The less-than-great Cracker Barrel rebrand (08-22-2025--Hour3)

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Okay, So Nick fills in for me on Monday, I fill in for Brett, and then everything goes back to normal on Tuesday, as far as I know. And I went back and forth, like how do I send these out? In which way around? I said, you know what, I'm just gonna send them all out. You're gonna get you're gonna get three episodes Nick filling in for me, and you're gonna get three episodes of me filling in for Brett. And that's how I'm gonna do it. And I got approval, So that's how it's gonna go. So Monday, Nick will be filling in for me. I'm in for Brett Winterable. All right, let me give you the number again, seven oh four, five, seven oh eleven ten. That's the call in number. It's also the WBT text line driven by Liberty Buick GMC. And I'm giving you the number again because we're going to talk about the rebranding of Cracker Barrel. Spoiler. They got rid of the barrel and apparently they also got rid of the cracker from the logo. Can I say that? I think I could say that. So if you have thoughts on this, you're and you want to weigh in on, you know, the Cracker Barrel rebrand. You want to act as a participant in the focus group, You want to call in. You don't want to. You want to do it earlier. You want to get your thoughts collected and do it earlier rather than later. Okay, So the fallout this is from Fox Business. The fallout from Cracker Barrel's logo change and restaurant makeover is not over. Shares of the food chain plunged yesterday as customer backlash and investor unease drove the chain's worst losing streak in months. Shares went down twelve percent. They bumped up a little bit by the end, and so it closed down seven percent, erasing ninety million dollars in market value. Their stock is down, was down at fifty four dollars per share. So Cracker Barrel is undergoing a seven hundred million dollar transformation across its six hundred and sixty or so restaurants. Okay, And there have been several components to this. That's been it's been going on for a while. You may have heard a couple of months back they introduced alcohol to the menu for like Mimosa's, Bloody Mary's, that kind of thing, and some people were not happy about that. I don't know why. It's not like people are going to go, you know, get smashed at Cracker Barrel. I viewed that at the time as part of an effort to attract a client tele that is looking to do a you know, Saturday or Sunday brunch or lunch or something, and they want to drink a mimosa or bloody Mary with their Sunday brunch. And it's a very popular element that gets people in the door at a lot of these brunch places, so I didn't have any problem with it. Then there was the announcement of the changing of the decorps. They're doing remodels of the of the Cracker Barrel interior, and some people were not happy with that either. If you've never been to a Cracker Barrel, first off, I would advise you go to one that hasn't gone through the renovation first so you can at least, you know, have an idea of what it used to be before it gets changed. But what it generally looks like is a lot of you know, wood on a wood trim paneling and stuff sort of dark. It's got that kind of yellowish kind of wallpaper look whatever. I'm pretty sure they got the wainscotting that is on sort of the you know, the bottom half of the walls again dark wood, a lot of dark wood, and the walls are completely covered with all sorts of decorations. And the decorations are you know, old timey signs, oil cans, you know, country store type of things, because that's what Cracker Barrel evokes. It's this idea that you're going to the old general store, an old country store. And believe it or not, there are actually places that still do exist that look very similar to this, and in fact, my brother in law runs one. So it's to the east of Charlotte. So these old country stores used to be sort of a fixture in a lot of rural areas, and so that's what the whole model of this franchise was sort of built around, this nostalgia of the old country store, grandma's cooking, right, a simpler way of life. And so all of the stuff, all of the decorations, covering almost every square inch of all the walls is always it's always like vintage antique kinds of things. And the revamp, the remodel of the stores, of the restaurants, rather they ripped out a lot of the wood, they brightened up, they didn't get rid of it all there's still like some you know, wood beams on the ceiling and stuff like that. The tables and chairs are still wood, maybe a little bit lighter than they were before. New floors right obviously wooden floors, but the walls are now sort of whiteish off white. It's brighter, and they took a lot of the decorations off the walls. There's still some pieces that are on there, but it's not like it used to be. And I've never been in one of these revamped ones, but I've seen some photos. Okay, So that was the