Megan McArdle: The Cracker Barrel flap was not about being woke

I suppose it’s natural to think of Cracker Barrel in August. Sweltering days call to mind road trips, rocking chairs and a tall glass of ice-cold lemonade. But if we are going to talk about the restaurant chain, I’d rather discuss the quality of its biscuits than the tiresome question of whether Cracker Barrel has gone woke.

Three Augusts ago, it was the chain’s decision to introduce vegan sausage that spawned a few unhinged social media posts and a legion of think pieces about whether conservatives were losing their minds. Today, it’s the move to rebrand the company, shedding the iconic logo with a man in overalls cuddling up to, yes, a cracker barrel. Surely we have something better to do with our vacations than debate the strategic choices of a franchise.

I don’t blame Cracker Barrel for this sorry state of affairs. The company is a victim of the internet’s endless search for something to be mad about. During L’Affaire Sausage, I pointed out that very few people were actually mad that Cracker Barrel had added a meat substitute to its offerings; copy-hungry journalists had scoured the company’s Facebook page and plucked a few lunatics out of the much larger number of vegetarians thanking the company for catering to their needs. I reminded people that you can always find a few fringe souls on the internet who are angry about anything. I begged them to ignore the shouting, just as they would if people were doing it on a random street corner.

Alas, I was shouting into the social media void, because here we are, trying to turn a struggling restaurant chain into a metaphor for American politics. This time, the president’s son joined the unhinged, retweeting a post from an account called Woke War Room that had, for some unaccountable reason, gotten mad about the change. This was followed up by our poster in chief himself, who advised Cracker Barrel to restore the old logo. On Tuesday, the company announced it was taking this advice. And thus we had a week of discourse about what it means.

So, with a sigh, it’s once more unto the breach to stress that Cracker Barrel is just a restaurant, not the avatar for whatever you’re upset about.

It’s obvious why Cracker Barrel keeps being chosen as the internet’s main character. Its branding places it firmly on one side of various cleavages in today’s politics: country vs. city, tradition vs. modernity, North vs. South. But when you are tempted to think that Cracker Barrel must offer some insight into What America Is Becoming, please remember that this is just branding. The company is trying to sell food, not a political program.

The chain was founded in 1969 – not 1776. It adopted the country branding because down-home cooking and folksy kitsch were trendy back then, not because they were trying to restore America to the Good Ole Days. The market has moved on, and Cracker Barrel has been adapting – not because it “read the room” and decided a white guy in overalls is a “bad look,” but because its profits suffered as economic conditions shifted, American consumer tastes changed and the market was flooded with casual-dining rivals.

Cracker Barrel was caught in the classic dilemma of businesses with an aging brand but strong brand identity: The things that put off new customers (such as the cluttered walls of the classic Cracker Barrel) are often the attributes to which your existing base is fanatically attached. Many companies have tried and failed to negotiate that divide.

I tend to agree with marketing analysts who say the update has made some mistakes; Cracker Barrel might have done better by leaning into its quirky decor and iconography rather than refreshing it to a sleeker, contemporary country vibe. But you can see how it happened, given that traffic to Cracker Barrel restaurants is down 16% since the pandemic. Companies in that position have to do something to attract new customers, and while I doubt younger consumers would have flocked to the evanescent new logo – which looked as though it belongs on a no-name, down-market buffet – I’m not sure I’d have come up with anything better than, say, jettisoning the “Uncle Herschel” illustration introduced in 1977.

But “venerable company makes mistakes trying to refresh its brand” is not the kind of story that usually leaps to national attention. It has happened now only because of the particular pathologies of our political moment.

We have confused brands with moral values, and we demand to see our politics reflected everywhere, even in signage. We have confused social media with social lives. And alone with our screens, too many of us have become addicted to rage, mashing the refresh button for the dopamine that rushes through us every time we discover someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet.

The addiction is so consuming that when no ready source of rage is available, we start cooking up our own out of whatever we can find in the cupboard. But if the cupboard is really this bare, I suggest people put down the phone and head to Cracker Barrel, rock themselves to serenity in the chairs on the porch, then head inside for a delicious helping of hashbrown casserole.