When Chuck Papez sought work at In-N-Out Burger in 1954, owner Harry Snyder offered the teenager a dollar an hour and the opportunity to build a career. He wasn't kidding.
Like Snyder and his wife, Esther, and every other employee, Papez started in the kitchen, peeling potatoes at In-N-Out's first drive-thru restaurant in Baldwin Park. Within five years, Papez had moved up to management, earning enough to get married, buy a house and start a family. Soon he was taking trips to the Caribbean, Europe and Mexico--bonuses awarded to managers for meeting goals.
"It's been a great career, I'll tell you," said Papez, who figures to retire comfortably from a company in which even part-time counter workers get 401(k) savings plan benefits.
In-N-Out is an anomaly in fast-food corporate America, a family-owned chain that clings to the values of a bygone era when loyalty meant something to both employer and employee. In-N-Out's hourly workers stay an average of two years, versus less than 10 months industrywide. That difference shows up in In-N-Out's service--and in the chain's cult-like following among customers.
But these days, many people inside and outside the company are wondering whether In-N-Out's special culture and values can endure. The company has thrived for 52 years as an independent, but it has come to a crossroads.
The drug-overdose death in December of Guy Snyder, Esther and Harry's eldest son, has left the company without a chief executive. And potential buyers have been breathing down In-N-Out's neck, sensing that the 143-store chain may finally be ripe for the picking.
Some fear that the family firm will be swallowed up by a big corporation or taken over by faceless investors, as have so many other successful mom-and-pop businesses, and lose its endearing traditions.
Whether that happens to In-N-Out depends largely on Esther Snyder, the family's 80-year-old matriarch. She moved from bookkeeping to the boardroom after Harry died in 1976. And through tragedies that have claimed her two sons--Guy's younger brother, Richard, died in a plane crash in 1993--she has reassumed day-to-day control.
But for nearly a year, Esther Snyder has been conspicuously absent from the company's headquarters in Irvine and her health has been a growing concern. During a visit to Redding last year for the opening of a new store, her chronically bad knees gave out and she fell, breaking her hip. She has since had two operations and is now undergoing therapy.
