The Cracker Barrel restaurant chain is expensive in the heart of many Americans: traditional cuisine in a musical environment “country” and a musical atmosphere that has been attracting part of the country for six decades.
Then, when the company with 660 restaurants and an annual turnover of $ 3.5 billion decides to change its historical logo, triggers a storm against the “awakened” culture on social networks, sink its stock market, divide its employees and cause the anger of a son of Donald Trump.
A LOGO CRAMP
The object of the anger on the part of conservative America: the soda and the simplification of the drawing of the Cracker Barrel brand.
“Uncle Herschel” disappeared, the true uncle of the founder Dan Evins, who was represented in a monkey sitting in a wooden chair, the elbow placed in an imposing barrel.
On the other hand, a simple yellow hexagon hit by the brand “Cracker Barrel” now represents the restaurant chain founded in 1969 and piloted by its general manager Julie Felss Masino, who had judged last year that the company was no longer “as relevant as in the past.”
Except that in the United States that put the conservative president Donald Trump in power, his son Donald Jr. demanded in his account X that he understood: “Damn, what is happening in Cracker Barrel?”
He even resumed a message taken from an account on social networks, “Woke War Room”, accusing the chain of “eliminating an aesthetic that Americans loved and having replaced it with a sterile and soulless brand.”
An elected representative of Florida, Byron Donalds, a republican candidate for the state of governor of the state, expressed in X his attachment to Cracker Barrel, where he claims to have worked.
“Get a greatness to the cookie barrel”
“Its logo was emblematic and its unique restaurants in its kind represented the touch of American culture.”
“No one has claimed the Wook redesign of this brand. It is time to give its size to Cracker Barrel,” Byron Donalds wrote, taking the slogan “restoring his greatness to the United States” by Donald Trump.
Cracker Barrel lost $ 94 million at the end of the weekend of its value and its action fell 7.2% to finish 54.4 dollars.
In one of its restaurants in the state of New Jersey, in Mount Arlington, the new logo is talking about employees and customers.
But his colleague who cleans the tables contradicts it: “Nothing changes, apart from the logo. The kitchen and menu are still the same.”
Kathy Brondolo is of the same opinion. This client for a long time, 67 years retired, thinks that the new logo “makes no difference, provided we can see it along the way.”
Traditional American dishes
In the restaurant of Monte Arlington about 70 kilometers west New York, the guests delight with traditional and American robotros dishes: meat bread, roasted chicken, butter cookies.
In a decoration of armchairs, antiques, hunting trophies and baratijas that hang on the walls.
For the marketing teacher, David Reibstein, at the University of Pennsylvania, “it is not uncommon for a brand to be updated” and, in this case, “it is not an important change.”
But, deplora, “for the traditionalists, tradition has broken and, like the heart of the clientele of cookie barrel, are these traditionalists who live mainly in red (Republican) and conservative states, they rush to react.”
Donald Trump, chosen in November 2024, won an average of three quarters of the country’s counties where at least one restaurant is located, according to the electoral sociologist Dave Wasserman.
Source: BFM TV
