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JVL
Hello everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleagues Hannah Yost and Sonny Bunch. And we're going to break down the big news from today. Cracker Barrel, the beloved American institution, has been ruined by woke. I'm kidding. It's not ruined by woke, but they've made like a big logo change and we're all having a lot of freak out and feelings about it. Before we delve deep into what is happening at Cracker Barrel, the most urgent news of the day.
Hannah Yost
Hit.
JVL
Like hit. Subscribe. Follow the feed because every once in a while you'll get a fun video like this instead of a video about the end of the Republic.
Sonny Bunch
Hannah.
JVL
When Cracker Barrel debuted their new logo on Thursday, shares the publicly traded company plummeted 12%. So the market doesn't like the new logo. Will you start out by telling me what your thoughts as a graphic design professional are?
Hannah Yost
It's part of a larger trend. We keep seeing all of these heritage brands take a really iconic logo and then shift do. We're gonna, we're gonna capture the youth. We're gonna outreach and get Gen Z in like in our stores with a new identity that is fresh and young and it, it doesn't work if they, they have taken the figure with the barrel off and are now have like this shiny new. It's not even like. But it's, it's still, you still have like the classic font. It's still the same colors. There are, there are trace. Like it's not a full departure like Jaguar. Like you don't. You don'. This huge departure but like they, they are erasing like crucial Elements of the logo that made it iconic and, and part of the American nostalgia thing that they were going for.
JVL
Did you like the old line art, man, next to the barrel in the Cracker Barrel? Because I never. I just thought that was too busy in terms of, like, have it when you reproduce it. That logo had to be reproduced at a pretty big size in order for all of the detailed lines in it to work.
Hannah Yost
If you think about it, like. But where, where was their logo? It was on billboards, on road trips. So, like, for what they were, it worked really well because, like, you're driving down the road or you see this, like, it's telling you what you need to know. Like, come on in. We've got a good old Southern boy and a barrel of, you know, crackers. Yeah.
Sonny Bunch
Are we allowed to say that it had a cracker and a barrel? Is that, is that allowed? I don't think so. No. Is that not allowed? Okay, just making, Just checking, Just checking.
Hannah Yost
Yeah, I got my choice.
JVL
So, Sunny, what are your thoughts? Do you like the new logo? It's very.
Sonny Bunch
It's punchy. I want to preface all this by saying that I always knew I was never a very good Southerner, despite, you know, growing up in Florida. I was born in Arkansas, spent time in Florida and Virginia. Spent most of my time, most of my time in Virginia growing up. But I always knew I was never a very good Southerner because I preferred IHOP to Cracker Barrel. I was like, I'm not a Cracker Barrel guy, does nothing.
JVL
You're a globalist cuck. You like the International House of Pancakes.
Sonny Bunch
Exactly. I want pancakes that remind me of France and Espana, not Georgia or whatever. But no. So I was never a huge fan of the Cracker Barrel, but that had to do with its food. It was the food. I just didn't care for the food. I don't want food smothered in gravy and chicken fried. Whatever.
Hannah Yost
Crackers.
Sonny Bunch
Not for me. It's not for me. But the ambiance was always fine. The ambiance was the best part of it because you would go there and they'd have those, like little. They'd have the boards with the pegs and you do the game and you have to like, jump. Exactly. I love, loved all that stuff. Great, great down home fun. I. For me, for me. I don't care that much about the sign redesign. I saw that yesterday. I was like, whatever. It looks fine. It looks, it looks. I, I didn't, I didn't have very strong feelings about it. I Was not like, oh, we got to keep the guy. We got to keep. We got to keep the guy in the barrel. Bring back bigger. The bigger issue for me was is the redesign of the stores. Like, I. When you. When I saw the videos of the store, people, like, doing the 360 spin around, you know, the store, showing what they look like now, I was horrified because that is.
JVL
What do you like, Sonny? Tell me.
Sonny Bunch
Well, if I had to describe it to you, I would. If. If you sat somebody down in front of HGTV and made them consume 10,000 hours of remodeling shows, and then you had that person find a team of OCD crippled individuals and said, take these junk drawers and rearrange them and put them on the walls. That's what you would get. You would get, like, minimalist. Minimalist junk drawers. Which is. Sounds like a contradiction because it is. It looks terrible. It's like they have. On the walls. They have. I can't. The only way I can describe it again is. Is minimalist juncture. They have, like, rolling pins, like 50 rolling pins on a board on the wall, but they're all perfectly organized. Like, they had Rain man there with a ruler, making sure that they were all perfectly even. And I like it actually. It actually makes me kind of mad to look at because I'm just like, who thinks this looks good now? This is part of my natural war against hgtv. And they're kind of like gray tile remodel, home aesthetic. That is what this reminds me of in many ways. But also, it just.
