Will one rotten rebrand spoil Cracker Barrel?

No one thinks the Cracker Barrel rebrand is a particularly good idea. The entire charm of Cracker Barrel lay in the farmhouse attic vibe, the nana’s candy dish assortment in the gift shop and the menu, which served up the best chicken and dumplings or biscuits and gravy and sweet tea possible from a fast-casual chain with horrible wooden chairs. Still, the melodrama surrounding this story, the rising and falling stock prices, the online mocking and gloating, seems a little overblown. Not everything has to be political. Cracker Barrel certainly doesn’t.

For those of you who’ve been wandering around the fields with a bucket on your head this week, Cracker Barrel has streamlined. They’ve decided to remove Old Man Joe or whatever his name is from the logo, though keeping the same basic font for the color scheme, and have retooled some store interiors, making it look less like a surreal Indiana BnB nightmare and more like something Chip and Joanna Gaines might have shiplapped together.

The new Cracker Barrel vibe met with equal condemnation from online Red and Blue America. The Steak and Shake chain, which made news earlier this year for its brave MAHA decision to fry potatoes in beef tallow, tweeted out the old Cracker Barrel logo with a surprisingly long manifesto:

“Sometimes, people want to change things just to put their own personality on things. At CB, their goal is to just delete the personality altogether. Hence, the elimination of the “old-timer” from the signage. Heritage is what got Cracker Barrel this far, and now the CEO wants to just scrape it all away… At Steak n Shake, we take pride in our history, our families, and American values. All are welcome. We will never market ourselves away from our past in a cheap effort to gain the approval of trend seekers.”

Pretty catty, Steak and Shake, but maybe a little overboard. Cracker Barrel may be MAGA-coded, but Democrats enjoy a nice corporate meat-and-three sometimes, too, just like Trump supporters will sometimes go for an iced caramel macchiato at the heavily Dem-coded Starbucks. The last time I checked, collard greens in pot likker belonged to everyone.
Unfortunately, the most godawful annoying people on the Democrat side of the ledger appear to agree with me. The horrifying new Trump-parodying social-media presence from California governor Gavin Newsom, which is like a monkey’s paw curse on the extremely online, tweeted out: “WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA ‘CHEESE’ FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR ‘GROCERIES’ (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!! ‘FIX IT’ ASAP! WOKE IS DEAD!! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

Then, to make matters worse, David Hogg came out of the Hogg Pen to say, about the Cracker Barrel rebrand, “Let’s bring the country together and all agree this is bad and needs to be reversed immediately. Not for the left or the right but for America.” And Hogg’s political opposite, Rep. Byron Donalds from Florida, tweeted out, “In college, I worked at @CrackerBarrel in Tallahassee. I even gave my life to Christ in their parking lot,” which led Hogg to retweet someone who said “I gave my life to christ in a cracker barrel parking lot in Tallahassee” is a lana del rey lyric.”

OK, have all the sincere people and ironic X hipsters had their say now? Are we done with Cracker Barrel jokes yet? Or are we going to have to endure weeks of memes like the ones I just saw with the old Cracker Barrel logo with the words “Release The Files” in the place of the company name?

I don’t think the Cracker Barrel rebrand is a particularly good idea, but then again, maybe America has moved on from its self-conception as a continental extension of the Country Bear Jamboree. Middle America doesn’t look like the set of Hee Haw anymore. Not all change is good, but private equity doesn’t always get it wrong, either.

Once again, Dems are misreading the cultural tea leaves and trying to appeal to a regular-guy demographic that no longer particularly exists. We live in Magnolia nation now; put that in your repurposed corncob pipe and smoke it. Anyone who doesn’t realize that is, in the words of the iconic Cracker Barrel peg game, just an “EG NOR A MOOSE.”