part of east Oakland. Like I’ve swear to god seen a half dozen girls at one intersection twerking in the middle of the street on the yellow lines, and one block over is a 5 block long encampment (16th and international/ 12th st).
Like this shit is on Google street view! It’s not hard to find. Follow this road all the way down to Fruitvale ave, it’s like a solid mile of a 3rd world refugee camp.
I was about to comment that I lived in Oakland for 5 years and it really isn't that bad. Like any city, it has its bad parts that you need to avoid. But you cleared it up.
a large part of east Oakland
A large part of east Oakland is bad. Luckily, it's easy to avoid... but not if you already live there.
Since you mentioned Fruitvale Ave, I just wanna add that Fruitvale Station (2013) is an amazing movie people should check out, well worth a watch. It's by the director Ryan Coogler that did Creed and Black Panther btw.
The crime stats and stories in this case are so bad they'd be comical if it didn't represent desperate people.
Since 2019, police have logged 1,335 incidents in the vicinity of the restaurant on Oakport Street — more than any other location in Oakland, the newspaper reported.
That number includes nine robberies, two commercial burglaries, four domestic violence incidents and 1,174 car break-ins, according to Oakland police data shared with the Chronicle.
I saw elsewhere that a guy got robbed there, came back to do a news interview, and got robbed again. The crime stats mean basically a crime a day at that location.
I like how they list a single-digit numbers for a few crimes and then 1,174 car break-ins. 9 robberies and 2 burglaries in 4 years is almost nothing, but sounds like car break-ins are basically constant.
Oaklander here. Shit has really gone downhill over the past decade. Tents started popping up about 15 years ago, and now some parts of town honestly make District 9 look nice. I see stuff in this down that I never thought I would see in an American city.
Edit:
Context: this is what I drive through to get to the hardware store. This street view is 3 years old. It’s actually worse now.
There’s actually a reason for it. The western Supreme Court (the court you go through before the US Supreme Court) made a ruling about a decade ago that all unhoused people can’t be removed from somewhere if there aren’t enough beds in the city for all unhoused people. So basically we can move guy #5 because there aren’t enough beds in shelters for 2,752 homeless people. Recently even Gavin Newsom was asking them to repeal the decision and was banding together with other western state governors and city mayors as they all say the ruling is unfair.
It's true. I drove truck down there. It literally looks like a warzone. There are clothes lines just hanging from cars everywhere in between tracks for cable cars. RVs on fire. Fires in trunks. It's like Robocop from the 80s was real. Stay the fuck away from International (used to be E14). It's not a good place.
Omg it has images from 6 years ago and 7 months ago. The difference is absolutely mind blowing. But also in general, to see how it looks now its just so depressing.
I've been reading a book right now that's based in the 1930s and this looks and feels like the Hoovertowns they describe.
I honestly think that this kind of change is a big part of why my mom became radicalized into MAGA. The area she just moved away from was already bad when she moved there, but it went down hill in a similar way. Over the same time period, she began blaming liberal policies for the problems and became someone who says that Fox News is too liberal and sends me links to the Gateway Pundit as proof for things she believes.
I lived there from 2009 to 2016 and loved it. Was really cool, even though I lived in Ghost Town on San Pablo, no body ever fucked with me or my GF. I came back after 3 years abroad and was devastated to see how bad it became. Then I went back in the "post" pandemic and I could not believe my fucking eyes that it was even worse. Dramatically worse. Tbf so is San Jose and SF.
Why is the assumption that it's always and only homeless people. Every time there's one of those viral videos of people stealing shit from stores it's somehow never homeless people.
But I guess if you want people without homes to start committing property crimes, one way to do that is to "move" them - meaning having a bunch of cops come, forcing them into areas with no services that they're unfamiliar with, and then having waste management steal literally all of their worldly possessions and throw them into a dumpster. Yes, that will keep them from stealing in order to survive /s.
