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.
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.
They choose… profit.
The entire thing feels manufactured by design to get people talking about Cracker Barrel.
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.
A bunch of my friends thought the logo change was dumb, too.
A bit rude to call them bots. ;p
There’s a difference between thinking the change is dumb, which is something that happens in an individual’s own mind as a passing thought, and thinking you suddenly need to tell everyone about it, and have arguments about it, and seek validations of your passing thought about it in large communities of other people and turn it into a national discussion. Bots are why everyone started talking about it, and that made people feel like they needed to tell everyone else what they thought about it too.
People were simply not losing any sleep over this (and never would have) until bots made it go viral. Some people might have legitimately formed such a thought without any significant outside influence, but it would have been an empty, meaningless, inconsequential thought, like thousands of others that likely go through everyone’s brain in any given day to be summarily dismissed and promptly forgotten.
The point the article is raising is that the attention economy has now weaponized such insignificant thoughts, and can exploit them into controlling people’s behavior, and thus, create actual real world consequences, the same way a hacker exploits access into a home computer to turn it into a botnet that they can orchestrate to perform actual attacks. It may not do any particular harm to the individual who has been motivated in this way, but it can do catastrophic damage to the targets of their collective wrath, scorn, and ridicule. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words might destroy civilization.
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.
Even if it was bots, humans are still unleashing hose things. Someone cared enough to do that.
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
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.
A bot says…?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
I wonder what percentage of posts containing the words “woke” or “DEI” are from bots, and what percentage of posts with those words are from liberals getting upset about a bot post.
Who had money on Cracker Barrel faking outrage about a plan that wasn’t to be?
They were also inconveniently experiencing significant negative feedback to their business decision to sell warmed up day old food as a standard operating procedure just before new of the logo drama erupted. If you thought cracker barrel was extremely mid before, it’s apparently gone full Applebee’s microwave kitchen bad lately.
Dang. They were mediocre the last time I went there (about 10 years ago), but at least uniquely mediocre (mediocre southern food). I’ve been there 2-3 times, and each time was on a road trip where the choice was Cracker Barrel, Denny’s, or a fast food place, and Cracker Barrel has an interesting store.
I very much dislike Applebees, Chilis, and other massive chains, but at least Cracker Barrel is a bit unique in presentation and has decent portion sizes. Or had, idk, I haven’t been there in a decade.
I don’t think anyone goes there for fine dining, so them reheating stuff isn’t all of that surprising. But it is disappointing.
Most right-wing outrage has been driven by bots for a decade. Yeah, what’s new?
tl;ds looked like a bot got hold of it
The point where I realized it was fake was when nobody was complaining about the font or going “Uhm, aktually it’s ‘typeface’!”
cracker bargle
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.
For all we know CB may have been behind the outrage
Biglari has been trying to take over Cracker Barrel for years. Not really hard to guess who was behind this.
I hadn’t heard of the change, nor the outraged bot army.
How about those Epstein files?
