A banner announcing that an In-N-Out Burger restaurant was coming to Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue sent the online world into a spin Monday morning.
Dozens of Cal students tweeted how excited they were – and then expressed disappointment when it was revealed to be a hoax.
Cal Ticket Office tweeted a picture of a banner hung up across the front of a boarded-up storefront at 2333 Telegraph around 8:12 a.m. today with the hashtag #InandOutTelegraph. Within a couple of hours, it had 243 retweets and had been favorited 205 times.
“
I’ve never been so happy,” tweeted one person.
Thinking this was too good to be true, Avinash Kunnath, a writer for the California Golden Blogs went to work. He called In-N-Out headquarters and learned that the banner was a hoax. (One person has suggested it was a senior prank.)
The popular burger chain currently has no plans to put a restaurant in Berkeley, according to California Golden Blogs. There are two In-N-Out restaurants near Berkeley, one on Hegenberger Road near the Oakland airport and one in Pinole.
The story on California Golden Blogs was shared on Facebook 398 times, and picked up by The Bold Italic who described the prank as “a really cruel hoax” — proving that, even with a joke, people wanted this to be true.
But there may be hope. Matthew Brueckmann, a junior at UC Berkeley, started an online Change.org petition asking In-N-Out to open in Berkeley. It has already garnered more than 1,200 signatures. Many of them came today after the hoax.
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