Call it a Grand Opening AND a Grand Closing, for a logo anyway: Cracker Barrel has already dropped its rebrand just days after announcing it.
The country-style restaurant chain beloved by MAGA recently announced it was changing its logo to a flatter presentation that dropped the kindly old man leaning on a barrel customers are used to.
And, because conservatives never met a thing they couldn’t turn into a culture war, they absolutely lost their ever-loving minds.
Now, mere days after making the change, the restaurant chain posted a lengthy mea culpa for hurting its customers’ feelings by simplifying its logo.
Customers apparently had a real connection to the elderly man in the original logo, known as “the Old Timer,” leaning on a barrel.
Which of course prompted flurries of jokes online, given that “cracker” is also a derisive slang term for rural white people dating back to Shakespearean times.
In the U.S., it has taken on slave-era connotations referring to “whip-cracking,” though most historians say the term’s reference to whips refers to working with livestock.
Nonetheless the term has come to signify Southern whites of a particularly, um, “traditional” bent, let’s just say. And while Cracker Barrel’s name refers to actual barrels used to ship crackers back in the day so they wouldn’t get broken, the connotation is there nonetheless.
Regardless of its meaning, the removal of the “Old Timer” sparked the usual accusations: The company had gone “woke,” with ire directed particularly strongly at the company’s supposedly woke feminist CEO Julie Felss Masino.
Many compared Cracker Barrel’s rebrand to the Bud Light fiasco in which the beer company hired trans celebrity Dylan Mulvaney to make a single Instagram video about the beer and then every right-winger in America had a mental health episode about it.
The uproar reached such a fever pitch that even our rapidly decaying President, never one to pass up an opportunity to distract from the Epstein files, weighed in on “Truth Social.”
Mere hours later, Cracker Barrel posted a statement saying:
“We thank our guests for sharing your voices and love for Cracker Barrel. We said we would listen, and we have. Our new logo is going away and our ‘Old Timer’ will remain.”
There’s no question the rebrand was a bad choice—not just its logo but its locations’ wraparound porches with rocking chairs are what makes Cracker Barrel distinctive. Getting rid of all that was a pretty dunderheaded move.
Everyone pretty much agrees that the change was a dunderheaded move, but people can’t help but laugh over the uproar.
IDK man, kinda seems like conservatives are the actual cancel culture snowflakes…
