People need to remember that these themed businesses are taking huge risk by maintaining their identity. If a CB goes out of business they practically take a loss on the building because no one wants to buy an old timey restaurant. It’s too niche. Companies are going to bland and grey so the properties are easier to sell. It was never about woke and everything to do with money as usual.
Imagine how much more successful any given business might be by simply… ignoring Twitter.
Peter Teil straight up told an audience that he will push ideas with tech.
Someone got offended that they took the cracker off the logo.
I mean they took the barrel off too. What is cracker barrel without a cracker and a barrel?
To be fair, the new logo is kind of barrel shaped. It’s also Denny’s shaped…
The entire modern “conservative movement” is completely astroturfed. It’s all funded and sponsored by the elites, in order to convince people to reject policies intended to improve their own lives, in favor of policies that exclusively benefit the elites.
It’s almost as if someone figured out that conservatives, in an effort to feel the need to play the victim, will react negatively and thus be more engaged when presented with non-conforming news.
A sort of dissonance…that happens cognitively.
Conservatives love playing the victim.
Trans women existing = an attack on all women existing
Not being allowed to pressure children into praying at school = being denied religious freedom
Here, Gizmodo. Let me fix that title for you.
“Almost half the upset tweets on the most bottidden platform (twitter) about Cracker Barrel were likely from bots.”
Realistically, the upset was probably more about how the new logo came on all of a sudden, was very plain, and like how coca cola found out with new coke in the 1980s, it’s not necessarily that people love cracker barrel. It’s a part of their nostalgia they grew up with. They went with Grandma and Grandpa growing up. It was a special little stop on a family vacation to eat. They liked looking at the toys and candy in the gift shop and it was so weird and cool they had a store in the restaurant. It can be a company nightmare to screw with a logo that’s been around for decades that could have memories attached to it.
Especially the new one is pretty lame.
Exactly. I’ve been to Cracker Barrel maybe 2 or 3 times. I think the food is decent, especially since I didn’t grow up eating southern style food. I’m not really nostalgic for it, but will prefer stopping there over a fast food place if it’s near where we’re going to stop anyway on a road trip (i.e. to get gas).
The new logo sucks, and it looks like they ripped off Denny’s. Likewise the interior redesign completely kills the soul of the place. Crack Barrel isn’t a cool hunting lodge or something, it’s a place to get home-style cooking (or what I imagine southern-style home cooking to be like) away from home, so it should feel like eating in a kitchen, not a lodge. The store is like the box of toys and puzzles and whatnot grandma and grandpa would have on the coffee table while food is getting finished up and really adds to the vibe.
I don’t really care all that much about Cracker Barrel though. It’s not a place I’d ever go out of my way to eat at, but it’s still a decent option when I’m hungry and tired.
I’ll give you a hint, the company behind the bots rhymes with Gracker Ferrel.
Nah, Cracker Barrel almost certainly wanted the redesign because that particular sector has been moving trying to avoid the whole “You can tell this used to be a Pizza Hut,” thing for a while.
They want to be able to just open up a store anywhere with minimal investment. Then if their store is super generic it’s real easy to offload the real estate if that location doesn’t work out. It’s easier for another firm to buy the real estate if they don’t have to spend a bunch of money making the former Cracker Barrel look like a Cracker Barrel.
Nah pretty much everyone was in agreement that the new logo was worse, what do you me-
a sample of 52,000 posts made on X
Ah yes, the defunct site that is mostly bots so that Muskrat can continue to earn ad revenue NaziBucks
similar conversations were happening on the alt-tech platforms like Donald Trump’s Truth Social, Twitter knock-offs Gettr and Gab
Ah yes, the sites that use amplification bots to keep their users riled up and strengthen the echo chamber
Yea a lot of people didn’t like the new bland logo, but conservatives were going on about how it’s an attack on their culture and heritage. To go that far about a truck stop restaurant was not an organic happening. This is why it doesn’t matter that Charlie Kirk was shot. If it wasn’t that, the outrage machine would have turned to something else.
I thought it was a stupid and pointless business move or potentially a publicity stunt. And I’ll admit I’d be slightly bummed to walk into Cracker Barrel sit down and not see the peg game or all the weird old country store bullshit because nostalgias a bitch. But like it’s not even good southern cooking, the only things good there were fried chicken livers and breakfast food. The former can be found in any southern town with much higher quality and Waffle House exists and is generally really close to most Cracker Barrel’s for the latter.
Cracker Barrel was usually cleaner than Waffle House, though, if that’s important to you while on road trips
Where is that true, before Covid I could get out of waho for under 13 no problem with a drink? Crackers Barrerl was always at least 20
Nah pretty much everyone was in agreement that the new logo was worse, what do you me-
Right? I’m definitely not right wing in any way shape or form, but I enjoy Cracker Barrel and the atmosphere once in a while. The logo doesn’t need to be updated to the bland bullshit modern marketers want to force just so they can make millions in bullshit consulting fees. There is no way in hell the new logo was better than the old one to represent the company, but someone got paid a ton of money to convince them that it was a good decision clearly without any market research to back it up. A blind idiot could tell that logo was a worse choice objectively without any politics involved.
Were there bots? Oh, for sure. But they weren’t the reason for the backlash, the shit decision was the reason it was a thing at all.
I still suspect the entire thing was a marketing ploy. That they had no intention of ACTUALLY changing the logo. They just wanted people to push back so they could get in the news. I wouldn’t be surprised if the marketing firm that made the logo also started the backlash.
I suspect the same is true about American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ad.
Didn’t IHOP do something similar by claiming that they were going to change their name to IHOB?
