Cracker Barrel changed its logo, pissing off conservatives, so they’re calling it “woke,” which is the conservative slur for anything they don’t like, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with race. But it isn’t just online nonsense—Cracker Barrel’s stock lost nearly $100 million in value over the switch.
Cracker Barrel wasn’t in the best position before all of this. The company’s been struggling in recent years. In an attempt to change its fortunes, the chain’s 55-year-old image has been updated under CEO Julie Felss Masino, who openly said the brand was “not as relevant as we once were.”
It seems the idea behind the rebrand was to update the folksy image, revamp the menu, and spruce up the stores a bit. Everyone absolutely lost it over this run-of-the-mill corporate strategy, I think because we were all exposed to just a bit too much lead as children. But at least it’s led to tweets like this…
Now why would they remove the cracker & the barrel? https://t.co/diVhCp1mNe
— The Princess & The Frog (@GabTheGem) August 20, 2025
Conservatives online are complaining that the removal of the white guy next to a barrel is somehow DEI-related or…something. Who knows. It’s difficult to parse the motivations of the deranged.
Lost among the disingenuous culture war madness of it all, we’re losing sight of the broader picture here: Absolutely none of you care that much about Cracker Barrel. I refuse to believe it. If you did, the company would not have been in financial dire straits before all this. You weren’t eating there because it’s deeply unhealthy, and while it used to be delicious, the quality of both the food and service has tanked in recent years.
On top of that, everything was already expensive, and then Trump’s tariffs made it all significantly worse. People can’t afford to eat out like they used to. There are at least a dozen vectors from which Cracker Barrel is taking a beating, and not a single one of them is wokeness or DEI-related.
If you’re complaining about “woke Cracker Barrel,” you are a person so intellectually lazy that you can’t imagine bland, generic, unoriginal corporate thinking is a much more efficient ruiner of the things you love than the concept of inclusion could ever be.
Shares dropped 7.2 percent in a single day, shaving off $94 million in value, and at one point flirted with losing nearly $200 million, not because of woke—a word that has been rendered meaningless by conservatives—but because of the same thinking that rendered every fast food joint a modernist little cube when they all used to have such distinct personalities. It’s also why every rental apartment is lined with stick-on fake gray wood panels. The vastly wealthy business leaders of America do not have a single original thought among them. It’s copy-and-paste cookie-cutter horseshit all the way down.
The blandness of the strategy is the reason the logo change went over like a sloppy fart in an elevator, thus tanking its stock and igniting one of the stupider culture wars in recent memory, which is really saying something. Inclusivity had nothing to do with it. But when you’ve primed your political base to see white genocide everywhere they look, they’ll find it in the stupidest of places, even in a deeply unoriginal, deeply uninteresting Cracker Barrel logo. It’s like a Rorschach test for racists.
Speaking to CBS, brand strategist Kelly O’Keefe summarized it best: “In a normal marketing environment, this would not even be noticed, but these are not normal times. Politically inert marketing moves are being labeled as political for opportunistic reasons.”
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