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.
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.
I clicked that thinking it would look like the bad parts of Paris. I was not expecting the bad parts of Fallout
Jesus fuck
My guess is that the map view folks are too scared to go back now. That thing is 3 years old.
When I looked at it, it said 7 months ago. So someone braved it relatively recently.
Crazy how a place with so much wealth can have so many people living in destitute.
I guess that’s what we get when we’re just passing a bunch of money around at the top.
All that wealth is owned by a minuscule fraction of the population. The rest of the 99% are poor.
I get tired of hearing that America is a wealthy country. It’s not the people that are wealthy. It’s just 1% of the population that is wealthy. The rest are poor and just a single missed pay check from being on the street like the people in this photo.
Relatively speaking, Americans are wealthy af.
You should take a look at the rest of the world.
That’s not really true if you account for the purchasing power of the dollar within the US. While Americans might benefit from cheap imported consumer goods, their housing, food, and healthcare costs are incredibly high when compared to other countries.
Yes, and their quality of life is also higher than those countries.
the one creates the other. the middle class is being gutted by the super rich, while congress is paid handsomely to do nothing about anything.
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.
Sounds like they should be building shelters not trying to repeal a law that is designed to help people.
As soon as we have enough shelters, cities will bus in more homeless.
I’m not made at homeless people. I’m mad that the system is creating almost normalized homelessness. And then that that creates political football.
They’re people. We forget that too easily.
If they do that. And you keep accepting new homeless people giving them security and food and helping connect them with work. Perhaps helping to build more shelters. The cycle will continue and grow and expand. The city will become stronger and stronger, and the places busing their homeless out will become weaker and weaker. Accepting them and building on to the city with them is how you win.
It’s something we can easily support as a nation. It’s simply something wealthy. People don’t want to give up any of their privilege to do though.
As a nation.
It’s made an issue for the city. And as long as an issue is over 100 miles away, the solutions are simple and not owned by the group.
Having been homeless myself, referring to homeless people as “uNhOuSEd” does absolutely nothing but make you feel a tiny bit more morally superior
You’re making zero difference
I’m formally homeless, and I enjoy knowing that people are making the effort to point out that the only difference between us and “them” or “those people” or “the homeless” is that they lack a roof. The word “homeless” has so many negative connotations that there are people trying to reframe it’s meaning to be more objective. Everything we say and do has meaning, so changing a narrative is extremely important.
But sure, fuck those people. /s
K
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.
It’s really wild. I noticed the lot was up for lease in 2017 also. I’m curious what the story is.
My images wouldn’t show more recent than 2021. Maybe because I’m on mobile.
Contextualizing it with District 9 really paints a bleak dystopia
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.
I am willing to risk my life for the Sinaloa trucks in that part of town. If that’s how I go, so be it.
Aite. Ill give you the food trucks. But I ain’t even thinking about it at night.
I used to do a taco crawl on my birthday. We’d walk international at night and get a taco at like 6 places. Last time I did that was about 7 or 8 years ago. I might only do it in the day now.
Sinaloa has a place on Telegraph now, and that is a lot less sketchy. But it’s also not quite as good as the truck.
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.
I’m hoping the Governor wins that court case and we can start to actually put people in our unused shelter beds.
“But state wide averages have gone down, so your anecdotal evidence is worthless” every second clown in this thread.
Yeah, the people who think crime is down in Oakland are really uninformed. A nationwide average doesn’t mean every city is doing great. Oakland has been struggling for a while, and it needs help, not people pretending that things are fine.
The data doesn’t look great in Oakland, and you can really see and feel the struggling in this city if you spend any time here.
Holy shit that is awful, this country is a dumpster fire.
Hey, on the bright side, some of those RVs are beachfront property!
There’s not much beach in that area. And the surrounding waterways are dominated by one of America’s largest commercial ports.
That looks like a street corner in Missouri.
Missouri doesn’t have as huge a homeless problem as California, there’s not as many homeless people come winter time in Missouri.
And that stops this looking like Missouri how?
It takes a couple of years for a homeless camp to reach those levels and that magnitude of squaler.
Ah yes just like all the other stores that “closed due to theft”
Oakland
But then again…
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.
I see that No Trespassing sign is working well
no trespassing because that land is clearly owned by the truck and trailer guy. /s
It’s like a literal Hoovertown.
This is the reality the politicians aren’t dealing with. Give me a politician that can look reality in the eye, tell me it exists, and tries to do something to improve it.
I like Sanders, but I don’t see many making the right noises.
Good god it’s somehow gotten so much worse!
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.
They don’t prosecute or investigate car break ins there.
No one leaves anything of value not in the trunk for any length of time. Like you literally can’t run into the store for a minute.
It being in Oakland makes me more suspicious, not less. That’s where the “crime wave panic” is at its strongest.
From comments here it seems that Oakland location really was notorious for crime and breakins
It might be “closed due to management theft from employees.”
Are police officers blaming all the defunding efforts that actually never happened yet?
The cops cannot move them because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found it unconstitutional to move them.
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.
I came in here to call bullshit. Then I saw it was in Oakland. Nvrmnd. Carry on.
Naw, we will still defend Oakland. Reading here, I see crime is down more than ever. It’s the corporations just wanting to make to much money.
Why not hire a security guard? This sounds like some packaged bullshit trying to blame downsizing on crime, just like CVS did a couple years ago.
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.
Wow, you weren’t kidding. What is wrong with Oakland?
What is wrong with Oakland? Poverty. That’s usually the number one factor for rising crime rates anywhere
This seems pretty non scientific. Crime stats are hard. The only organization that even comes close is the FBI and only because states are required to submit certain reporting.