Hannah Yost
It just.
Sonny Bunch
I don't understand who this appeals to. Who is. Who is the audience for this?
Hannah Yost
Is this. Is this private equity did, like, when they brought in. They. So they brought in a new CEO. Like, what. What else changed? Is this because, like.
JVL
No, I mean, it's been publicly traded. I don't think it is.
Hannah Yost
Okay, but it, like, looks like. It looks like the corporate idea of what Gen Z likes. Like, it looks like the Pinterest Ification.
JVL
Well, she's from so the. So our new CEO, nice gal named Julie Messino, long history in retail. She came up through Macy's and Starbucks and Coach and Godiva, interestingly enough, in her early years. But then she spent most the bulk of her career at Starbucks and then Taco Bell. So these. I would say this makes a little bit of sense, right? A little bit of sense. And she was previously CEO of a Los Angeles cupcake business. Do with that as you may. And anyway, I can say I understand the idea because the old Cracker Barrel aesthetic. And here I'm talking about the retail portion of the store, and that's where they've been getting killed. So their retail sales since beginning their redesigns have gone down even while their food. Food and bed sales have gone up a little bit. It looked like. Like a container ship from China just threw up inside the lobby of the Cracker Barrel.
Sonny Bunch
Like, that was.
JVL
I mean, the aesthetic was just chaos, Chachki.
Sonny Bunch
Chaos.
JVL
Nothing in there actually costs more than 7 cents to manufacture. And what it is, is it's a trap for parents, because your children, While you're waiting 45 minutes to sit down at a table to have a biscuit that costs $4, you. Your children are wandering around saying, can I buy this? Can I buy this? Can I buy this? Can I buy this? And the stuff they want is a combination of toys are gonna fall apart in five minutes, and sugar products. They're gonna make them vibrate while you're still trapped in a car for 12 hours driving to the beach. So, I mean, again, I think I'm okay with redesigning. No, in theory, the Cracker Barrel, the.
Hannah Yost
Conceit of it was like the old country. So I pulled up the old logo, and it's. The old country store is in the logo, and it's like. And if you look at it, the k, like, it goes up, and it forms like, a lasso around. So I think that, like, what they're actually going for is, like, the old Main Street. You walk in and, like, all the tchotchkes, like, the convenience of it. But no, the way that they've described it is decluttering the. The interiors.
JVL
Did they go through any retail item that did not spark joy? They threw out.
Hannah Yost
They. Marie Kondoed Cracker Barrel, which she's now, like, come back from that. Like, there's actually been a huge whiplash and, like, backlash against all of that minimalism. Like, Kyle Chakia writes about this a lot how, like, the global airspace and, like, the minimalist aesthetic has gone. Is more globalist than, like, they are turning Cracker Jack or Cracker Barrel. Excuse me? Cracker Barrel. That's like the popcorn, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Into ihop, basically, and making it more of a direct competitor rather than leaning into the heritage, which is an interesting choice given, like, our current political climate. You'd think that, like, here's our history, and we're proud of it. I guess not.
JVL
So you think Cracker Barrel has been conquered by the Wokes?
Hannah Yost
Sonny disagrees with me, but I think.
JVL
Maybe I want to hear it. Give me, give me, give me your argument here, Hannah.
Hannah Yost
Well, if you. Look, I. So I've been thinking about it and like, you know how the. There's that saying where all Americans think that they are temporary, temporarily embarrassed millionaires. I think part of like America's refusal to deal with like, the repercussions of slavery and all of this is that, like, it is a temporarily embarrassing part of our history that we don't really. Like. That was just. That's not part of like the actual narrative of our history, but like, it is. And Cracker Barrel was. I mean, thinking about it as like the western country storefront kind of goes against the southern identity that it actually has. Like, in point of fact, it's from the south, but it's like pantomiming a western aesthetic and like the two colliding is kind of awkward. But I don't know where to go now.
JVL
Sunny, you are going to let them, you who are an anti woke crusader. We're going to let the Deis off the hook for this.
