Undoing Authenticity

Cracker Barrel can reclaim its logo but not its distinction

I have been preparing for this column since I was seven years old. My insistence on picking pit stops on road trips with my kids further equipped me. Now I can craft an essay about the hottest controversy in pop culture and assert without reservation: I am an expert at Cracker Barrel.

I have patronized maybe 100 of the company’s 660 locations. As a Tennessee expat, it has been my connection to the mothership. I ate there after Church Training and Sunday night worship as a kid. My hometown had one of the comfort food chain’s original seven stores, though back then the food was an afterthought, less important than the Shell gasoline it sold along the new-ish interstate system or the homespun souvenirs in its old country store. The small dining room had just a few menu items; I usually ordered pinto beans and cornbread while I remember my mom liked steak-and-biscuits.

Now Cracker Barrel has riled its customer base and gotten love from all the wrong places as left-wing commentators jumped to its defense. A corporate marketing strategy that revamped the stores’ interiors and un-countrified the company logo has been the flashpoint. Keyboard warriors on both sides used the pushback to farm a new plot in the culture wars, but the facts seem non-ideological to me. This may be just a classic business school case study of what not to do.

The truth is Cracker Barrel is in a spiral that began long before the company’s graphic designer got involved. The food quality has declined; the service is suddenly irritating; and the evolving menu unrecognizable since Starbucks veteran Julie Felss Masino became CEO in 2023.

In the late 1990s, I met Cracker Barrel founder Dan Evins, a donor to my Republican causes, and admired his acumen. He sourced almost all the things he sold directly from his Lebanon, Tennessee base east of Nashville, with a database-driven, just-in-time delivery system imitating the best manufacturing strategies of the era. It was unlike anything then in the restaurant business. Every store transmitted the exact daily sales of each menu item to the corporate headquarters, driving the inventory that would be sent there the next day. He bragged he could predict exactly how many catfish sandwiches would be sold on a given day by a given store – and the precise number of sourdough buns for those sandwiches would be baked in Lebanon, by a separate company owned by one of Dan’s friends, and trucked to that store, with minimal waste.

Prices at Cracker Barrel were cheap, so food margins were thin, and volume, via table turnover was the path to profitability. Evins’ goal, as I recall, was for the waitress to put the check on the table 18 minutes after she took the order. Dining rooms eventually got the most square footage at Cracker Barrels but the profits came from the gift shops where people browsed as they waited to be seated. Patience was aided by rocking chairs on the porch – which were also for sale.

The business model was sophisticated, but the real product was not grits or gifts: it was the ability to squint and let your other senses transport you back to granny’s house. The crackling sound from the stone fireplace. The hickory smell of smoked ham. The smooth melt of slathered biscuits in your mouth. Those sensations got you almost, but not quite, home, even though you were beside an interstate highway and driving in the opposite direction from home. In a sea of plastic sameness, Cracker Barrel was distinctive.

Customers got a short-term time machine, launched from a dining room of rough-hewn paneling and bric-a-brac antiques curated from backroads yard sales. The junk on the walls was authentic – and those of us who grew up in rocking chairs at granny’s recognized the same rusty tin advertising thermometers she had hung on her screened porch, or the washboards we had spied gathering dust in her shed.

Now there will be less junk, no rough paneling, and a cleaner aesthetic tuned to evoke aspirational suburbia. For a company that primarily sells experience, immersing the customer in what she aims for, instead of where she came from, is a strategic whiplash.

Masino’s changes might have a sound business basis. The demographic tables may show that selling nostalgia to octogenarians like my dad and Gen X-ers like me – and hoping it sticks with my kids - is a dead end. The Cracker Barrel executives’ fear of being out-avacadoed and out-trended by First Watch may be legitimized by their spreadsheets. But there is risk.

Cracker Barrel once tested a customer rewards plan with cards issued in just a few stores. Within a couple of months, the loyalty cards had shown up at every single location in the country. Evins concluded Cracker Barrel did not need a loyalty rewards program; it was a loyalty program.

The company has experienced that loyalty’s ferocity as its logo swap proved the last straw for a clientele that could taste and see what was already lost. Chastened, the company has announced it is reverting to its old logo, and it issued a half-hearted apology insisting “the things people love most about our stores aren’t going anywhere.” But they already have.

Now the culture war soldiers of fortune will move on to some other grievance. Smug lefties will find some other heartland icon to dunk. This kerfuffle will fade. Except my dad, my grown kids and I will be stuck with lukewarm gravy from a bag, the removal of who knows what’s next from the menu, and the recognition that an old friend has devalued our memories. We will still check in at a prodigal Cracker Barrel periodically, but in a world where authentic connection is hard to find, it is even harder to reclaim - no matter what logo you use.

Pass me the okra, if you don’t mind, while you still can.

In Case You Missed It: Writing about mom makes me think a few of you might have missed my tribute column to her last spring. Check out: Have You Called Your Mama?

My Latest Political Analysis: Monday’s column focused on redistricting, a square subject that is suddenly cool. Check out: Revenge Of The Nerds.

The Archives: All 40 of my columns are available on The What For website.