In-N-Out bans employees from wearing masks

Mandatory No-Mask is such a weird stance, it violates both Health&Safety and Personal Choice/Freedom.

Was it even necessary? Like, does In-n-Out have so many staff still wearing masks that they've gotta mandate this?
- Yeah, it's not. From my experience in the restaurant that I visit (in LA) I see maybe 1/4 or 1/5 that still wear them.
  As a parent of a pre-K kid (for those who don't know, daycares and schools for young kids are grand centrals for microbes) I no longer get sick from covid, but I can still tell I got it, because there are specific symptoms I'm still getting from it that are quite annoying. One of the worst is that for few days I feel just extremely tired. If I have nothing to do, and I can just sleep that time off. Working during that time is no fun.
  So even if mask reduces chance of getting that by half, it is still worth it. It also would help employer as being tired at job one won't get as productive as they normally could. And this is just my experience, and other people have it worse.
If you think about it mandating masks for food prep makes way more sense.
They never cared about personal freedom I'm the first place it was just an excuse not to do what other people wanted them to do.
We have to strip you of your freedom in the name of freedom.
Freedom country

Fun Fact: Roughly half of all cases of food poisoning in the US are due to sick employees not wearing masks.

Sick Workers Connected to 41 Percent of Food Poisoning Outbreaks, CDC Reports

The type of people who ban masks are also the type of people that think you should be forced to work when sick 🤮
That's an interesting and even plausible sounding statistic. I wonder if you have a source?
- Sick Workers Connected to 41 Percent of Food Poisoning Outbreaks, CDC Reports
- Not OP but I too wanted to know a source so I did a search on this cool new website I invented with Al Gore called https://google.fu and found this from Smithsonian Magazine:
  The study examined 800 foodborne illness outbreaks reported by 25 state and local health departments between 2017 and 2019. Of the roughly 500 outbreaks linked to at least one known contributing factor, 205 of them, or 41 percent, involved ill workers.Jun 2, 202
  /s about inventing that with Al Gore. It was actually Tom Landry.
- I,for one, support this claim regardless of it's veracity! :)
To be fair, if you're getting food poisoning from someone preparing your food it's probably not the end covered by the mask that's the problem.
Correlation, not causation. Is my food poisoning orally contagious? A sick employee may care a lot less about the quality of food they're preparing, causing more people to get sick from rotten food on average. There are too many variables to even consider in this.
What do you base that off of? Most food poisoning is due to bad storage of food resulting in bacterial toxins even after it's cooked. Only Norovirus has an oral route that I can think of (and that's usually based around projectile vomiting that then ends up on hands).
- I believe it could be this: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/ss/ss7206a1.htm

In & out burger - they’re the ones who print bible verses on their fry containers, aren’t they?

If so, that tracks.

They sure are.
The absurdly overrated chain, yeah.
- For real. One of the most disappointing experiences of my life was the first time I tried In N Out. I took a couple bites, sat back, and just thought, "That's it? That's what everyone thinks is a great burger? What the fuck is wrong with everyone?"

This is an absolutely ludicrous policy.

Imagine a company banning their employees from washing their hands or wearing hair nets?

The only possible reason they could have to do this is an attempt to appeal to moronic conservatives.

Do they realize that workers in food factories have been wearing masks for decades?

In N Out even has their own warehouses to supply their restaurants. I see meat packing positions listed on their website which I would highly suspect require masks.

Me in summer through winter of 2020: "Well, silver lining about COVID is that we all learned how to wear masks once this all blows over."

Conservative family: "Agree!"

Me during the unending apocalypse in summer 2023: "We should wear masks with the air quality so poor [unsaid: due to the now present and undeniable human-caused climate change."

Exact same conservative family: "That sounds like socialism and fascism to me"

I'm not terribly surprised, given as they print bible verses on their packaging. Sad to see another relatively decent Christian business go down the alt-right rabbit hole, but their burgers aren't good enough for me to risk the plague because they can't follow basic safety guidelines.

Ugh… god has the worst fan base.
It's messed up. Imagine the memo said, that in-n-out bans hairnets, gloves and washing hands unless the offender has a medical note.
I don't argue for mandating it, as it is very hot in the kitchen, and mask would make it even worse experience, but pandemic or not this makes sense when working on food, it makes it more sanitary, and if employees wants to wear masks all power to them, they should not be penalized.

I had no idea the company was run by such huge assholes. I don’t think I’ve ever been to an In-n-Out, and now I know to avoid them.

