On Saturday afternoon, a gunman opened fire at the In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho, a location that had been open for only eight days. Three people were killed, including one employee, and seven others were wounded. As of Sunday afternoon's police briefing, two of the victims had been treated and released, three were stable, and two remained critical. Police identified the shooter Sunday as a 24-year-old who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and is believed to have acted alone.

In-N-Out's public response this weekend has been about as clean as crisis comms gets which is why I think it's useful to dissect.

About three hours after the shooting, In-N-Out COO Denny Warnick released an initial statement acknowledging the pain and uncertainty with care: "We are heartbroken. Our prayers go out to our Customers, our Associates, and all of their families," with confirmation the company was working closely with Twin Falls police. Clean, fast, and limited to what was known. Textbook.

Then, late Saturday night, roughly ten hours after the shooting and close to midnight in Twin Falls, owner and president Lynsi Snyder posted a heartfelt statement to social media. It's not even a statement to me perhaps as much as it is a lament: "My heart is broken, my chest is heavy, my eyes burn from the tears I've shed. We lost one of our beautiful Associates tonight. She was taking care of our most important asset — our Customers, and her life was taken by a disgusting human who doesn't value the lives of others or his own."

A post written close to midnight reads more like grief than any corporate message architecture. And the raw anger in an owner's voice is unmistakably hers. Snyder, whose uncle Rich ran this company until a plane crash killed him in 1993, and whose father Guy ran it until his own death in 1999, knows this kind of loss and it shows, which is why nobody will accuse that post of being written by legal or by AI.

But look at what they got right: each leader stayed in their appropriate lane. Warnick's statement is "we" and "our," start to finish. He hits on the facts and the process, delivered exceptionally fast, exactly what was his to say as the company's voice at that moment. Snyder's on the other hand, opens with "my": my heart, my chest, my eyes. By the time she posted, the facts were already covered, so there was nothing left for her to confirm or explain and what was left was the loss itself, and an owner can speak to that as a person; a COO, speaking for the company, isn't in the same position.

We don't have any visibility into what internal comms looks like right now but I'd bet real money there's a substantial amount happening that none of us will ever see: direct calls from Snyder to the employees who were on shift Saturday, HR mobilizing grief counseling for all employees, increased security presence, etc.

There's also a real playbook in what In-N-Out has and hasn't said publicly that's worth reviewing with your team:

My thoughts are with the entire team at In-N-Out this week. And if you're taking a hard look at your own crisis or emergency response plan and need support, drop me a DM.

LemonLime, a Y Combinator-backed AI startup all of five months old, hosted a party in San Francisco with a tattoo artist and a flyer: "Instant Interview for anyone who gets a tattoo." Seven attendees actually left with tattoos and most of them apparently featured the LemonLime logo. Co-founder and CEO Jordan Zietz bragged about it on LinkedIn, writing that they'd offered "an instant interview to anyone who got a LemonLime tattoo." Interview, not job mind you. One widely quoted X post summed up the reaction: "sf startups are now branding applicants like cattle."

Tattooing yourself for a company isn't even new, and it's usually gone fine. Back in 2013, a Brooklyn real estate company gave its own agents a permanent 15 percent raise for getting their logo tattooed on themselves and about 45 said yes, so it made the news as a quirky loyalty story. Anytime Fitness has roughly 4,000 members, staff, and franchise owners walking around with its running-man logo, and Forbes wrote up a case study about it's brand loyalty.

Nobody called any of that dystopian.

Here's why I think this one hits different. In those other examples, they were people who already had something like a paycheck, or a membership and then they got even more of it. LemonLime flipped that dynamic completely. The people at this party had nothing. They were strangers hoping for fifteen minutes to make their case for a job in a terrible job market and the price of those 15 minutes was something permanent. So that's the real story: not "haha, tattoos," but a company with all the power and leverage asking the people with none of it to pay up.

It also became a great example of what a crisis looks like with no comms function. Zietz apparently agreed to a phone interview with the The San Francisco Standard and then canceled minutes beforehand by text ("slammed w things rn, sorry :(") then handled follow-ups by text. The Y Combinator comms team distanced itself through an actual spokesperson: "YC-backed companies operate independently and make their own recruiting decisions. We've seen plenty of approaches to landing a job interview, but permanent ink may be a new one." I personally love the strategic dry wit.

One more thing I noticed is that the apology didn't make the story go away, it just gave it a second life. Thursday's headlines were about a tattoo party but Friday's were about the apology and it's also where a lot of the national and global media piled on. Look who that apology was for: not the seven people with tattoos because none of them has publicly complained, and Zietz offered to cover their removal costs. The backlash was all spectators, angry on behalf of a nameless, faceless victim. You're never going to be able to effectively apologize your way out of a debt to a crowd that was never even owed anything in the first place. All they can do with an apology like that is pick it apart.

My closing advice is to always, always, always have a comms person to call before the next stunt gets dreamed up, not after it's already on X. And when you do have to apologize, size it to the injury and aim it at the injured, not the internet.