Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino attempted, and failed, to erase Highway America’s beloved country store. Masino’s doomed endeavor is just the latest example of refinement culture’s steamrolling homogeneity, but this felt different, somehow much worse, than previous flattenings of consumer couture. Cracker Barrel’s eccentricities and nostalgia kitsch turned a remodel into a reckoning.
Of course, the woke Millennialification is cringe-inducing. However, this is not the first overhaul of an established chain with pop culture power. Previous iterations of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut also invoke nostalgia, with images from the 1990s and early aughts making the rounds online once a season or so. Cracker Barrel, clearly, had a different pull. In practical terms, it has always been a sit-down-first experience, but the backlash runs deeper than that.
The logo may have been salvaged, but if interior remodels continue apace, your roadside retreat will become a hospice grab-and-go.
Founded in 1969 as a purposefully nostalgic endeavor, the Cracker Barrel project set out from the get-go to tug on your heartstrings. It evoked a bucolic America already gone by, the decor a launching point for older relatives to spin yarns about the good old days. Pizza Hut nostalgia is down simply to a decade of construction and the passage of time.
Cracker Barrel’s true uniqueness is its emphasis on an ambience that says “stay,” inviting customers to settle in and reminisce. Whether you were playing the peg game over butter and biscuits or rifling through the wooden toy and Weasel Ball aisle, Cracker Barrel never motioned toward the door. Cozy and familiar, Cracker Barrel invited you into the tangible world of things: clutter, knickknacks, antiques, wood, gas lamps, and farm equipment. The walls were heavy. Stone hearths anchored every dining room. The Barrel presented itself as a destination, as the American grandparent par excellence, a barn-den of earthly delights.
Contrast this with the new interior. The tyranny of gray, of symmetry and 90-degree angles, becomes omnipresent. It is profoundly soulless: rolling pins arranged in perfect squares and sequence, kettles in fluorescent color affixed exactly upright in rows on bland canvas displays. In essence, Cracker Barrel’s simulacrum of a country home is abstracted even farther into its most literal parts and parcels, calling to mind cooking blog thumbnails and pallid pop art. It points toward the digital, to the representative over the real, and even worse, it pushes the consumer toward the exit. It seems to say “get in and get out.”
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Photo by Joe Raedle / Contributor via Getty Images
The digital is fundamentally temporary, the way in which we interact with essays, short-form video content, tweets, and the rest. The sign of this is the gray, the sleek, nostalgic props rendered in perfect lines like typeface, all blaring with the same refrain: EXIT. They’re razing the physical and replacing it with a digital reconstruction.
Everything is an airport. Everyone, everywhere, wants you out as soon as you walk in. The restful, the physical are stripped away in order to sap the hearth of its heat so you never get comfortable enough to stay. There is nowhere to stop and wait for a while. You have to keep moving, racing through a world of commodities blurring together into one long strand of gruel.
The last redoubt of color and clutter, Cracker Barrel is now just another franchise, flattened and homogenized. The logo may have been salvaged, but if interior remodels continue apace, your roadside retreat will become a hospice grab-and-go.
We still crave slivers of the real, of invitation and warmth, of the physical world. We desire escape from our escapes, entry into the real and exit from the digital. Cracker Barrel’s rebrand discarded the pleasant lie of highway stopover as home away from home. Venues will increasingly resemble the virtual as comfort food becomes uncomfortable.