next step. People were not happy with that. I think they have also done some changes to the Country Store because when you walk in and I was chatting with cac O Day was the morning guy up in Raleigh and Greensboro on the news talkers up there, and I joined them on Fridays. We were chatting about this very thing, and he said, you know, the whole point of the Country Store is that while you're waiting for forty five minutes for your table after church on Sunday, you get to walk around and the kids occupied. They got the big checkerboards out on the patio or the front porch with the rocking chairs and stuff, and so the whole thing is designed to kind of, you know, help you while away the time, while also tapping into the nostalgia of the general store, where you know, back in the olden days, you could walk up and there'd be some guys with spatoons and they'd be playing some checkers or something, right, and so that's the whole vibe, and that's the whole point of it. And so the store remains. But he said that they've been sort of pared down. Maybe it's not as cluttered, and I think that's the sign of the times, also because I think people don't want to be all up on each other anymore. I think our personal space has probably expanded somewhat, particularly after COVID, So they probably make the aisles a little wider and that sort of thing. And then came the logo, And this is actually what I am more disgruntled about the logo change. I'm way less disgruntled about the other changes, the decor. I'm less disgruntled about the addition of alcohol to the menu. I'm gruntled, if you would say I'm gruntled about those elements. I'm disgruntled about the logo mainly because they changed the color, and they're trying to tell me that the color I'm seeing is brown and not black. They changed the lettering a little bit, they changed the outside. The logo used to be like a pinto bean, but they stopped selling those years ago as a side or whatever, and so now it's so now it just looks like a barrel turned on its side. It's just sanitized. Oh and they got rid of Uncle Herschel, the old guy sitting next to the barrel in the original cracker barrel logo. They got rid of him, and so now it just looks like this strip down, sanitized, nothing of a logo. And this is the trend. All right. So you've heard me talk about creative video for almost a year. 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More fun, more memories, more ROI check it out now at incentivetripkit dot com or call Eric at eight eight eight five three three seventy six thirty seven Extension two O seven for the details. So the Cracker Barrel rebrand, critics say the rebrand is a risky move for a company already struggling with thin margins. And this is something that I think people who are just reacting viscerally to it, and look, I get it. It's it's kind of hard to go through the last twenty years of all of the rebranding, which really amped up about fifteen years ago. Ten years ago really amped up with the wokeism and the cancelation and the everything in America is bad and you know, uh, institutional bias and depression and all of the Marxist clap trap. Right, it's kind of difficult for people who are well, I mean, I don't want to play the race card here, but as a white folk, I can say this. I can speak with authority on this. I am a white dude, and a lot of white dudes have been feeling like they've been getting attacked in the culture, an awful lot. They have felt that, and feelings are neither right nor wrong. It's how you act on those feelings, Okay. And by the way, these feelings are somewhat justifiable in the fact that, oh, I don't know, the Democrats are right now hemorrhaging white dudes and they're actually trying to figure out how to get a bunch of white men to start voting for them again. Right, So this is it's not completely out of left field. Well, it is out of left field, but it's not out it's just it is justifiable, Okay. So it's hard to see this as something unrelated to the bud Light camp where they put Dylan mulvaney on it, and the pr director there goes on a podcast and starts saying, we want to ditch the old frat brow image, and these the customers that we've traditionally appealed to. And then the guys that have been traditionally drinking your beer decide, well, if you don't want us as customers, then we won't be your customers. Message received, Right, New Coke, bud Light. There are a bunch of other examples, right, Thomas Sorry. Richard Stern, the director of the Thomas A. Row Institute for Economic Policy at the Heritage Foundation, said it's another example of how abandoning your brand and loyal customers is not the way to grow a business. He added that Cracker Barrel has consistently posted weak profit margins around one and a half percent, which is about a third of what you would expect from a successful restaurant, so it should be somewhere around four and a half percent. Stern argued that by chasing a new market, the