On the menu today: Another big, well-known American corporation that had been doing just fine suddenly embraces a sweeping redesign aimed at placating modern sensibilities. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson’s latest guest contends that the United States fought on the wrong side in World War II, and California Governor Gavin Newsom puts his presidential ambitions above the best interests of his state.
Cracker Barrel’s New Logo Continues the Trend of Corporate Genericism
The good news is that the newly redesigned Cracker Barrel logo doesn’t really qualify as “woke.” The bad news is that it is painfully generic and boring, and you can’t begrudge anybody who liked the restaurant chain from recoiling at a redesign that removes the sitting grandfatherly figure and leaves Generic Country Font Number Seven atop some half-melted Velveeta.
I might not be that far off with the Velveeta metaphor. The company’s press release stated the following:
“Its more popular menu offerings like farm fresh scrambled eggs and buttermilk biscuits even serve as inspiration behind the hues of a refreshed color palette featured in the new campaign. Anchored in Cracker Barrel’s signature gold and brown tones, the updated visuals will appear across menus and marketing collateral, including the fifth evolution of the brand’s logo, which is now rooted even more closely to the iconic barrel shape and word mark that started it all.”
This comes after the chain redesigned its interiors to give them a “brighter, more contemporary look,” which some fans of the restaurant didn’t welcome at all. The chain’s interiors were well known for dark woods and the walls being covered in near-antique signs and tchotchkes, designed to emulate a combination of your grandmother’s kitchen and the back of your grandfather’s garage. The new look is indeed lighter and brighter; one person who liked it said, “It’s like Joanna Gaines [of HGTV] was here.” Of course, this makes the interior of a Cracker Barrel look a lot more like most other restaurants out there.
You might be asking, “Who cares?” But this was a big enough deal to Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino to announce the changes on ABC’s Good Morning America Tuesday.
And a chunk of the coverage attempted to shoehorn politics into the reaction. The Daily Beast declared, “MAGA Loses It Over New Cracker Barrel Logo.”
(The Daily Beast deserves its reputation for being notoriously inaccurate and misleading; they’re fresh off writing headlines suggesting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is “slaughter[ing]” Florida veterans for no good reason, and only belatedly acknowledging that this is in reference to the death sentence for a serial killer who raped and murdered at least ten women in Tampa Bay in 1984.)
Note that this isn’t really a struggling brand. Cracker Barrel is currently the 34th biggest restaurant chain in the United States, bigger than the Cheesecake Factory, Five Guys, and Waffle House. Founded in 1969, the chain’s early locations were positioned near interstate highway exits in the South and Midwest, but have since expanded to 657 locations in 572 cities across 43 states and territories. In June, the restaurant chain announced its “fourth consecutive quarter of positive comparable store restaurant sales growth.”
People are resistant to change in general, but it is understandable that they’re particularly resistant to change in a restaurant chain whose appeal has always included an element of nostalgia. And perhaps there is an ideological or sensibility aspect to the reactions; the people who are most inclined to dislike sudden drastic changes are the ones inclined to try to conserve things they like.
Cracker Barrel isn’t supposed to be “modernized,” and it isn’t supposed to be hip or cool or edgy. The bland new logo — which looks like it could be an app on your phone — imitates lots of other corporate logos by shifting toward abstract minimalism. (Mr. Pringle doesn’t even have an oval for a face anymore, he’s just some floating disembodied eyes, eyebrows, and a mustache, a sort of Eldritch Lovecraftian horror staring at you unnervingly as you eat your chips.) At least Cracker Barrel kept capital letters. From Adidas to Amazon, from Citibank to Facebook to Hulu, every corporate logo these days looks like it was designed by a panel consisting of E. E. Cummings and Bell Hooks.*
A few online commentators compared the Cracker Barrel rebrand to the mess at Bud Light that started back in 2023. In that case, it was much easier to see a political or ideological angle, particularly when Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, said in an interview that she felt a “need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand,” and that “Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Anson Frericks worked at Anheuser-Busch InBev for a decade, finishing his time at the company as president of sales and distribution. In February, Frericks published a book, and his insider account suggested that the beer brand’s debacle was exactly what the skeptical outsiders suspected from the start: Bud Light’s image was steadily reshaped by group of politically progressive advertising minds who operated in an urban bubble and did not understand their existing customer base on any level.
Is that what’s happening at Cracker Barrel?
Masino was named president and CEO of Cracker Barrel in July 2023, so she’s been in that role for a bit more than two years. She was previously the president of Taco Bell international from 2020 to 2023, and before that, the president of the taco chain’s North American operations. Prior to that, she’d served as corporate president at toymaker Mattel, Sprinkles Cupcakes, and other roles at Starbucks.
We’ve seen this happen a lot at a lot of brands: The appetite to attract new customers spurs the company to change the product, but in the process, the changes drive away the existing customers who liked the product just the way it was.
Cracker Barrel had a very clear identity. As Mary Katharine Ham put it, “This seems almost like intentional sabotage. No one wants a minimalist Cracker Barrel. We want Hoarders: Southern Grandma Edition. If it doesn’t look like Meemaw and Peepaw’s, with the only concession to modernity is removing ashtrays, I’m out.” I also liked the comment, “The point of going to Cracker Barrel is like you’re going to Grandma’s. Now it’s like you’re going to her nursing home.”
A new CEO has arrived and is attempting to modernize the look of the brand. Now, it doesn’t look all that different from First Watch.
*At National Review, we capitalize E. E. Cummings and Bell Hooks; none of this choose-your-own-capitalization stuff here.
Tonight, on Tucker, ‘We Should Have Sided with Hitler’
Earlier this summer, National Review ran a lengthy and detailed essay written by James Kirchick about Tucker Carlson’s dark turn and detailing the former Fox News Channel prime-time host’s increasing obsession about the Jews. You didn’t have to look too far to find Carlson fans who insisted it was a “smear article.”
Hey, let’s check in with Carlson and his latest guest, Dave Collum, a professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University:
Collum: Well, it turns out, I think the story we got about World War II is all wrong, actually.
Carlson: I think that’s right.
Collum: And then I read about FDR, and FDR’s right-hand man was a Soviet spy.
Carlson: Certainly was.
Collum: Right? And therefore —
Carlson: Confirmed, confirmed.
Collum: We should have been — one can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. Patton said that. So, and maybe there wouldn’t have been a Holocaust, right?
Carlson is nodding along as his guest contends the United States should have joined the side of Nazi Germany in World War II, and that by doing this, the United States somehow would have prevented the Holocaust.
By the way, how can Stalin be so bad that we should have allied with Hitler, but at the same time, Carlson’s got a warm-and-fuzzy view of Vladimir Putin?
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the state of California faces a plethora of serious and worsening problems. The best thing for the state’s residents would be for its current governor, Gavin Newsom, to have the best possible working relationship with President Trump and the White House; the Golden State needs all the help it can get from the federal government. As we saw from the European leaders at the White House summit earlier this week, by now, everyone knows how to play the game with Trump: Focus on the common interests, sing his praises to the heavens, flatter his ego, and be effusive in your appreciation.
But Newsom wants to run for president in 2028, and to win the Democratic nomination, he needs to furiously and relentlessly demonize Trump in every possible way. The governor needs to pose as Trump’s most vociferous and critic — which, of course, is destined to antagonize Trump and make the president minimally inclined to help the state any more than he must.
The interests of the people of California are no longer aligned with the interests of Newsom’s political ambitions. Guess which one is going to win?