Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino made clear all the way back in last May that she planned a woke coup to kill the culture of the beloved restaurant chain.
“We’re just not as relevant as we once were,” Masino told far-left CBS News last May. “[W]e are not leading in any area,” she added. “[T]he reality is we’ve lost some market share, especially at dinner.”
At the time, per CBS, “Cracker Barrel’s sales ha[d] flatlined, with revenue for its most recent quarter unchanged at $935.4 compared with a year earlier, while its stock has tumbled 40% so far in 2024.”
Masino told CBS that she was testing different food items and more dynamic pricing based on the average income in each store area.
“I want to emphasize that optimizing our price points across the menu doesn’t mean just increasing prices,” she said. “In several places, it may actually mean taking the opposite approach. We understand the lower-end consumer is challenged and value is and will remain an important part of the brand and we will work vigorously to protect it.”
Then came the remodeling. “The goal, simply put, was to freshen things in such a way as to be noticeable and attractive but still feel like Cracker Barrel,” she continued. “Historically, Cracker Barrel has made limited changes to our design aesthetic, and we’ve probably relied a little too much on what was perceived to be the timeless nature of our concept.”
No one opposes change, especially if your stock has lost 40 percent of its market share. In fact, in that situation, change is necessary. What’s at issue here is the type of change this dimwit initiated, and it’s the kind of change we tend to see when leftist women are put in charge.
As we have seen with Bud Light and NPR, leftist women are so self-involved and narcissistic that rather than increase the appeal of what works to their already sizable customer base, they force the institution to go woke so that it appeals to them.
This is exactly what the Disney Grooming Syndicate’s LucasFilm chief Kathleen Kennedy did to Star Wars and Indiana Jones. She feminized both franchises, she turned both into an image of how she sees herself, and in doing so killed not one but two golden geese.
If you give a boy a GI Joe action figure, he will become GI Joe. If you give a girl a GI Joe action figure, she will turn GI Joe into herself. Suddenly, GI Joe is out shopping and attending tea parties. Men and women are different. Sorry, they just are. Certainly, there are exceptions, but how else to explain how Cracker Barrel, an establishment that directly appeals to Southern traditions and a church social environment, now looks like every other sterile and homogenized chain restaurant?
Instead of embracing what made Cracker Barrel a beloved brand, Julie Felss Masino turned Cracker Barrel into Julie Felss Masino.
She turned Cracker Barrel into Bed, Bath, and Beyond when she could have increased the appeal to her customer base. Add a row of American flags to the roof, bring in live country music on the weekends, advertise that everything you sell will be made in America…
Removing Cracker Barrel’s personality is suicide, an act of aggression against the customer base.
Might as well go to Ruby Tuesday.
What’s the difference?
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.
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