The Recent Cracker Barrel Rebranding Met with Backlash
At the end of last week, Cracker Barrel’s corporate leadership announced that they are changing the iconic logo and modernizing their restaurants. This is not earth-shattering news, but that is not the case with social media users who patronized the restaurant in the past.
The outrage translated into a $100 million loss in stock value. One hundred million dollars in value is earth-shattering for any company, and the reasons behind the loss are reminiscent of the Bud Light fiasco.
The old logo portrayed a down-home, rural establishment with plenty of tradition and the promise of home cooking. On the left, “Cracker Barrel” was in brown letters encased in an orange oval that looked like a pumpkin. Underneath, the bold letters were the phrase “Old Country Store.”
What really caught the customer’s eye, hoping to sell the theme of country cooking, is the male white figure wearing overalls sitting and leaning on a depiction of a real cracker barrel. Only rural people wear overalls daily. Far from being just an ordinary guy, this fellow was fondly called Uncle Herschel. The name speaks for itself.
According to Cracker Barrel’s CEO, Julie Felss Mancino, restaurant owners nationwide were clamoring to modernize their facilities. So, the corporation got to work and created a new logo. The design looks like that of a Marxist Chinese artist. The old logo’s previous symbolism has been stripped to the bare bones—no more Uncle Herschel, no country store, and no pumpkin. It has successfully erased years of tradition and any reference to southern rural America, which was historically more conservative and embraced family and country values. THAT’S THE POINT.
What is not apparent to people is that one of Marxism’s hallmarks is destroying tradition and replacing it with minimalistic and nebulous messaging. From 1966 to 1976, Mao Zedong initiated the Cultural Revolution to rid China of bourgeois” infiltrators.” Part of the attack on Chinese culture was the destruction of historical relics, ancient architecture, artwork, and other artifacts representing what revolutionaries thought was from China’s feudal past. All of the precious history and tradition were either destroyed or defaced.
No one is suggesting the elite of Cracker Barrel are in a league with the Chinese Communist Party and their destruction of a whole culture. But what is meant is deep within the leftist psyche is the need to destroy culture and reshape it in their own image. This is precisely what the war on woke is about: one side honors history and tradition, and the other wants to burn it down or substantially transform it into something quite different. This is what happened to some degree with the Cracker Barrel redo.
Like Bud Light, Disney, and Target, who went woke, the public outcry has cost these corporations a lot of money and a customer base. The same has happened with Cracker Barrel. Of all the companies you would guess would go woke, Cracker Barrel probably wouldn’t be one of them. Cracker Barrel tried to diffuse the public outrage by issuing a lame statement that no one is buying.
When we say the war on woke is not over, the latest is proof of that. Thanks to the public and social media, Cracker Barrel has been notified that woke is no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, many corporations have boards of directors as goofy as Cracker Barrel’s. Until those leftists are ferreted out of boardrooms and CEO positions, other companies will follow a similar path.
The war on woke is not over yet.