It's always the people who bitch about people without homes who have zero interest in learning what it would actually take to help the problem. If they actually cared, they would never advocate for just "moving" people, because if they used their brain for two seconds they would know how much worse it would make the problem. These are human beings. You can't throw them away, sweep them under a rug, or make them disappear into thin air. They need resources to rebuild their lives. I wish it were requisite to be homeless for a week in high school or something, since no one seems to be able to imagine what exactly they would do if they woke up tomorrow with nothing. It would never be a problem again.
Sounds pretty par for the course for Oakland, tbh. The locals probably know better, but the airport ought to be notifying visitors that they can't be leaving valuables in their cars in that city. And that they're gonna want the insurance on their rentals.
For real. I learned about this from a guy delivering my weed when we visited. That’s when I learned what biping was. Never would have known. “You dont want to rent a car in Oakland”
the area has high theft because there are a lot of restaurants in the area, and its outside of an airport, so a lot of tourists tend to leave their luggage in their rental vehicles, making them extremely prime targets for theft.
The Raising Canes in Oakland switched to drive thru only because of the rampant thefts of people flying in and trying Raising Canes first.
At the same time, I see why they'd doubt this, given it sounds similar to the rash of articles about stores closing in cities because of "out-of-control crime" before the midterms, only for the real reasons like corporate reorganization or unionbusting to trickle out later.
was crime really plummeting at a time when we were seeing a slew of security videos showing mass amounts of organized smash-and-grabs all over California?
Oaklander here. Crime might be down nationwide, but it is up a LOT here. It’s quite sad. Big franchises aside, a lot of small local businesses haven’t been able to withstand the crime wave. Lots of my favorite mom and pop places are closing up and saying that they just can’t deal with the cost and stress of continued robbery / burglary.
But as for this place, there are cameras and guards in that lot, as well as employees taking orders. People still smash and grab, even in broad daylight.
This part of town is really struggling, by the airport, and thieves know the rental cars are almost guaranteed to have luggage. No one that lives here is shocked by this news. This is not Walgreens locking up soap in a place with dropping crime. This area is legitimately struggling with some big problems.
Idk, looking in from the outside adding a security guard usually ends up with someone dying in the US. Either the security guard tries to be John wick but ends up being a Paul blart or the security guard is a waste of salary as they go "why would I risk my life, fuck that.".
At best it would be a deterrent to young kids who get cocky.
I thought that the whole "bay area is getting worse" was a front propagated by big businesses trying to hide their corporate losses to shareholders. Weird huh
And in Canada, at least one Tim Horton's restaurant had to close dine-in because of violent drug addicts and homeless people making it unsafe for everyone. 😵
Overall crime is down nationally. Some specific categories are overall trending upward (car theft, not surprisingly) and crime is always fluctuating in local areas in either direction.
In and out owner was denying COVID procedure at a point, right? Suspect this is less warranted action and just another nut job carrying water for the crazy, hate machine on the right.
Didn't I hear this location was right by the A's stadium, and the A's are leaving, correct?
So maybe a business failing being covered by "out of control crime" just like how target and the retail Association got caught lying about the stores they were closing the to "out of control crime". Then it turns out... Oh, each of the stores they marked to close actually had other nearby target stores with higher reported crime rates, but what the stores marked for closure DID have in common was that they had lower sales.
Retail boils down to a real estate speculation guessing game. Executives are typically unqualified, privileged pretenders . They made the wrong guesses on store location, because they are incompetent, and now they are exploiting this moment - just like they price gouge through COVID. It's all a play to cover their failures.
I'm pretty inclined to believe the reason of crime in this instance because
In-n-Out is so popular, most locations' drive-thrus have 'round the block traffic
Oakland is pretty crime ridden
They're only closing a single location, and In-n-Out is not franchised.
It's very likely that people backed up in the drive-thru line were being robbed. I used to think the stories about how fucked up that city is were just exaggerated until I had to work out there overnight. It really is that bad.