“IHOb also issued a press release about the change and still used the original “IHOP” in its footer, suggesting the switch was a temporary promotion.”
Seems so. Source.
I suspect the same is true about American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney ad.
What the fuck…
I didn’t even know this was a thing…
That is entirely possible. Make a shitty logo you never intend to actually use widely and use the backlash as basically free publicity.
It makes sense, and fits with modern society’s social media dynamics.
But I refuse to give the marketing fucks that sort of recognition. It’s more likely they just fucked up because they get paid either way and simple logos are the hot trend right now, and the corporate suits went with the marketing consultants blindly, as most of them usually do.
People have been suggesting this as a strategy at least since New Coke debuted. We can’t always definitively say that was actually the plan, but sometimes we can like with IHOP.
Did anyone actually think the IHOP rebranding was real? That looked like a promo trying to force itself viral from the second they announced it.
A bot says…?
Why did you lose sleep over it?
Why do you assume that having an opinion about something means I was solely invested in it? Because clearly having an actual opinion on something must mean I’m making it my entire reason for doing things in my life. Of course.
Is that how you live your life? Only able to focus on one current event at a time? If so that’s extremely depressing. But being unable to think about more than one thing at a time would explain a lot about why people are so easily manipulated by this sort of shit in the first place.
Sorry I triggered your thesis.
Are we not allowed to talk about an interesting intersection of advertising and politics?
You know this is a discussion board, right? If you didn’t want to discuss, why are you posting?
Can you explain the thought process as to how you fabricated your comment out of the 7 words, “Why did you lose sleep over it.”?
You self-generated a random thought and argued with yourself, then somehow blamed me.
Fine job.
Honestly I just thought it was funny they got rid of the cracker and the barrel.
Through the course of the controversy, I learned that the “cracker” was the Uncle Herschel mentioned in the menu a few times. He’s a character of theirs, something of a mascot, though a much subtler one than most other restaurant mascots. He’s in the art but his name isn’t widely advertised. A couple menu items have his name in them (e.g. Uncle Herschel’s Breakfast), but the name is not connected to the mascot in the logo.
Oh, I also thought it was funny that they said they changed the logo to be more inclusive (I guess of people who don’t look like Uncle Herschel), but they still don’t operate in California due to that state’s progressive policies, so they can shove their “inclusive” talk. Actions speak louder than words. They do hire women, and people of color, which is a great start for a restaurant so steeped in “Southern values,” but you can’t say nobody is excluded from the table while excluding an entire state based on the politics of its government. That’s just as dumb as rock groups refusing to play whichever Southern state did a stupid thing most recently.
The cracker in Cracker Barrel is that the barrels are “Cracker Barrels”
Exactly! Barrels full of crackers. And the new logo kinda looks like a barrel (it also kinda looks like Denny’s, but that’s neither here nor there).
There’s 5 cracker barrels in California…
They probably just haven’t seen them since they tend to be just on the edge of civilization. Their schtick is to be a stop on a road trip, so if you don’t go on roadtrips, you probably wouldn’t see them.
I like Cracker Barrel’s four vegetarian sides plate. I can pick reasonably healthy options and the price isn’t terrible. They are my preferred interstate-adjacent dining option on roadtrips. I’m even a loyalty member.
Yet I can’t imagine spending one microsecond thinking about their logo let alone being stupid enough to be manipulated into having an opinion and then believing it relates to politics. Unless you are the majority shareholder, your view is utterly irrelevant. Shut up and either patronize the place or not.
There are a lot of people today on the right who cosplay as libertarians but somehow care deeply about the logo of a company they don’t own.
Exactly.
I only go to Cracker Barrel on road trips and when they happen to be near where I plan to stop anyway. I don’t go out of my way to go there, but I do prefer them over fast food joints.
Their new logo is stupid, mostly because it reminds me of Denny’s. It doesn’t change whether I’ll go there, it only makes me think their logo is stupid when I do.
Most right-wing outrage has been driven by bots for a decade. Yeah, what’s new?
I love watching companies tear themselves apart trying to appeal to both sides of the aisle.
Eventually, they’re just going to have to stop trying and pick a side. That’s when the real fun begins.
Why not just run a decent business? You don’t need to appeal to the left or right to sell food at a restaurant to hungry road trippers. Make your product appealing and people will come.
That’s what I don’t understand about target as well. They went out of their way to appeal to the left, then out of their way to appeal to the right, and now everyone is pissed off. If they stuck to selling stuff at reasonable prices, they would’ve been fine.
Don’t discriminate in your workforce, just find the best people for the job and you’ll do fine with people regardless of their politics.
It’s part of how hysteria works.
The average idiot can’t resist it by definition.
They choose… profit.
The entire thing feels manufactured by design to get people talking about Cracker Barrel.
For what purpose?
Could be advertising by Cracker Barrel too.
Stir shit up, get people to declare sides. Or maybe for the lulz.
I’m glad people here are onto the attack on our internet.
Making non-political things political means people aren’t looking at other stuff that actually matters. People have a limited attention span, and a limited amount of time to look at things outside work and family. Fill that with bullshit that doesn’t matter and they can’t stay educated on actual current events.
The culture war outrage keeps people from thinking about real problems. Instead, they’re perpetually angry about shit that has literally zero impact on their lives.
To distract us from the other bots.
Maybe this article was written by a bot to distract us from the bots talking about other bots. Maybe I’m a bot. Hmm…
Culture war keeps the rubes fighting the wrong people so that the real villains can keep robbing them.
I saw the logo, thought it was weird, figured they would roll it right back in a week.
