Among the many ways the last few years of Wokemania has reduced the quality of American life and our access to the pursuit of happiness is the creation of the ideology-linked addiction to virtually useless masks and a near-crippling phobia regarding the threat of air-borne illnesses created by fearmongering during the pandemic.
Human beings communicate their feelings and attitudes with their faces. Masks undermine trust, romance, and forming personal bonds as well as communication. Businesses are quite correct to insist that employees show their faces to employees. Fighting a toxic cultural norm that would lead to a large proportion of the population hiding their faces in public is essential if we don’t want to see modern life and human interaction deteriorate further than they already have. This is one positive way corporations can help themselves and society without taking sides politically.
If the counter-argument is that the In-N-Out prohibition is political, then that’s a significant tell. Progressives have been seeking to strip autonomy from citizens in many seemingly minor ways, apparently aiming for the death of democracy by a thousand cuts. Masks stand for conformity, lock-step fealty to “science”,” trust in Big Brother, and virtue-signaling the “right” virtues. Simply on the basis of the last alone, In-N-Out’s ban is justified. Wearing a mask has become the equivalent of a Biden button or a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
On your own time, please
Ethics Alarms 
But if you are stupid enough to have not left California yet, mask up…
(note this is addressed to employees NOT in CA)
IMHO: ethics hero awarded a little premature…
When trying to stay in business in Bizarro World, say goodbye when to mean hello, eat the plates and throw away the food, and mask-up.
Good catch. I just glossed over the list of states. Du-oh. Super interesting. I wonder what In-N-Out’s thinking regarding California was? The California employees would all walk out or get the state to sue them pronto? Some lefty group would organize a boycott?
Indeed… I did a quick look at their locations map and counted roughly 70% of their stores are located in CA…
It’s almost reverse virtue signaling…
This report suggests that they can’t (though the word “illegal” isn’t used).
https://www.ocregister.com/2023/07/18/in-n-out-bans-mask-wearing-for-employees-in-some-states/amp/
This one (CA dept of public health) also suggests it as well, but doesn’t specifically mention employees (the very last question in the FAQ list).
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/Face-Coverings-QA.aspx
I read the In-n-Out position as “we really don’t want our employees to behave like walking asshat billboards, and our patrons certainly don’t. But CA law limits us.”
In fact, the In-n-out statement for CA says “if you choose to wear a mask it must be N-95 and company-provided.” (Link in OC register article)
I take that as the company putting its money where its (uncovered) mouth is: they’ll pay for masks, but they must be ones that don’t have messages emblazoned on them and at least pretend to offer medical benefits. In other words, obeying the law (allegedly for health reasons) and that’s it.
FWIW, as a CA resident and occasional In-n-out patron, I find their employees almost universally polite and devoid of the usual GenZ woke nonsense in terms of masks with messages, stupid pins and buttons, etc.
Starbucks employees on the other hand…
In-N-Out’s long lusted for expansion out of California only happened, very judiciously, ten or fifteen years ago. Historically, it’s a completely California operation. They were careful in expanding for quality control reasons.
And yes, their restaurants are all obviously tightly run pursuant to company policies. The quality is spectacular, and the employees are no nonsense and competent.
“ Masks stand for conformity, lock-step fealty to “science”,” trust in Big Brother, and virtue-signaling the “right” virtues. ”
And here I thought they merely stood for “I would not like to contract or spread the novel coronavirus.”
Good thing you’re here to tell us why people who never wore masks prior to the pandemic of said virus actually do so. People should definitely listen to you over the CDC.
This is such a fatuous comment that I’m allowing it out of moderation just to have the pleasure of replying to it.
The CDC thoroughly disgraced itself in the handling of the pandemic and the proof is irrefutable. Since you obviously haven’t followed the issue at all (Helpful Hint: do the necessary research before shooting off your metaphorical mouth here (or anywhere) with smug assertions born of bias and ignorance. In the realm of mask particularly the CDC was incoherent, inconsistent, and dishonest. First it recommended masks, then said they weren’t necessary, and finally admitted that there was no data to support them. Or maybe it was the other way around: as I said, look it up (you can do that right here: there are probably a dozen mask-related posts.) Paper and cloth masks are particularly pointless. People (frightened, ignorant, incurious, ill-informed peope)were made into phobics by constant media fear-mongering and Studies show that masking was essentially useless in preventing the spread of the Wuhan and other air-borne viruses. But so were the other silly CDC nostrums, like “not touching your face”, wiping down surfaces, and maintaining six…no 10…well some kind of of “social distance.” All of it was from a standard CDC formula that had nothing to do with the actual pandemic at all: watch any pre-Wuhan plague movie, like “Contagion.” If you really followed the CDC so respectfully, you would know that it now says there is no need for masks, but its credibility is shot, so who cares? (Well you do. Sad.) Now wearing masks is simply a demonstration of brainless virtue-signaling by sheep and sitting ducks for totalitarians: it means 1) I believe in SCIENCE! 2) I’m a progressive! 3) I love Joe! 4) I’m a sheep: if the government says jump, I ask “how high!” 5) I’m a moron! or 6) I was so terrified by the coverage of the pandemic that I wear masks alone in my car, in my house, and make my poor children wear them, which is doing them permanent harm.
