That’s “Umbridge”.
If she designed it, there would be a lot more pink in it.
Waiters would also stab customers with forks for slouching.
If only we had an Uxbridge to rid us of the Husnock MAGAs.
I don’t have anything to say about a brand I don’t know, but I am surprised about the importance given to this logo change. Even Ted Gioia (a music critic and jazz historian) writes about it!
Short synopsis of his observations: Cracker Barrel is not an old store, it was founded after Woodstock. It is owned by BlackRock. It is fake and formulaic.
Seen from abroad this whole thing looks like a distraction from something else. Let me call it the Epstein File Syndrome, even if in this case it probably has nothing to do with Epstein.
I don’t think so; the Right has always been prone to being hypersensitive and going on crazed crusades over trivia. This is just them acting like they always have.
Heck, I recall from my childhood when I was too young to keep straight the definitions of “right wing” and “left wing”, that was how I identified right-wingers: “Those people who act all crazy over harmless things that don’t affect them”. Back then it was black people being shown on TV and using people using “Ms” to refer to women, but only the content changes; not the behavior.
However, I think the same thing has always been the case for Wendy’s restaurants, whose tables used to have old-timey reprints of newspapers that were even older than anyone there could have remembered. “Old timey aesthetic” was a whole cultural thing between at least the early 80s and mid 2000s.
But now the Gay 90s are just another time period in history, even though, logically, that should have always been the case since at least the 60s. It had been coasting on nostalgic-nostalgia for decades.
So late-mid-20th century nostalgia could coast along for a few more decades. Or not. Who knows.
This seems like a really weird story. It’s just a logo. I get caring about decor, but the logo?
Of course, Lucent technologies picked up a lot of flack for their logo
Maybe that’s when i should have realized Adams was a crazy conservative.
I knew someone at Lucent back then. He said the employees were calling it The Hemorrhoid.
Voice of Homer Simpson: “That man has never eaten in a Cracker Barrel in his life!”
Its absence was offensive to people who think white people are being erased from “the culture”.
Probably. I think it’s another case in the thick file of situations where angry white conservative Americans feel like their culture is being “erased.”
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
Now I’m getting nostalgic for 1964.
I think the times they have a’changed several times since then.
Is this very different than the Colonel disappearing from KFC? It’s an antiquated dining experience, the chain fast food/supper club highbred needs to evolve.
As I mentioned above, it really isn’t the colonel that disappeared (I actually loved the series of commercials where a slew of different actors played Sanders (including Reba McEntire!)) but the “fried”.
I never cared one way or the other for the logo, mascot or decor, but when they had trouble with food quality, I quit going for several years.
(Disclosure: I work in advertising/marketing, and have had several major restaurant chains as clients, including KFC.)
Different from the standpoint that Colonel Sanders was/is a symbol of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and use of him has waxed and waned over the years since his death. He’s still part of their current logo. (And, as noted, it was in trying to move away from “Fried” where they got pushback from their loyal customers.)
In the case of Cracker Barrel, it’s clear that their loyal consumers are emotionally invested in that logo, and the general Cracker Barrel experience (the homey gift shop stuff, the antique crap-on-walls in the dining room, the heavy, starchy, fatty “Southern” menu items, etc.), as a symbol of a particular lifestyle and culture. I’m not sure how many KFC consumers are that emotionally invested in Colonel Sanders, or think of him as a symbol of the American South.
The issue that Cracker Barrel faces is that their market research has discovered that younger consumers don’t care for the things that their loyal consumers love, and they’ve been kind of ham-handed in trying to update the chain to broaden their appeal; it also suggests to me that they haven’t done a good job of testing their changes among their loyalists.
(FWIW, in industry terms, Cracker Barrel is a “casual dining restaurant” (CDR), and is part of a subset of CDRs that are typically called “family restaurants.”)
For the record, I like CB’s comfort food. I like meatloaf, mashed potatoes. I like their breakfast. I like the decor. I like the store. I even like that damnable peg game.
What I don’t like, and what made me stop going (to this day) is their homophobia and conservative-cum-MAGAt sensibilities and policies. There are too many other choices available to support anyone like that. Even on the interstate.
I’m not disputing your history or your position.
But to me it’s funny that this entire kerfuffle is the conservative-cum-MAGAt crowd claiming that first CB stopped being homophobic enough a few years ago, and now, outrage upon outrage, CB is doing other changes not conservative-cum-MAGAt enough!
Quelle horreur!
Looking back at their 2022 investor presentations (because yes, I like doing that), it seems that with the explosion in inflation they decided to pass little of the increased costs on to the consumer. In the words of the (former) CEO:
“We’ve been thoughtful with pricing, but it’s been margin-dilutive.”
And how. So, they chuck out that CEO less than a year later, and she’s replaced by a CEO who kicks off a 2-year plan to modernize, and things just get worse.
They’re doomed.
My take on it: the logo rebrand was … lametastic. Not “woke”, but weak.
I suppose they thought just turning it into “the CB” (standing for nothing, like IBM/ATT/KFC) would be too far… Whatever market research shop worked this account, failed.
I mean even POTUS’s comment sounds sensible in the face of it — basically saying “look, guys, turn it into a New Coke moment”. (All of it of course AFTER it was obvious they were going to rethink it.)
Bigger prob the chain is going to have is that now they’ll have everyone nitpicking their slightest deviation from Orthodox Crackerbarrelism even if/when it does make business sense.
And he was a real public figure, who did start the business.
In the 1970s I used to visit Wendy’s with my grandparents, born in the teens, and they very much remembered a few of those newspaper ads. I think they loved the place even more than I did, too.
I’ll never set foot in a CB again, already a resolution since they fired their gay employees in the 90s (some of us don’t forgive or forget such things). And especially now that it’s apparently a cultural hill some will die on; I’m on the other side of that hill. But damn, I so miss restaurants that serve old-people food, and I don’t mean deep-fried carb bombs, just an ordinary meat-and-three (as some Southerners say). Everything is too damn hip and trendy and spicy and fusion-y these days, and the bubbles in the cola hurt my tongue.