You're not missing anything - they are pretty overrated with a very limited menu. In my opinion 5 Guys is better.
- And 5 guys is already overrated af
- Isn't the appeal of in-n-out the lower price point compared to other fast food burger places, rather than the options or stellar flavor? 5 guys is way more expensive and the customization/taste reflects that.
- 5 guys is better, but also more than twice the price.
  In N out isn't the best, but they're the best for their price.

This policy is obviously insane and, I hope, legally challengeable. That everyone is acting like this will cause all the customers to die is alao absurd. I live in a pretty liberal area of the country and basically no one is wearing masks anywhere.

I went to in-n-out yesterday and literally no one there had masks, customers or employees.

My wife and I ate in the car as per usual, but I know full well that we're some of the last holdouts.

Curious, why are you still a holdout? Seems nearly everyone has accepted this isn't as bad as it once was and will never go away...
- A variety of reasons really:
  I got it very early, back in March 2020 and had severe long covid from it. I had trouble just breathing for the following year and moderate aphasia for nearly three years. I still have mild aphasia and, as a professional communicator, it's been emotionally devastating.
  I know the current strains don't cross the blood brain barrier as easily as the earliest strains, but the idea of going back down that road doesn't sound terribly appealing.
  My wife was recently diagnosed with a congenital condition and covid could give her a permanent disability or even kill her. We're consulting with doctors, but we're still very much in the uncertainty phase.
  Finally, a friend of ours, who's been nearly as cautious as we are, recently got pressured into unmasking at a corporate retreat, got covid and now has (permanent?) heart damage. We all know it's a fluke and just very bad luck, but it's no less traumatizing for her or her family.
  There will almost certainly be a time in the near future where we no longer mask for basic activities. We watch things like excess deaths, wastewater analysis and hospitalizations as closely as possible and the situation is clearly improving.
  That said, every war has a final victim, and we have no intention of being that person. For now, masking is physically easy, we have a social circle that we trust and honestly don't miss a lot of the excesses we've stepped away from.

Just wear a religious face covering then

A place that bans masks doesn't come off as the type to be tolerant to religious freedom either...
- With the composition of the supreme Court right now that doesn't matter. Just say you're a devout Christian and that they're impinging your rights, doesn't matter if you have to lie about the essential facts of the case even they will side with you.

The people who made this decision when they talk about vaccines: "My body, my choice, you can't tell me what to do!"

Same people, when they talk about masking, abortion or anything else: "Your body, my choice, I can and will tell you what to do!"

My skull would probably crack from the cognitive dissonance if I tried holding these two opinions, but it seems some people have no issues with it at all...

You can't make me wear one in the middle of a pandemic but I can force you to remove yours!

Tell us you're an insane conservative without telling us you're an insane conservative.

Lynsi Lavelle Snyder-Ellingson is the billionaire owner.

Gross.

And this, my friends, is what virtue signalling actually looks like.

Okay, so what if the employee is protecting the customers from themselves? If the employee had a sniffle or whatever I would much prefer they wore a mask.

Shouldn't they be off sick rather than working in a service industry while I'll to begin with?
- I'm guessing you either don't live in America or have never had to work a job like fast food to get by.
  If they have sick days they probably either can't afford the time off or get pressured in to not taking it by their boss/family/social circle/society
  And just so we're clear, sick days aren't necessarily paid sick days. They can also be days you just don't get in trouble for missing*
  *May require a doctor's note

Er... What?

USA, you all are nuts. Imagine banning masks in a hospital.

Bro don't give the crazies ideas please.
There are no doubt many US hospitals where this would fly.
No fucking doubt.
- Some of them literally did that right at the start of the pandemic before everything got shut down for quarantine because "it might scare the patients."
  I wish I were kidding.
  https://www.npr.org/2020/04/02/825200206/doctors-say-hospitals-are-stopping-them-from-wearing-masks
The hospital I get my care from here in Los Angeles still requires masks, and the security guard will make you put one on before you can enter the lobby. 👍

At least the lines will be shorter after they've infected enough of their older customer base

It's difficult for things to go in and out with a mask, so it makes sense to me /s.

Cool. No one should care, because the face tissues are useless. Besides, breathing into the same mask all day, combined with oils off your face, as you constantly grab it with your fingers to readjust it, defeats the whole purpose. Then there's the utterly useless cloth masks that people wear several times over. I mean, there's zero studies to prove their effectiveness to begin with. But, society conforms itself because it's "for your/other's safety"

Medical studies have shown that social distancing is as effective, if not more effective than wearing a mask.

great, but what's the harm in wearing a mask?
How do they social distance the shitty burger they are making with their infected mouth?
Got people making your burgers with 6ft long poles, do you?