Ok, here’s the FBI’s stats from 2019:
Violent crime rate per population:
Los Angeles: 0.73% Oakland: 1.25%
So it’s close to twice the crime rate of Los Angeles.
One year of crime stats doesn’t measure change. Your argument is that the crime rate went up. You would need to provide numbers for at least ten years and ideally 20 or 30 to say anything about crime trends.
If you try and reply again be sure to include the metrics for which crimes went up, and which ones went down in the years you’re concerned with. I think you’ll find virtually everywhere in America is the same, and that violent crime has been on a consistent downward trend for the past thirty years and property and drug crimes have occasional spikes that track concurrently with significant economic disruptions.
Causes and solutions to criminal behavior are not a mystery. The only reason crime is still a significant problem in America is because on half of the voting public can’t hold back their emotions and insist on using criminal justice to exact revenge, rather than rehabilitate and prevent.
I wasn’t arguing that crime is up in Oakland, that was the other guy. I’m just shocked at how bad Oakland is compared to the rest of California. California is a really nice place to live, so I’m surprised that one of our cities is that bad.
Oh word.
Yeah it is, just like all that shit about how retail stores last year having to close because of crime AS CRIME WAS FUCKING PLUMMETING
Crime is NOT plummeting in Oakland. Quite the opposite.
I live here and have been in the area for decades. It’s legitimately bad now, and that parking lot is a shit show.
*reported crime.
At some point, store workers give up on calling in for your average shoplifter.
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?
social media can let people believe what they want, but the retail org that claimed closed stores were from shoplifting retracted their claims after it was revealed they were unsourced hearsay. Most closures have been from low sales in office districts since remote work expanded
social media
no, It was security camera footage
the retail org that claimed closed stores were from shoplifting retracted their claims after it was revealed they were unsourced hearsay
yeah I read that article too. It was one article.
vs several clips of security footage showing increased incidences of smash-and-grabs from dozens of different retail stores
sure they closed cracker barrels and Walmarts and Targets and CVS stores in all the high-crime areas due to “low sales in office districts since remote work expanded.” sure.
Is that the same reason those same stores we go to now have most of the products displayed behind locked cases which necessitates customers tracking down an employee just to purchase a pair of hair clipping scissors? Yes I kid you not, I wanted to buy a pair of hair clipping scissors from a Walmart in California a couple years ago and it was locked behind a case and I had to track down an employee just to purchase a pair of scissors that were locked behind a plexiglass case.
do they keep all that merchandise locked behind a plexiglass case due to “low sales in office district since remote work expanded?” or due to increased incidences of theft?
the crime stats and lost goods in those stores were not particularly exceptional. What was exceptional was low sales at those stores.
often when you get a clip, you don’t even know what the date is. I’ve seen people post shit from the 1980s saying it was yesterday. Clips show that something happened somewhere at some point, not that rates are going up or down.
It’s both, in high theft areas you need more sales to offset your losses. Low sales and high theft will close a buisness fast.
You’re getting downvotes, presumably from people who haven’t spent any time in NorCal. This is a problem everywhere there from Oakland, to SF, to Palo Alto and San Jose. No where in the bay in safe from this.
No locals leave anything of value in there car for any amount of time.
I learned that in 2013 when my rental was broken into in a fancy Palo Alto restaurant.
But these aren’t violent crimes, which I think are declining, just property crimes.
If you go resturants around lunch you’ll see a bunch of people with a laptop bag or backpack but they don’t get their computers out. Companies tell their employees to never leave laptops in their cars, even for just a minute.
And Target! I hate having to call someone to unlock the fucking toothpaste.
I lived near a CVS that was constantly targeted for crime. It’s closing this month, and I honestly can’t imagine how it stayed open this long.
You can pretend it’s packaged bullshit, but until you live in a city and experience it first-hand, you’ll stay in your pretty make-believe world.
deleted by creator
They charge 85% markup on consumer shit.
They aren’t closing because of crime. The ration of stolen items to sold items would have to be like 10 to 1.
If half of their daily sales walked out the back door, they’d still be making money hand over fist.
deleted by creator
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.
Nah. There are security guards everywhere and most of them don’t ever kill anyone.
You just said it yourself, “most”
I agree it’s the wild West over here with guns and gun nuts but for the number of security guards compared to the number of shootings they do, they aren’t a significant portion of them. They are way fewer cops, and way more police shootings.
I’m more worried about security guards getting shot than them shooting ngl
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”
What is biping for those of us not in the loop?
Bipping is the act of stealing from cars, often through the use of “splashing” (breaking the car windows).
It’s an exit away from the airport. It’s def scetch. I only worked down there when I could park my car or bike inside a gate.
Can’t have shit in Oakland…
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.
Is this just another example of stuff that wouldn’t even happen if cost of living was affordable to people not born wealthy?
Plenty of people steal even though they don’t need to to survive. Not everyone that steals is starving.
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. 😵
Land of the free cars.
Lol, oakland.
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
I happily hop on Bart to go to SF and spend a day as a pedestrian. No issues, minimal to none of the rumored stuff.
Oakland… I’ll make a Bart transfer there and I’ve never felt too unsafe. I left the West Oakland station once and people looked at me like “what the hell are you doing?” I went back.
I have driven through Oakland, rode Bart through Oakland, flown into and out of OAK. I don’t linger in Oakland outside of tourist spots (Jack London Square). Alameda, nearby, hasn’t been an issue for me.
noo I love burgers :(
