The data doesn't lie: Texans like In-N-Out better than Whataburger

Which fast food burger chain is better: Whataburger or In-N-Out?

The debate rages. Texans loudly proclaim their allegiance to Whataburger. Californians quickly tell you that In-N-Out is the best. Other states might feel caught in the middle.

So just for fun, I devised an objective test.

Let's forget polls run by food magazines that are more about state pride than real quality. I compared Whataburger and In-N-Out head-to-head in by using Yelp reviews for comparable locations in Texas.

That's right, I gave Whataburger a huge home field advantage.

Home field advantage didn't matter. In-N-Out won by a landslide. It was absolute, total domination. Frankly, I was surprised that it wasn’t even close.

Before you send me an angry email, keep in mind this wasn't my subjective opinion. People in Texas consistently rate In-N-Out much higher than Whataburger on Yelp.

About the Whataburger vs. In-N-Out test

In-N-Out Burger is a relative newcomer to Texas. The fast food hamburger chain was founded in Southern California in 1948 by Harry Snyder. It wasn't until 2011 that In-N-Out opened it's first Texas location.

Today, there are 40 In-N-Out locations in Texas.

Whataburger, by contrast, has Texas roots. Harmon Dobson opened the first location in Corpus Cristi, Texas in 1950. There are 697 Whataburger locations in Texas today.

To make the test fair, I mapped out each In-N-Out location in Texas, identified the closest Whataburger, and then compared the Yelp reviews for the two locations.

This was fairly easy to do. In some cases, there’s a Whataburger in the same parking lot as an In-N-Out. In most other cases, the nearest Whataburger is just down the street.

Consumers craving a fast food burger in these markets could easily choose between the two chains. The Yelp reviews tell us which they like better.

How In-N-Out beat Whataburger in a landslide

The test used data from Yelp reviews to evaluate three key categories:

1. Overall rating

2. Enthusiasm (total number of reviews)

3. Consistency

In-N-Out won all three tests handily.

Overall Rating

I compared the Yelp reviews for each of the 40 In-N-Out locations in Texas to the nearest Whataburger. All 40 In-N-Out locations had a higher Yelp rating than it's closest Whataburger competitor.

Yep. In-N-Out pulled off a clean sweep of Whataburger in Texas.

There was a wide gap in average rating between the two chains when you compare In-N-Out with nearby Whataburger locations:

Enthusiasm

I used the total number of reviews for each location as a proxy for customer enthusiasm. The higher the number of reviews (regardless of rating), the more enthusiastic the customer the base.

It's not a perfect metric. For instance, it doesn't control for the length of time a location has been open. Since Whataburger has a 61 year head start on In-N-Out (1950 vs. 2011), Whataburger would seem to have the advantage here.

It didn't matter. A whopping 37 out of 40 In-N-Out locations had more Yelp reviews than the nearest Whataburger.

In-N-Out averaged more than twice as many Yelp reviews per location:

Consistency

This last measure is about the entire chain, rather than just one location. The hallmark of a great business is you can rely upon a consistently good experience no matter where you go.

This is where In-N-Out really crushed it.

Every In-N-Out in Texas enjoys either a 3.5 or 4.0 average Yelp rating. Meanwhile, the nearest Whataburger locations ranged from 1.5 to 3.0.

Why are Whataburger's reviews worse than In-N-Out?

A lot goes into a Yelp review. Food taste and quality are important factors, but those aren’t the only things that customers care about.

Negative reviews for both chains tend to focus on three issues:

1. Wait time

2. Order accuracy

3. Friendliness

Wait time is particularly interesting.

Both Whataburger and In-N-Out prepare your meal to order, so the wait will always be longer than if you go to a chain that sells pre-made burgers stored under a heat lamp.

Strangely, the average wait at an In-N-Out is typically much longer because In-N-Out is usually a lot more crowded. (At least according to my anecdotal observations and personal experience as a fan of both chains.)

So why does Whataburger get dinged more than In-N-Out?

Because wait time is just as much about perception as it is actual elapsed time. Given the right set of circumstances, wait time can feel dramatically longer.

Negative Whataburger reviews that mentioned wait time often called out that the restaurant didn't seem very crowded. This caused customers to wonder why they were waiting so long.

In-N-Out customers, on the other hand, can see the long line of customers in front of them. They expect to wait because the chain is so popular.

