Bottom of the barrel

With attacks on a restaurant chain, the right-wing "war on woke" takes another bizarre turn.

Is Cracker Barrel — Cracker Barrel — really the next front in the culture war?

Apparently so. Your grandparents’ favorite country-themed restaurant finds itself in the gunsights of the right-wing indignation industry because the Lebanon, Tenn.-based restaurant chain had the temerity to redesign its restaurant interiors and update its corporate logo for the first time since 1977.

Inside the redesigned restaurants, there is less clutter, better lighting, and updated menus. The new barrel-shaped logo retains the familiar gold-and-brown color scheme and prominently displays the company’s name, but the old guy in overalls sitting in a rocking chair next to a barrel is gone.

The company’s stock took a nosedive on Wall Street last week with the release of the new logo as the culture warriors of the right, infuriated by these changes, ran to the ramparts.

As Christopher F. Rufo put it on X on Thursday: Conservatives “must break the Barrel. It's not about this particular restaurant chain—who cares—but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’ The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now.”

The controversy erupted days after President Donald Trump intensified a more serious Kulturkampf offensive. His target is the museums along the National Mall in Washington D.C., where the nation’s history — good and bad — is put on display for the world to see.

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” our nation’s self-appointed historian-in-chief declared in a social media post. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” For good measure, he added: “This country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.”

Trump’s crude call to sanitize American history into uplifting pablum might seem to have little in common with a social-media squall about a restaurant chain. It is certainly far more serious (and likely to be the subject of further musings here). But each, in their way, illustrates the fixation on “woke” concerns for social justice and the supposed evils of diversity, equity, and inclusion that keep the MAGA base energized and infuriated.

The Cracker Barrel kerfuffle comes as the company pursues an overhaul of its restaurants after years of stagnant growth. Even with the changes, much of what makes Cracker Barrel distinctive remains. The tables still feature the restaurant’s pegboard game. Store-related merchandise is still available.

As for the logo, this is the fifth time it has been redesigned since the company was founded in 1969. The latest version “is now rooted even more closely to the iconic barrel shape and word mark that started it all,” Cracker Barrel said in a press release, which made no mention of anything having to do with DEI.

In a saner world, the logo change would go unnoticed, except perhaps in the pages of Ad Age or Restaurant Business Magazine. But that’s not the world we live in. Commenting on the logo change, brand strategist Kelly O’Keefe told CBS News: “In a normal marketing environment, this would not even be noticed, but these are not normal times.”

As if to confirm O’Keefe’s assessment, Brandon Morse asserts in Red State that the Cracker Barrel rebrand is the culmination of a nefarious years-long plot by “the left.” Citing Upward News, Morse traces this scheme to the 1990s when the company (like many others at the time) adjusted its employment practices and worked to end discriminatory treatment of customers.

“The left set out to destroy Cracker Barrel, and one way or another, it succeeded. Cracker Barrel may soon find itself erased from people's list of places to eat, and even if it still manages to stay in business, the Cracker Barrel you once knew is gone,” Morse predicted.

His morose conclusion: Cracker Barrel is “[a]nother thing the left has destroyed.”

As Rufo noted, the stock market seems to be taking a dim view of the changes at Cracker Barrel. After the new logo was unveiled, the company lost more than $94 million in market value as share prices fell 7.4 percent in Thursday trading. The decline slowed but continued Friday.

But it’s too early to tell if Cracker Barrel will suffer lasting damage from its changes. CEO Julie Felss Massino bravely insisted last week on “Good Morning America” that “people like what we’re doing.” Even if they don’t, there might be a simpler explanation than a grassroots rejection of imagined “wokeness.”

The new Cracker Barrel might just be boring.

The “redesign isn’t ‘woke,’ although it is understandable that those who have a conservative mindset and are wary of change would be less than enthused to walk into a Cracker Barrel and find it indistinguishable from a First Watch,” Jim Geraghty noted in National Review. “It’s just bland and less distinguishable than it was before, and that does seem like a reflection of a bad trend in corporate America.”

That’s a sane, measured analysis. But it’s likely to be overshadowed in the days to come. Corporate miscalculation doesn’t serve the political purposes of the grievance mongers.