The low point of the Cracker Barrel affair may be this. “It needs to be a place where you go to get, like, a homecooked meal and it reminds you of being, like, at your parents’ place and, like, warm and cozy,” said a Fox know-it-all complaining about the chain’s rebranding strategy. Like, here’s a point: a restaurant isn’t a place where you get a homecooked meal. Nobody can tell the difference between anything nowadays, especially Fox pundits sticking up for ersatz olde-tyme ways fabricated and sold by a corporation. Next we’ll hear complaints because Mr. Burns’ Old-Fashioned, Good-Time, Extra-Chewy Cookies doesn’t say it’s old-fashioned anymore.
A few weeks ago losers on the Internet said we should be mad about Sydney Sweeney saying she had good genes. But they were just some nuts, a sprinkling of the usual crazies found online. This time around we’re talking prominent voices, people who make a living off nuts. Last time the scattered crazies were left-wingers of the identity politics type. This time the nuts are right-wing. They made a big noise about the scattered crazies and talked about the wave of outrage supposedly coming from the left. Now they, and especially the prominent voices, make a big noise about the Cracker Barrel logo, which once had an old man and a barrel and now doesn’t. It’s the damn left again, they say.
“No one asked for this woke rebrand,” tweets Byron Donald, a MAGA congressman. Christopher Rufo, the freelance Goebbels, says it’s time to throw Cracker Barrel against the wall. His aim: “creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’” Donald Trump Jr. chimes in. “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel??!” he demands. DJ, let Jimmy Failla of Fox Across America explain it to you. Cracker Barrel wants to bring in the sort of people who don’t usually go there, so that means they want “a little more of that white woke liberal crowd.” Removing the old guy and his barrel sends a signal: “like you’re trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re not for that sort of thing anymore.’”
What sort of thing—just general stores and talkative old codgers? No, but Jimmy isn’t entirely clear. He defines the brand’s customer base as “people who like the country,” then hastens to add that he doesn’t say the company’s being “anti-American.” The idea, such as it is, would appear to be that Cracker Barrel wants some big-city business to go with its usual business. People in the cities are woke, so whatever appeals to them must also be woke. Hence, erasing the country geezer is more than decluttering (unlike the logo’s trimmed-down lettering and the thinning out of knickknacks on restaurant walls). This part of Cracker Barrel’s forlorn attempt at sprucing up isn’t simply a New Coke maneuver. A new allegiance is being declared.
The woke left does complain about old white males, but the sight of this particular specimen shouldn’t frighten them. An old white guy with wraparound shades and a trucker cap might do the trick, especially if the logo could include his SUV. But the Cracker man’s a Norman Rockwell type, a drawing of something from a sepia past. That’s why the company put him up there. A look at Wikipedia tells us that Cracker Barrel started in 1969, when general stores had faded out but market research was doing fine. The early outlets were along interstates, so people driving long-distance could see something homey and stop for a bit of food and atmosphere. How many of these people had seen a general store? Hard to say, but the store belonged to the era when goods and people didn’t travel across the country so easily. It was a general store, not a specialized one, because a given town’s commercial items could fit under one rather modest roof. Having helped eliminate that phenomenon, the interstates then sprouted restaurants that sold the illusion of going to such a place, an illusion that was so dear because the thing itself was so dead.
Well gee, talk about late capitalism (a favorite topic when the left isn’t woking). Here we have people acting like they’re defending bedrock America when their complaint is that a company making billions a year isn’t selling them the exact feeling they want to buy.