Part of Whataburger's challenge is consistency. Wait time, accuracy, and even friendliness seem to be highly variable at locations with low Yelp ratings.

One explanation might be that Whataburger is no longer a family-owned company like In-N-Out. It’s not even a Texas company anymore. In 2019, the company was purchased by BDT Capital Partners, a company based in Chicago.

Meanwhile, In-N-Out is built on consistency. I profiled the company in my book, Getting Service Right, and found it has stayed focused on its core mission of offering quality, cleanliness, and courtesy throughout its entire history. It's still family run, doesn't franchise, and exclusive sells burgers, fries, and drinks.

Why Having Fewer Options Leads to Better Service

Sheena Iyenger and Mark Lepper set up an experiment in 2000. They wanted to see how adding more choices affected consumer behavior.

Their experiment was conducted in an upscale grocery store called Draeger's Supermarket in Menlo Park, California. The store was known for having a large assortment of products such as 250 varieties of mustard.

Iyenger and Lepper experimented with an in-store sampling booth with two variations. One variation offered 6 different varieties of jam. The other offered 24.

The display with 24 varieties of jam attracted more customers with 60 percent of passers-by stopping at the display compared to only 40 percent of people stopping at the display with just 6 varieties.

Surprisingly, people who encountered the display with just 6 varieties of jam were five times more likely to make a purchase than people who encountered 24 varieties.

It turns out that offering fewer choices can be good for business. Here's how. 

Fewer Options = More Sales

A recent furniture shopping trip revealed how easy or complex a buying decision can be. 

My wife and I found two furniture stores that offered sofas we liked. One was Living Spaces. They really did service the right way and we ended up buying a sofa and a love seat from them. (A recent blog post described other ways that Living Spaces does service right.)

One of the biggest differentiators between the two stores was the number of options available.

Living Spaces had a much larger selection of sofas. However, their helpful salesperson narrowed it down to just a few choices once we described what we were looking for. Each choice had a simple one-page sales sheet that visually depicted the various size and configuration options. Making a choice was easy.

The other furniture store overwhelmed us with choices. One sofa that looked promising had a complex code book full of possible configurations. Even the salesperson struggled to decipher it all. There were six different options for the arms alone. It was too much.

Like the jam experiment, limiting options helps Living Spaces sell more.

Fewer Options = Lower Costs

Costco is famous for keeping its costs low and passing on those savings to its members. One of the ways it does this is by offering fewer options than its competitors.

The graph below shows the approximate number of individual items sold at Costo and its two major rivals, Sam's Club and BJ's.

Data Source: iStockAnalyst

Notice that Costco has 24 percent fewer items than Sam's and 46 percent fewer items than BJ's. Having fewer items allows Costco to rely on fewer employees to maintain inventory in it's stores. It also enables the chain to negotiate better deals from its vendors and offer lower prices to its customers.

Fewer choices haven't hurt Costco's service. The chain leads the American Customer Satisfaction Index for specialty retailers with an 84 percent rating.

Fewer Options = Better Operations

Last year, I wrote a post called Why McDonald's Customer Service Sucks in Three Charts. 

One of those charts depicted the proliferation of menu items at the chain. The menu had grown 365 percent since 1980.

Data Source: Fortune

The staggering number of menu items causes a lot of operational problems as employees struggle to keep up with so many options. One study found that 12 percent of McDonald's drive-through orders contained an error.

Compare this to fast food champ In-N-Out. They're consistently rated extremely high in both customer service and food quality. One big difference? The In-N-Out menu contains just six items.

Solutions

One of my favorite customer service books is Uncommon Service. It describes the need for trade-offs. A business can only be really, really good at something if it's willing to be not so good at a few other things.

This book provides a great lesson in simplicity.

If you want to delight your customers, offer great prices, and make your operations run like a well-oiled machine, you need to sacrifice selection. 

Your customers, and your employees, will appreciate it in the long run.

How In-N-Out Almost Became McDonald's

Note: The following is an excerpt from Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It.

I go to In-N-Out Burger a lot.

The law of averages suggests I should have had a bad experience at least once by now. Some visits have been better than others, but I’ve never had a bad experience. Not one.

I’m not alone in my admiration of In-N-Out. They’re consistently ranked among the top fast food chains in customer satisfaction. The chain only has locations in a handful of states, but people all over the country and even outside the United States have become fans, with some devoted followers even planning a business trip or vacation itinerary around a visit to an In-N-Out. 

