Shh: There's a Semi-Secret Way to Get In-N-Out Delivered

In-N-Out, the still mostly California-based company that staunchly refuses to join the delivery-app age, is not entirely beyond the reach of Animal-style obsessives who dislike leaving their couch, as we are now learning.

You still will not find In-N-Out available anywhere on the usual apps like DoorDash or UberEats — back in the wild west days of the delivery app wars in 2014/2015, DoorDash even tried making an end run around In-N-Out, allowing orders to be placed on the app and then having drivers physically go make and fetch those orders in person, for a fee, and In-N-Out sued them.

But, as LA Material reports this week, "nature abhors a vacuum," and thus some enterprising folk have taken it upon themselves to offer door-to-door In-N-Out delivery on Facebook Marketplace, and the TaskRabbit knockoff site Airtasker — the latter even has its own dedicated page for In-N-Out delivery.

Of course, sometimes these are just solutions for the idle wealthy who can't be bothered to get in their McLaren and go through a drive-thru, and probably not for the average wage worker. As the California Post notes, not citing any source, one customer (possibly of Airtasker) in Santa Clara was willing to pay $100 for two Animal-style burgers and two Animal-style fries to be delivered to their house.

But a quick look at Facebook Marketplace locally yields one person offering to do the delivery run in the San Jose area for a $5 to $10 fee, which is better than DoorDash!

And, of course, word of mouth about all this will inevitably lead to scams. LA Material tried out the services of a driver named Adrian in Glendora who was offering to deliver In-N-Out for his usual $25 delivery fee plus a $25 "drive fee," so $50 on top of the cost of the order. They wired him the $50 on Zelle and, guess what! The food never came and Adrian blocked them on Facebook following multiple voicemails.

Should someone pop up in SF offering to do the run to Fisherman's Wharf for you, you might want to use a service like PayPal with some sort of scam protection.

Evangelical In-N-Out CEO Lynsi Snyder, who caused an uproar here in California last year when she announced she was relocating to more conservative (and cheaper) Tennessee and opening an "eastern" headquarters of the company there, gave an interview in April in which she reaffirmed that the company would never offer delivery, because of the "freshness factor." And sure, In-N-Out's notoriously non-crispy fries would only be worse after sitting in a delivery box for 30 minutes.

Comments