restaurant chain has strayed from its roots. He said their brand was partially the old fashioned feel of an American general store, hearkening to the Pioneer West and the growth of rural highways. And I agree with that. But here's the problem. If the restaurant is only clearing one and a half percent margins, it needs to be resuscitated, right, It needs to be refreshed. But the core of what makes Cracker Barrel Cracker Barrel is that nostalgic feel. It's the throwback, right, So how do you do a refresh on a moment that's sort of frozen in time. That's a challenge. And it does not appear that the the CEO and the people that are leading the rebrand here, I don't know if they're able to pull this off. Now. I have seen some of the reporting about this CEO, this Julie fels Meissino, who has been leading the charge, and people are like, oh, she's implemented DEI stuff behind the scenes, like at the corporate level and pushing it down to the restaurants through the franchises and stuff. Not in support of all of that, not in support of all of the you know, the gay pride stuff that they've been pushing out to the franchises, all of it. So I get it right again, like this stuff has so infiltrated corporate America, and she in corporate America is one of the proponents of doing so. However, she does have a bit of a track record also of turning around struggling restaurants, notably Taco Bell. During her tenure from twenty eighteen through June of twenty three, she served as president of Taco Bell North America, later as president of Taco Bell International. She drove growth eight consecutive quarters of positive same store sales growth. She championed an innovative menu with items like the Nacho Fries, which became their best selling new product approved variations like the Steak Rattlesnake Fries and Reaper Ranch Fries. She prioritized a quote frictionless customer experience through initiatives like in restaurant kiosks, delivery partnerships with Grubhub. She expanded Taco Bell to over one thousand restaurants across thirty two countries in Brazil and Spain and India. I mean, if you can open a Taco Bell in Spain. So she does have some success in doing this stuff, but that's a Taco bells a different kind of a restaurant, right than cracker Barrel. There was a piece from back in May when they did their earnings call it's over at Northeastern University's college website. Their publication Cracker Barrel evokes nostalgia, timelessness, and drustic charm. And it's time for a change. As the CEO says, the brand is no longer relevant. So what do you do if people that are seeking that nostalgia? What do you do when they are dying off? And you now have younger people coming up that don't have any recollection or any They have no personal experience with this kind of a country store vibe. It's foreign to them. And so the stuff that they're seeing all over, the clutter and all of the decorations and all this stuff, it doesn't evoke any nostalgia for them because they have no touchstone for that. Right Their parents or grandparents probably like demoed the house and built a McMansion and painted everything agreeable gray, you know, decluttered, very modern kind of stuff like what like these Like this is a younger generation coming up, and this is the stuff that maybe they have more of a connection to. Like I'm gen X. I know what the vibe is at Cracker Barrel, but I don't know if the younger kids do unless they've been to Cracker Barrel and like that's it. So they quote a guy Northeastern University marketing expert Bruce Clark, who says it's going to be difficult. This rebrand is going to take years. It's going to be difficult. He said, the cardinal rule of rebrand is you want to refresh, not replace. And I think this is where Cracker Barrel is getting it wrong. Now that we are seeing the things that they are doing, it's moving past refresh and it's now into replace. They took Uncle Herschel off the logo, right, They removed the barrel off of the Cracker Barrel logo. They removed the words old country store off the logo and now it just says cracker Barrel. And I don't think that is a refresh. I think that is a replace. And I think that's why people are feeling like, you know, kind of great replacement theory stuff going on here, like oh, it's a white dude, got to get him off the logo now. Also, I would point out this is there's been this trend going where they've been removing people, just images of individuals off of all sorts of logos for all sorts of woke reasons. Remember Uncle Ben's rice aunt Jemima Sirah right, so he's just another casualty in this ongoing battle. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. 