That is/was, of course, intentional.
I would note that she was barely there for two years. From a corporate perspective, that’s not enough time to significantly experience or move the culture or the practices.
Makes me wonder if some of this pushback started with disgruntled insiders.
She does wear glasses
Eh, what is Mr. Lowe’s opinion worth anyway? He owns a couple of the ugliest lamps I’ve seen. The kind that none of his kids will be fighting over.
And that explains why any change is “woke”, i guess.
That’s probably the reality, here.
I suppose the story has largely died down. But I’d LOVE to know how their numbers (other than merely the stock price) change, if they change. What percentage of all those outraged people will now show their gratitude for the company’s capitulation, by spending money at the various locations?
All I’m certain of is that there is nothing about this ridiculous controversy that will encourage new, younger customers to start patronizing the place, which was the perceived problem in the first place.
Well, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity—especially in a case like in which it is merely a branding issue (not something negative like a food safety issue).
Cracker Barrel got millions of dollars of free publicity and brand awareness out of this whole thing.
… but did they get any more customers?
In the end, that’s the metric that will matter.
I really like the new logo that Stephen King shared:
I’m trying to think of the equivalent business model that would work today. I don’t think any generic new chain would work, since restaurants had been so specialized that if you had a retro-themed cafe with 80s-90s-early 2000s swag strewn around, the menu itself would draw attention to itself because it would be either oddly specific or a mishmash of common items that weren’t all sold in any one place.
I think that specifically retro-fying chains would work. Perhaps even change the label so that you know which style of restaurant you were going into.
For the remaining sit-down stand-alone Pizza Huts, all you’d have to do is bring back the buffets and video games. Their exteriors already look nostalgically-retro to me.
And the red-and-white checkered tablecloths, and the red plastic drink cups! 
Several of us in this thread, myself included, separately went to our local Cracker Barrels to report on the kerfuffle. Hadn’t been in years, won’t go again in years, but I did give them ~$30 for breakfast one time.
At least as of now, the stock has recovered from the losses after the surprise announcement and the MAGA-masters’ orders to their MAGA-slaves to aim their daily allotment of ritual whining (that’s what RW stands for these days; the lazy cowards) at CBRL.
It will be interesting to see how sales volume in the last 4 months of this year does on a YOY basis.
The long-term history of Cracker Barrel stock is from going public in ~1985 to about 2010 (AKA ~25 years) they didn’t do beans; It just sat there. They had a pretty good run-up from 2010 to 2020 then got tanked by COVID, as did most of the rest of the industry. They did a decent job of crawling out of the COVID crash to regain roughly their prior high by late 2021 - early 2022. Then it’s been a continuous slide with occasional upward wiggles.
Over its ~40 year lifetime it’s been a shit non-performing investment except for a couple of years here and there. It still is a shit investment.
Not a restaurant (anymore) but I have been noticing a lot of Howard Johnson ads on my social media lately. From the looks of the ad It appears parent company Wyndham is trying to revamp the chain and specifically market it as a nostalgic retro experience.
Hmmm. My recollection is HoJo’s heyday was the early to mid 1960s. By 1970 they were dead / dying and feeling real dated. And in that early 60s, they were a great place to take “the family”, which really means “the kids, while the parents suffered through it.”
So their target market would be people nostalgic for eating at a HoJos as a kid in the 1950s or 1960s. IOW, somebody now at least 60 and maybe 70.
You can go broke designing your restaurant chain to chase after folks busy moving into retirement homes. CBRL already has that problem. HOJOs will fall in the same hole, just not with Kountry kitsch, but Optimistic Golden Age / Space Age 1950s-1960s kitsch.
CBRL knows that Kountry is continuing to make new Kountry folks every year up through now. There are toddlers being raised today that CBRL food is comfort food. That crowd will always be with us.
The nostalgia for the Golden / Space Age as interpreted in suburbia? Not so much. I wish them well, but I predict a HoJos revival will be a case study in Getting It Wrong at MBA schools almost from the git-go.
The food is going to be a huge part of that nostalgia, however, most 60-70 year-olds are hyper aware of the consequences of their diet. Though they may be nostalgic for the experience they are averse to indulging it at the cost of their health.
Or, they test market a few locations, it doesn’t do well, and they quietly shut it down.
I did find this article, about a funky, “Tomorrowland”-feel retro HJ Wyndham hotel, located across the street from Disneyland in Anaheim, though it’s from 2022.
Beyond that, Wyndham does currently operate some other hotel locations under the HJ name, but as far as I can tell, they look pretty much like normal modern hotels, inside and out, other than using orange in their color palette, and having a few mild retro touches (like lamps) in the furnishings in the rooms.
I’m having a hard time finding evidence of anything solid beyond than that, and not anything about an actual revival of the Howard Johnson’s restaurants.
I think that varies vastly by demographic and by region. Overweight 70-somethings shoveling in fried chicken and mashed potatoes are a stereotype of some demographics for a reason.
The more one lives among some combination of educated, urban, coastal, or rich the more health-conscious the diets at every stage of life. And vice versa. That’s an average of course; individual habits are all over the place.
Truth is, I can’t really see any difference between a CBRL menu and a HoJo’s menu, once you peel off the homespun lingo. Breakfast is breakfast. Lunch will be meatloaf, pot roast, fried or baked chicken, breaded fried fish filets, and a teeny dollop of canned green beans. Dinner is the same as lunch but larger and they’ll have a crappy piece of sirloin for the big spenders. And pork chops w applesauce.
To clarify, I was talking about the Howard Johnson hotel chain, not the restaurants. The ad I saw used the tagline “retro recharge”, although they may well be overplaying the retroness of their rooms.