Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. A programming note, Monday, you will get six
podcasts from me. Usually you get three a day, one
for each hour, but Monday you're gonna get six. Now.
The first three will be during my normal noon to
three show, but it will not be me. It will
be Nick Craig filling in for me. Okay, because on
Monday I will not be here. Nick Craig will be
filling in for me noon to three live on WBT,
and then I am filling in for Brett Winter Bowl
three to six, and so I'm going to send those
episodes out on the podcast as well. 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
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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
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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
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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.
Speaker 2: Great, everything is great, Everything's a going right, According.
Speaker 1: To plan good. Okay, well, so not like Cracker Barrel's rebrand.
Speaker 2: You know what, why don't they sell brands?
Speaker 1: What do you mean sell brands?
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: What would the could you get the brand caught? You're saying,
like Cracker Barrel.
Speaker 2: Brand g one where he's sitting there, you know, slinging.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: There isn't the Cracker Barrel fraternity and the does the brand?
That is true, right?
Speaker 2: I also think it would be great for home defense.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Are you trying to tell me it's unwieldy?
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Not gonna ben can't be four feet wide. It could
not be for it's gonna be sort of small.
Speaker 1: Uncle Herschel has a plaid shirt and you can see
the plant. We'll just use.
Speaker 2: We can do it, we can we can make this happen.
Speaker 1: This is like the neon signs that they make where
you can see the connections between the letters.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Oh, I hate that. I do too.
Speaker 2: It's very fake, right.
Speaker 1: Because it all has to be connected in one thing, so.
Speaker 2: You're gonna have to connect it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I'm gonna make one.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: 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?
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Let me tell you they get if they get rid
of him. Chris van Hollins got to bring him back.
Speaker 1: Well, who is he trying to bring back? Was that
the Auntemima or Uncle Ben neither landa Lake's.
Speaker 2: No, he was. He brought Marilyn Man back.
Speaker 1: Oh that's right.
Speaker 2: If they're going to get rid of Uncle Herschel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I want.
Speaker 2: I want them to go send Van Holland down over
there to that lady and and bring him back.
Speaker 1: 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?
Speaker 2: Yes? Yes, I'm passingly familiar with Yeah, so yes.
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got I got audio from Uncle Herschel earlier today.
Speaker 1: You got audio from am I?
Speaker 2: Am I lying? Am I lying?
Speaker 1: Like the og the original Uncle herschel.
Speaker 2: No, the guy who's been put out of a job.
I do I have that?
Speaker 1: 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.