You don’t come on here wielding sarcasm rather than logic and facts, jerk. Read the Comment Policies, or have someone read them to you (who isn’t wearing a mask, so you have a chance of understanding her), then, if you want to try again, follow them. If your comment is coherent and non-obnoxious, I MIGHT let it post, but it better be damn good, and based on this first attempt, I doubt you’re capable of that, or even “passable.”
In short, you’re banned, but have a one-comment probation if you dare to use it.
Mask up!
Then I suppose I will take a chance and use my one additional comment to ask for a source for your claim that the CDC admitted that there was no data to support mask-wearing. I can find no such admission. I know they no longer recommend them due to the reduction in cases (largely due to the vaccine, which anti-maskers also tend to oppose—not saying you do, just that there is overlap), but that’s not the same as saying that masks never worked, or weren’t necessary at the height of the pandemic. Thank you in advance.
P.S. Sorry for the snark, but it felt like an appropriate response to your disrespect of mask-wearers and what I saw as your unfair assumptions about their motives.
OK, probation conditions met.
I over-stated:the CDC eventually admitted that cloth mask were useless after pushing all masks.The studies are still all over the place, but now the position seems to be is that the N-95 masks provide some benefit.
The best the studies can say is that there is evidence that there was a lower incidence of the the virus where masks were worn than where they weren’t, but there are so many factors influencing that result than it is hardly conclusive.
There are many thousands of posts here, all searchable. Ethics Alarms never supported anti-vaxx sentiments regarding the pandemic, but we now know, as with masks, they were deceptively hyped and misrepresented. (I’ve had the two shots and the booster, but even my Wuhan-phobic sister (who wears a mask in the car alone, and has refused to come into my home since March 2020!) concluded that Booster 2 was pointless.
I’ll apologize to you as well for the tone of my response (that’s covered in the Comment Policies too), but it’s fun to let loose now and then, and I was being self-indulgent.
Welcome to Ethics Alarms. Keep it cordial and civil, and we”l get along fine.
Thank you.
I still can’t find the CDC coming out and saying cloth masks were useless, but you’re right that they have said they are less effective than N-95s.
I admit to occasionally wearing a mask in my car alone during the pandemic, but usually just because I forgot to take them off. I never found them particularly uncomfortable.
I personally don’t see how In-N-Out is acting ethically heroic with this move. I supported businesses (not the government) implementing mask mandates to keep their employees and customers safe. (This is also why I opposed DeSantis interfering with businesses’ right to do this). A no-mask mandate seems like more of a political statement than a mask mandate. I personally don’t see the need for mask mandates anywhere anymore, but I think it should be each person’s decision if that is how best to protect themselves, and I think the harms of masks you identify in this post are more exaggerated than their benefits. You don’t need to form a personal bond with your cashier, and if they think it’s going to keep them from getting sick from or passing their own germs to the hundreds of members of the public they interact with each day, I’m not going to say they should make that trade, and I don’t think their employer should either.
Finally, I apologize if my handle was misleading as I don’t mask up anywhere anymore (I’m as boosted as they come and I disagree with you about the effectiveness of those too), but I am still defensive of mask-wearers given how diligent I was about it from 2020-2021. Yes the research is mixed, yes we can’t trust the CDC to be right about everything, but that’s all the more reason to let people make their own decisions about whether to mask or not at this point.
Our daughter-in-law – who is a nurse – has maintained since April 2020 that N-95 masks provided marginal benefit against Wuhan. Our doctor – now retired – echoed the same, based on the medical evidence he had regarding the virus. Both always considered the other masks – paper, cloth, etc. – largely useless, though strangely enough, our doctor wore the paper masks. Maybe it’s because he was forced to and did it as a form of mockery. Anyways…
The CDC waffled on this very basic thing for a very long time, and they, of all those involved, should have known immediately which masks would or would not work. It takes little scientific power to determine the size of Wuhan molecules and compare that with the pores in paper/cloth/N-95 masks…then tell us what to use. That should have been readily-available information by the second or third press conference. Instead, it was conflicting stories and hand-wringing and “we’re not sure” and “I know we said this before, but…” and Dr. Fauci trying to mandate masks in public while not wearing them himself…all of which did little more than keep the public in a constant state of uncertainty and make them feel unsafe around anyone.
It did not have to be – and should not have been – this way. It’s one reason, among many, why the CDC is a laughingstock to lots of people.
From the Arizona Republic (Years ago, it was the Arizona Republican. Now it should be the Arizona Democrat/) report on the policy:
“This is not the first time In-N-Out has come under scrutiny since the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the burger chain’s San Fransisco location was forced to shut down temporarily after it failed to check a customer’s vaccination status before allowing them to dine in.
At the time, Arnie Wensinger, the company’s legal officer, critiqued the local San Fransisco health guidelines, saying that In-N-Out refuses to “become the vaccination police for any government.”
In-N-Out has not issued a statement on the current mask bans.”
I like Arnie’s bravado. Good for him.