Sonny Bunch
There's a longtime saying on the left, and I get in fights with my film critic friends about this, that all art is political. And that is kind of what this. There's this kind of nascent maga movement on Twitter to be like anything. Everything I don't like is woke up. And it's. And this is. You see it here and you, you see it. Look there. There is an argument to be made, right, that like, think about the McDonald's rebrands away from like, play places and like, you know, kind of colorful, wacky looking chairs to like the more blocky, modernist, minimalist aesthetic. You've seen that a lot. You see this in Taco Bell, right? Taco Bell has gone from like the kind of like Alamo style buildings, right, to the, to the big. What I can only describe is like they look like modern apartment complexes that kind of like rectangular, straight, like. And I prefer, I prefer the old Taco Bells. I like that. I like, I like the old play places. The question is, is this, is this a political move? You know, and there are arguments. I have seen people argue that like, they want to erase children from public spaces. This is the woke. Single, childless women are trying to do this, blah, blah. And I. No, I don't, I don't think so. I don't think it's that. I really don't think it's that. I think it's just like there is this idea that people want clean lines and they want empty spaces. They Want open, open floor plans. Open floor plans. That's what we want. We don't want, we don't want to like block people off with walls. And we don't want too much stuff in the way. We want them to be able to see all over the place. So if you're at the Cracker Barrel, you can conference with the table to two tables over be like, hey, you getting those biscuits over there? We're doing that. We're doing the gravy today. Is that like that is. That's the feeling I get from this. I don't think it's. I don't think it's. I don't think it's woke. I just think it's dumb.
Hannah Yost
My point was that it was like, it's a reminder though of the past. Like if you, if you walk into a wood paneled like store that has the checkers set out and the walls are decorated with cotton, like it's going to evoke a certain song of the South. Yeah. So that's. So maybe, maybe like you're, if you're a corporate person looking at the research that, yeah, this is going to be a turn off to Gen Z who is sensitive about everything.
JVL
Let me read to you something that Julie Masino said at a conference not long ago. Everybody has a Cracker Barrel origin story. Whether they stopped by Cracker Barrel on their way to Grandma's years ago and for Christmas or holidays or whether they were traveling for soccer. Everybody has a connection and a story and they've, they're always very emotional and heartfelt. I'm sorry, is that true? Because my connection to Cracker Barrel is that's the place you stop when one of the kids needs a bathroom between rest areas. And it's like that's all it is. It's a. Does anybody ever go to a Cracker Barrel when they are not traveling?
Sonny Bunch
Yeah, you're a Yankee.
JVL
Does anybody ever go to Cracker Barrel except when traveling along the interstate? So this is a sincere question.
Hannah Yost
I do, I have actually do have anecdotal data. So Alec is from. My husband's from Lumberton, N.C. and cracker barrel was the most popular place for these southern rural people to go to after church because it was like, are you kidding? Ish. No, I'm not kidding.
Sonny Bunch
My family.
JVL
It was like thing I've ever heard.
Hannah Yost
It's a poor town.
Sonny Bunch
This is Yankee talk here.
Hannah Yost
This is like a Southern, southern, northern divide here.
JVL
You can't really see.
Hannah Yost
Maybe a little rural, rural urban divide too.
JVL
I don't even know how to respond to that.
Sonny Bunch
Look, this is jbl. This is snobby. You're being a little bit snobby right now. That's fine. That's okay. That's all right. This is a safe space. This is a safe space. So you can do that. I would say, but I'm frankly, again, I'm more with you. I was never a Cracker Barrel guy. When my friends and I would discuss what we were. If we were gonna go to a diner style restaurant, it would be like Denny's or ih. It was never, it was never Cracker Barrel. We never, we never really were into that. And I like, I find her whole, like, sub Don Draper, like the emotional connection that everybody has to crack. Come on, Cracker Barrel. Like, let's host it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I'm like, I, again, I kind of. I kind of, I kind of shy away from all that. But even if it's true, even if you, Even if that was, let's, let's take it entirely at face value that there is. Everybody has this emotional connection that they have with Cracker Barrel that they walk into it and they feel the feelings. Wouldn't you want to keep it the same? Wouldn't you want to try to emphasize that instead of being like, look, you've walked into a museum of horrors. You've walked into. You've walked into the ultra organized kitchen of, of somebody who has never actually been into a real working kitchen before. Like, it's, it is a, it's a. I don't understand. I don't understand having that idea for the brand and then executing it this way. That there's a disconnection there for me.
Hannah Yost
Yeah, she's talking out of one side of her mouth and she's doing one, Doing another thing. Like, she's just trying to sell it. But like, the research that they're going to lean on is going to be trying to get more foot traffic, and the foot traffic is going to come from a different, different demographic than they currently are attracting. And the current demographic that they're attracting are, is going to be older people on road trips.
JVL
Interesting. It's all so interesting.
Hannah Yost
Do you want to hear my personal? My personal.
JVL
I want to hear your personal. I want to hear your emotional connection and your journey with, with the Cracker Barrel brand.
Hannah Yost
My family did go to Cracker Barrel a lot growing up because we would drive so much. Like, my grandfather was a truck driver and he like, they loved Cracker. They loved Cracker Barrel because you know what they did they used to. This was like in the pre streaming era, Cracker Barrel functioned kind of like a library. You could audiobooks for checkout. So my grandfather would like every time we would go on a road trip, we would go to Cracker Barrel and pick out books. And that was like we couldn't buy anything in the store because again, it was like sugar hell. But we could, we could pick out a. Pick out entertainment for the road trip.