What’s the secret to In-N-Out’s success? It may be easier to understand if you compare them to a similar restaurant that struggles with customer service: McDonald's. 

The two have a lot in common. While McDonald's has a more diverse menu, both are fundamentally fast-food burger joints. Both were founded in Southern California in 1948. Many fast-food service concepts in use today originated at either In-N-Out or McDonald's. The two companies even use the same three words as a foundation of their operating principles: quality, service, and cleanliness.

So why is the customer service experience at these two restaurants so different? In a word, culture. Culture defines everything these organizations do when it comes to customer service. 

In-N-Out founder Harry Snyder made sure the principles of “Quality, Cleanliness, and Service” were more than just platitudes. He instilled them in everything the company did – and these principles are still present in everything In-N-Out does today. Their food is fresh, not frozen. Their stores are clean, even during busy times. Their employees are friendly and well-trained. In-N-Out has maintained their remarkable consistency by steadfastly refusing to franchise their stores and resisting the urge to expand too quickly.

Culture also shapes many of their business practices, such as hiring employees. In-N-Out’s management believes a high-caliber employee is necessary to provide the service and quality they know their customers expect. They offer better wages and working conditions than their competitors which contributes to one of the lowest employee turnover rates in the fast food industry.

When Ray Kroc purchased the McDonald's concept from the McDonald brothers, he focused on rapidly expanding the business. The words quality, service, and cleanliness were clearly less important than a growth strategy based on volume, cost control, and franchising. For example, their frozen burger patties are cooked in approximately 42 seconds using a special clam-shell grill that cooks both sides of the patty at the same time. This is a remarkably fast and inexpensive way to cook burgers, but it may also be why McDonald's finished last in the 2010 Consumer Reports fast food burger rankings. (Yes, In-N-Out was rated #1.) 

While franchising allowed McDonald's to grow into a global giant, it also made it difficult for the company to control the quality of service delivered at its restaurants. Today, approximately 80 percent of their restaurants are run by franchisees and only 20 percent are run are by McDonald's, Which means the service customers receive from most of its establishments is determined by the management skills and customer service philosophy of an independent franchise owner rather than by the McDonald's organization. 

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Culture isn’t exclusively defined by an entire organization. Even at McDonald's, stores with managers who are good at engaging employees and motivating them to deliver outstanding service typically bring in 10 percent more revenue per year than the average.

Learning Point:

Values alone don’t define your culture. It’s what you do that counts. For another terrific example, read how Phone.com is operationalizing their values to turn them into action.

Passionate Customers

My recent posts about Starbucks gave me an opportunity to research what other people were saying. Not surprisingly, a lot of people are very passionate about what Starbucks is up to. A few bloggers have even started some very interesting conversations, such as Becky Carroll (Customers Rock!) and Jay Ehret (The Marketing Spot). Carroll and Ehret are collaborating on what they call "The Starbucks Project" to help "Howard get it right." (Howard Schultz is the CEO of Starbucks.)

This got me thinking - how nice would it be if we all had customers who were so passionate about our products and services they went to great lengths to give us feedback and help us get it right.

• I love Jimmy Dean sausage, but this guy takes it to the next level. Listen to his complaint call (careful, his language is a bit 'colorful').
• Fanpop.com is a fan club website with pages for many companies (including In-n-Out!).
• Fans, regular customers, and employees can all interact at Get Satisfaction. Check out the examples on the Timbuk2 page.
• Burger King even tried to create this sort of 'consumer enthusiasm' with their Whopper Freakout campaign.

What can we do about it?

Creating a passionate, self-motivated base of fanatical customers is both an art and a science. This could be a big discussion, but here are my top 3 strategies.

Strategy #1: Be consistent. I love In-N-Out and they rekindle that romance every time I visit, no matter which store I go to. Their service is always enthusasiatic and friendly and the product is always good. Very few companies can achieve this level of consistency.

Strategy #2: Resolve problems like a hero. This is the classic 'hero' opportunity. A customer experiences a problem and someone becomes a hero by swooping in to save the day. Kearny Mesa Acura in San Diego does a great job here. I've occasionally experienced a problem in the service department, but they've always made it right and then some.

Strategy #3: Overdeliver. The best strategy is to give customers more than they expect. The Prado Restaurant in San Diego is outstanding in this aspect. I can distinctly remember many times I've been there because they almost always incorporate an unexpected surprise. The ambience and food are both outstanding, but the service even surpasses both.