Family vacations growing up usually meant heading down I-40 west into Tennessee, then up toward Lexington to see my grandparents. We’d peel off the highway somewhere outside Knoxville and, more often than not, land at Cracker Barrel.
My routine never changed: Play a little checkers, get an order of pancakes just for the tiny syrup bottles, then take one last lap through the store to angle for a harmonica or a railroad cap.
Your Cracker Barrel story is probably similar. Most of us over a certain age have one, and that’s why the new logo gained so much attention. If you somehow managed to miss it, here’s the short version: Management axed the classic old-timer and barrel for a plain wordmark on that golden background, and a slice of the right branded it a woke capitulation.
In a era where everything is a marketing ploy, nostalgia is so hot right now.
But the thing about nostalgia is that it’s just a feeling — it isn’t real. A few years ago I took my own crew to Cracker Barrel for my birthday. The details were pretty close to how I remembered it: dark, cluttered, plenty of kitsch. It was fine, but the experience just didn’t match the glow in my head. Those things never do.
Yes, the new logo is bland and soulless, but I can’t be sure it’s not the right move. I don’t like it, but it does make a certain sterile, corporate-MBA kind of sense. Either way, I don’t have the energy to be mad about it.
Because, be honest: when’s the last time you actually ate at Cracker Barrel?
Logs on the fire
Even so, I’ll admit that over the weekend I almost drove over just to record a video dunking on the rebrand. I caught myself in time, thankfully, but I couldn’t stop myself from posting a small jab on X.
It’s the same tug we all feel online — when a topic catches fire, you want to throw a log on it.
When you see the world as content, “villain” is the cheapest plot device. A small corner of the internet decided Cracker Barrel’s CEO must be a woke-scold harbinger of cultural apocalypse. When facts are boring or fixes take time, invent a bad guy so the story feels worth telling.
That same script is running closer to home with a new doctor licensure law.
It’s a lot more serious a topic, but follows the same general pattern. In a small corner of North Carolina’s conservative internet, a plain effort to get more physicians into rural clinics got recast as a tale of sellouts and shadowy pipelines. I wrote about that for the paper this week.
Read it here (free with gift link): North Carolina needs doctors, not viral outrage over where they’re from
So what’s the moral of the story here? The simplistic lesson is that authenticity is the coin of the realm in today’s society. Customers (or voters) will forgive a lot of warts if they believe they are honestly come by. Forget where you came from, and you get punished. All that may be true in some instances, but that’s not really what’s happening here.
Maybe the lesson is how a CEO’s job is to make a call and live with it. Whether you’re running a restaurant or running a state, you’ve got to tune out the trolls and do the work.
Or maybe the real lesson is how easily the internet turns all of us into critics-in-search-of-a-villain. Honestly, it’s a bit of each — and saying all that makes me feel about as old as the guy from the Cracker Barrel sign.
Quick hits
My other newspaper column this week was about the chart that went viral online showing the percentage of 30-year-olds in America who are both married and homeowners plummeting over the past few decades. A lot of people are shrugging it off, but I think it’s worrisome for the future of North Carolina.
Read the full article here (free with this gift link): This is the most important chart in America right now. Can NC do anything about it?
At a premium
Top spenders on social media this week
Question of the week
The results last week were a little surprising to me. For the record, I do tend to put up signs at my house - but only for really local candidates where I feel like it would make a difference.
This week, I have to ask you about the Cracker Barrel logo.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Andrew Dunn
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://longleafpolitics.substack.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