JVL
Yeah, because you'd get your books on tape or your books on CD and then you, you buy it for full price. But you can return any other Cracker Barrel and get like all but $3.
Sonny Bunch
Back or something like that.
JVL
Yeah. So it was like the red box.
Hannah Yost
Of audiobooks way, like, way before that. Like I was like a kid and I remember us doing this.
JVL
All right, before we get out of here, I need your predictions. Does the Cracker Barrel re logo design stand or does this get disappeared like the Gap rebrand? Remember there's a Gap rebrand that went away. Yeah.
Hannah Yost
It lasted like three days.
JVL
What do you guys think?
Sonny Bunch
I think, I think this ends up standing. I think they, I think there's too much money invest or maybe, maybe what happens is they only do like a handful of stores like this and you know, they leave some of the other ones the same. I'm kind of curious what, how, how broad this rebrand is, but I do, I do think the sign rebrand will either stand as is or they'll have some sort of minimalist man with a minimalist. Cracker Barrel with a, with a minimal. You know, like they'll have like a. I don't know you. As you said, there's too many lines in that. There's, there's, there's a lot going on there. Maybe something a little, a little simpler. Little man with a little.
JVL
So Hannah, do you think they'll walk it back by just like introducing a, A secondary logo that is less extreme and then over time just balance, you know, like a B testing the secondary logo becomes the main logo and this one has disappeared? Or do you think there's a chance like three days from now this thing just, it just goes belly up and they pull the plug on it?
Hannah Yost
No, Sunny. Sunny is right. It's too much money. It's 700 million dollar transformation plan. Like they're that like, I know, sunk cost fallacy. Maybe they pull the plug on it. But like I think they're like, they're, they're pretty committed to this. And again, look at, look at a brand like Jaguar that did the same thing where they, like, abandoned this iconic, beautiful, but complicated thing. The. The only hope I have for it would be looking at a brand like Burberry, where they, for a decade there, they did the whole luxury minimalist thing, and they have completely scrapped that for returning. Return to the classic crest and the horses and whatnot. I don't think. I don't have a lot of hope for it. The retail space, though, I feel like that they. They're super. There's, like, the. The wokification sensitive stuff I do think will stand, which is tragic.
JVL
Well, guys, there you have it. We finally got to do a fun video. We will return to the collapse of democracy at your regularly scheduled time very soon. Good luck, America.
This episode explores the controversial rebranding of Cracker Barrel, the iconic American restaurant and retail chain. With the company’s recent logo update and store redesigns sparking a wave of negative reactions—and a 12% drop in stock price—the Bulwark team deconstructs what the changes mean for Cracker Barrel’s identity, its customers, and the broader trend of “modernizing” nostalgic brands. The conversation ranges from graphic design critique to broader cultural questions about heritage vs. trend-chasing, with spirited debate about whether this kind of corporate transformation is simply bad design, or something culturally and politically significant.
Hannah Yost (on the redesign):
“They have taken the figure with the barrel off... erasing like crucial elements of the logo that made it iconic and, and part of the American nostalgia thing that they were going for.” (01:48)
Sonny Bunch (on the new store aesthetic):
“If you sat somebody down in front of HGTV and made them consume 10,000 hours of remodeling shows... you would get, like, minimalist junk drawers. It looks terrible.” (05:21)
JVL (on old Cracker Barrel chaos):
“The aesthetic was just chaos, Chachki. Nothing in there actually costs more than 7 cents to manufacture.” (07:59)
Hannah Yost (on American memory & nostalgia):
“Cracker Barrel was... thinking about it as like the western country storefront kind of goes against the southern identity that it actually has.” (10:14)
Sonny Bunch:
“There’s this kind of nascent MAGA movement on Twitter to be like anything I don’t like is woke... I don’t think it’s woke. I just think it’s dumb.” (12:43)
Hannah Yost (on personal connection):
“Cracker Barrel functioned kind of like a library. You could audiobooks for checkout. So my grandfather would like every time we would go on a road trip, we would go to Cracker Barrel and pick out books.” (17:18)
JVL (skeptical):
“My connection to Cracker Barrel is that’s the place you stop when one of the kids needs a bathroom between rest areas.” (13:47)
The Bulwark team uses the Cracker Barrel rebrand as a case study in the tension between heritage branding and attempts to modernize by courting younger demographics. The conversation blends design critique, banter on regional/cultural divides, and a discussion of whether all change is necessarily “woke,” or just misguidedly chasing trends. Sentiments range from nostalgia and skepticism to frustration at the loss of quirk—and all agree: this rebrand isn’t going over easy, with either customers or the stock market. The final consensus? The changes are expensive and likely to stand, however unpopular, but may erode what made Cracker Barrel culturally unique in the first place.