Gov. Newsom and Democrats Send Another CA Business Packing: In-N-Out is Out

California ranks dead last once again in Chief Executive Magazine’s Best & Worst States For Business 2025. Tennessee ranks #1 once again, and now “The Volunteer State” is getting another of California’s oldest and one of the best known businesses in the country: After 77 Years in California, In-N-Out Is Moving to Tennessee.

Lynsi Snyder, President of In-N-Out is moving her family to Tennessee, and plans to open Tennessee In-N-Out restaurants by 2026.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s Democrat Marxist class have sent yet-another successful California business packing, looking for greener pastures, lower taxes, fewer regulations and a family-friendly environment.

“There’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here,” Lynsi Snyder said during a recent appearance on the Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey podcast.

“Doing business is not easy here now,” Snyder said of California.

Snyder said that in addition to moving her family to Franklin, Tennessee, a significant portion of the company will move as well. Some corporate employees will move to Tennessee, and others will remain in Southern California.

Snyder said they are making a long-term moving plan to give employees time to make their plans, as well.

 

Snyder shared her frustrations with California policies including the crime issues the stores have had in San Francisco and Oakland. She also the shared frustrations with the impossible policies during Gov. Newsom’s Covid lockdowns – “so many pressures and hoops we were made to jump through,” Snyder said. Masks, plastic shields, and the state made restaurants check customers’ vaccine cards during the Covid flu era.

“You’ve got to do this, you have to wear a mask, you gotta put this plastic thing up between us and our customers and it was really terrible you know. And I look back and I’m like, ‘Man, maybe we should have just pushed even harder on some of that stuff and dealt with all of the legal backlash.’”

“We’re not policing our customers,” Snyder said.

In-N-Out was shut down by the state briefly in San Francisco, as the Globe reported in October 2021:

In-N-Out told the city what they think of the vaccine mandate: “We refuse to become the vaccination police.”

San Francisco city government temporarily closed an In-N-Out fast food burger restaurant over the company’s refusal to force customers to prove they are vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The City by the Bay requires a vaccine ID to purchase a burger and fries, but no ID to vote. San Francisco allows open meth and heroin purchases and use on city streets, homeless vagrants to poop on the sidewalks, and thieves to rip off Walgreens daily, but if you want a Double-Double and a chocolate shake, you need to prove you’ve been vaccinated.

California’s governor, who has a strained relationship with the truth, denies that Californians and their businesses are fleeing to other states, despite mountains of evidence, well-documented news articles, and economists across the country chronicling the phenomenon.

California’s own Chevron Oil company announced in 2024 that it is moving its headquarters to Houston, Texas from San Ramon, California – another big business to flee the Golden State. Chevron joins X/Twitter, Space X, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Charles Schwab, and Toyota Motor North America, to name a few of the mega-businesses that departed California because of the state’s leftist/Marxist politics and regulatory environment.

Economist Art Laffer and Chapman Economics Professor James Doti spelled out the numbers and rightly declared that Gov. “Newsom doesn’t appear to see is the deleterious long-term effects of a highly progressive tax system. Case in point: The ‘one-percenters’ who pay 50% of the tax are voting with their feet by leaving California in droves.”

They explained in 2023 that the ten states with the lowest income taxes including Florida and Texas, gained a cumulative net inflow from all Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) classes of $391 billion from California during the entire 2018 to 2021 period.

Most went to Texas with its business-friendly climate, no corporate or personal income tax, easy access to global markets, robust infrastructure and a reasonable regulatory environment.

California is losing more workers than it’s gaining, new report shows, the Globe reported Nov. 26th.

“Businesses are leaving because it is no longer economically feasible for them to stay within California,” the Hoover Institute says. “Businesses that remain in California are hiring much less, and California now has the country’s second highest unemployment rate,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Nov. 19, 2024.

Chief Executive reports California’s tech industry is even losing out, and AI isn’t a guarantee that California will dominate:

“As states compete for emerging industries like AI and automation, the calculus for relocation goes well beyond tax incentives. For CEOs like Jenny Zhan of Beyond International, who recently moved her alternative investment management firm from Irvine, California, to Houston, Texas, that decision is less about the perks and more about longterm strategy. She cautions other CEOs to carefully consider their reasons for relocation.

“It’s not an easy thing to do, so you really need to look at the complete picture and how it can improve your business,” she says. “For us, talent was a big factor. Talent is always seeking opportunities for long-term growth, and Houston is providing those opportunities for young talent, so we have to go wherever the talent is.”

Very interesting that she had to leave California for better talent.

“Tech firms have been migrating away from traditional tech strongholds for some time, but the biggest recent driver has been the rapid rise of AI, which has required companies to seek locations that provide affordable, reliable sources of energy and a workforce skilled in AI-driven applications. One of the states doing ‘a phenomenal job’ of getting ahead of the trend is North Carolina, which landed big data centers from Google, Microsoft and Apple, and in 2024 added American Tower and PowerHouse Data Centers. ‘They’ve been leveraging that into life sciences and healthcare R&D and manufacturing.’”

As the Globe reported in June, “New data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics was released, revealing a staggering 36,565 fast food jobs have been lost since September 2023 when the $20 per hour fast-food minimum wage law, AB 1228, was signed into law.”

And now In-N-Out is moving its headquarters.

Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democrat supermajority Legislature are doing nothing to change the reasons businesses and residents are fleeing the state.