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Call or text eight two eight three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all there is to offer at Cabins of Aashville dot com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Let me go over to the text line, Oh my goodness, David says about the Cracker Barrel rebrand. Uh yeah, from rustic to contemporary, right, And that is I think accurate. That's what they're trying to do, trying to turn it from a rustic kind of a vibe to a contemporary kind of a vibe. And they're trying to get younger people into the restaurant. Your competing with places like First Watch, right, a lot of these uh these breakfast chain types of places where the millennials and the gen zs and the the gen y's, and the I don't call them out, the gen A's, I don't call them alpha like where they're where these younger people are wanting to go. So they're trying to make them brighter and cleaner, more contemporary kind of a thing. But they're stripping away the character. It's like architecture, you know. You you don't see buildings with ornate, intricate stuff on the outsides anymore, right, Like we abandoned the Art Deco movement, which was a quintessentially American form of architecture. We don't do that anymore. Now we build these, you know, boxes that just look like a box, and they don't They don't evoke anything in the human spirit due to its beauty or lack thereof. Let me see here. This is from I don't know Anonymous, who says a great show as always, there's a solution to the Cracker Barrel dilemma that we need to pass along to their marketing team. They simply need to create a commercial with Sidney Sweeney adorned in cracker barrel attire. That's a problem solved. There, You go see that. We're all about solutions here. Steven Indian Trail Pete Cracker Barrel CEO. Julia Messino is the new Alissa Heinerschneid, the former bud Light executive. Does Cracker Barrel serve bud Light? I don't know, I think so, And yes, this is what it's being equated to, this rebrand effort. And I'm just looking now at the bo Snerdley, former producer for Rush Limbaugh. He tweeted out, Cracker Barrel takes a ninety four million dollar hit after the most colossal rebrand mistake in history. So okay, I don't know it's I don't know if it's a rebrand. It does feel like a replace, you know. And that's the thing. You better have done enough market research to know that you're going to be able to replace your clientele, your customer base with some other customer base that you're not attracting. Right now, before you just discard all of the old customers, right, did you do a market analysis to know that this rebrand is going to attract more people that are not coming. Regarding the Cracker Barrel rebrand Q the Marlon Brando godfather meme, look what they did to my boy not Uncle Herschel. No, yes, he has been removed from the logo. And look I understand this as well from a like a graphic art perspective, I could make the case for why you would do this, which is you have an intricate, hand drawn kind of image, and when you're trying to apply that to various things, it becomes sometimes difficult. If you're zooming in, you're zooming out, you're resizing the graphics. Sometimes it can get distorted. And these are things that in the marketing departments and you know, consulting rooms, that they're that they're thinking about. But you've stripped the logo of any uniqueness. It now looks like every I mean, all the taco bells now look like all the new McDonald's, which look like all the new Burger kings. They all look the same the old all the buildings look the same, these little square boxes, right, And obviously that's there's some intentionality going on there. You can't all have just arrived at the very same kind of architectural design. This is from Kevin. I heard they're doing some Dylan mulvany commemorative cracker barrel cups as well. That's I don't think that's true, Scott says. Cracker barrel never recovered from the pandemic. The prices went way up and the portions went down. The service also went out the window. That's very possible too. This kind of a restaurant model has been hit very hard. You've heard about the red lobster problems, right, the trouble they've got olive garden. Right. A lot of these restaurants are still struggling. And here's an anonymous Texter. My dad, a black man, felt bad for years. You guys, only about ten years. Man up. The world will be more diverse. That's not changing. Tough. Guys will succeed regardless. What do you mean, man, what are you talking about? This company is going to maybe go out of business because people feel like they have been targeted for genetic replacement. Because of that kind of talk, you are advocating for the quote replacement theory. And I would just warn you, as I did yesterday or the day before, I forget, when you start playing this racial identitarian game, you cannot be surprised when your opponents in that game start doing the very same thing back to you. This is not a recipe for a unified, diverse society. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events, and I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources. Why, well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app, and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. Here's a little segment we do every Friday for the final segment of the program with Brett winter Bowl three to six host here on WBT and Brett Winterble pregaming with Brett how Art thou sir. Great, everything is great, Everything's a going right, According. To plan good. Okay, well, so not like Cracker Barrel's rebrand. You know what, why don't they sell brands? What do you mean sell brands? Why don't they take this moment and have those iron brands that you can get done and just everyone can have one in their house. What would the could you get the brand caught? You're saying, like Cracker Barrel. Brand g one where he's sitting there, you know, slinging. That's gonna have to be a very big brand because the the level of detail on Uncle Herschel is that's what we need. It's intricate. Well, you got to do it if you if you're supporting them, you should support them in that way. Because there's two persons. There's two reasons why you would want that. Number one, want the brand, the brand, Okay, you want the brand just in case you just got to use a brand for some particular reason. I don't know why, how or where. Don't ask me, it's not my not my job. The other one is. There isn't the Cracker Barrel fraternity and the does the brand? That is true, right? I also think it would be great for home defense. I see, That's why I say it's so big. You have to make it so big to maintain the level of detail. I don't think you're going to be able to lift it in order to wield it in self defense. Are you trying to tell me it's unwieldy? I am Wow, I think it would be so, because I mean think about you got the you gotta post, right, Yeah, And the length of that post that's right, is going to be in proportion to the size of the branding surface. Yes, And if that thing is, like, I don't know, four feet wide, it's. Not gonna ben can't be four feet wide. It could not be for it's gonna be sort of small. Uncle Herschel has a plaid shirt and you can see the plant. We'll just use. We can do it, we can we can make this happen. This is like the neon signs that they make where you can see the connections between the letters. You know. Oh, I hate that. I do too. It's very fake, right. Because it all has to be connected in one thing, so. You're gonna have to connect it. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I'm gonna make one. You could make it out of very thin metal maybe, and then you could shrink it down, But then I think you got to abandon all right, all right, I fixed it. I got it. We're not going to use a not a branding iron iron, not a branding iron. We're gonna sell Christmas cookie elements that make up what's his name, mister Shire? But what's his name? The guy from the from the company. What is his name? The guy from the company, the company guy that you were just telling me. The guy who talks to the barrel all day? Oh, he sits next to the barrel. What doesn't talk to the barrel? What is his name? Uncle Herschel, Herschel, Herschel really, yeah, like Herschel Walker like that? Yeah, Uncle Hirsh Is it him? I don't know. Apparently they say they're not going to be removing him from like they took him off the logo, but they're not going to be removing him from the story. Let me tell you they get if they get rid of him. Chris van Hollins got to bring him back. Well, who is he trying to bring back? Was that the Auntemima or Uncle Ben neither landa Lake's. No, he was. He brought Marilyn Man back. Oh that's right. If they're going to get rid of Uncle Herschel. Yeah, you know what I want. I want them to go send Van Holland down over there to that lady and and bring him back. Bring him back, get him a margarita. He was successful at bringing back. So have you been to you ever been to a cracker barrel? I should ask first, uh, because you're you are a recent recent but you've been here several years. But have you had the opportunity to sample the whares? Shall we say? Yes? Yes, I'm passingly familiar with Yeah, so yes. Yeah, I mean I've probably been to a cracker barrel a dozen times really in my life. Yeah, but I've been down here thirty years, so I have understood why they've done certain changes. Sure, but it's this logo. It's not even that they took Uncle Herschel off the logo. My beef is that the logo just looks like any other logo. It's just awful. It's terrible, it's just nothing. It's sad. Yeah, it just might as well just say something like food here. Yeah, I got I got audio from Uncle Herschel earlier today. You got audio from am I? Am I lying? Am I lying? Like the og the original Uncle herschel. No, the guy who's been put out of a job. I do I have that? All right? You want to, I can't hear it now because we're about to celebrate the weekend here. You're gonna have to listen to Brett's show. All right. That'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron and my atreon page or go to thepetecalanarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.