So, I wasn't planning on discussing this. I mean, i tend to think this sorta stuff is too low brow for me, and i dont care about the sort of culture war nonsense that the right is trying to turn this into, but as it turns out, when I think about it, I actually do have a larger point to make here, so here it goes.
When I first heard about the changes, I was like "gee, its like they basically eliminating any point in even going there." I mean that old country aesthetic was the point of the experience. The food isn't good. It hasn't been good in years. I havent stepped foot into a cracker barrel in 4 years because the last few times I went...the food SUCKED. But I have occasionally gone to them on vacation over the years, and there was even a stint back in the late 90s/early 2000s where we actively went there on holidays because the food was good.
It just seemed like, to me, redoing the insides and making the logo simplistic was just peak 2020s corporate encrapification of everything. And that's what the real problem is. The right likes to frame this as a culture war, like the woke are declaring war on their cracker barrel (which itself is kind of emblematic of maga and conservatism these days), and let's face it, I'll be blunt. No one on the left cares about cracker barrel. At worst it's kind of a meme these days since the presence of cracker barrel is correlated with conservatism the way a whole foods is emblematic of liberalism. But otherwise, we don't care. We aren't pushing to remove the guy off the logo, we dont care. But conservatives are acting like its a woke war on conservatism so there was backlash, and yeah they eventually conceded and changed it back. If anything, this is a weird moment where I'm....kind of on MAGA's side, but not for the reasons they are. But let's really talk about corporate encrapification here.
Corporate encrapification is what it sounds like, it's corporations just making everything crappier and worse in their never ending quest for more profits. ANd there's been a discussion about A LOT of different restaurant brands that are just soulless husks of their former self. It's not just cracker barrel, it's EVERYTHING.
It's McDonalds. McDonalds used to be emblematic of a lot of things. For a lot of us millennials, it was a sign of good times. The food was cheap, you got toys with the food, you had the play area with the ballpit and the tubes, and we loved mcdonalds as kids. But nowadays, what is mcdonalds? Well, there are enough pictures online that basically sum up the difference and they come up in facebook feeds and memes. What once was a nice colorful flavorful experience has been replaced by this repressive brutalist architecture. You go to mcdonalds and what do you see? A grey blob. It's a grey, brown, and black block with a generic logo on it. It sells overpriced food that has far outpaced the rate of inflation overall, and let's face it, the whole point was that it was cheap, and it was kid friendly. but McDonalds isn't what it once was. Was it woke that killed it? No. It was corporate entities that slowly stripped the entire experience out of it, and just turned it into a soulless money making machine without even the pretense of the fun kid friendly experience it used to be.
Or take Pizza hut. Same thing. Back in the 90s, it had character. I never really ate inside, but they had the pizza buffet and it was a great experience a lot of my generation is fond of. We also had a thing there if you read enough books in school, you got a free pizza. I would always get the free pizzas because i used to read a lot until college sucked that love of reading out of me (having to read 120 pages every 2 days will do that to a MFer). But yeah. Same thing. Bland. Soulless. Simple logo, brutalist architecture.
Or take IHOP. Like, I used to like to eat there once in a while. I'd get the strawberry crepes. We used to be able to put as much syrup as we wanted on stuff, and had every flavor. Post COVID, they stopped doing that to save money. Now you gotta ask for syrup and i dont think they even offer the flavors it did. And the service got worse too.
Heck lets talk COVID. COVID changed the fast food and restaurant landscape a lot. I can understand temporary disruptions in 2021 as safety precautions or "No OnE WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe!!11!", but let's face it, that isn't the problem in 2025. Since then, these corporations, looking to squeeze every dollar they can out of people, have massively raised their prices, cut back the quality of their services, and sucked the experience out of things.
Now, let's go back to cracker barrel. You used to go there, get good food, you had the nice country aesthetic. You would play the little peg game waiting for the food if you werent packing hardware (as in, gaming hardware, I'd bring my game boys over the years). I'd get the steak, which has declined in quality over the years, hence why i hate eating there now. You'd get the AW root beer out of the bottle, which was a unique experience here. You'd get the country store, which my mom loved, and she used to spend like an hour after eating shopping in it. And me, I'd go out to the front porch where you can sit in the rocking chairs. And they had a giant checkers game with a rug board and oversized pieces, and yeah, everything about it screamed a unique experience. The food over the years has gotten progressively worse. But at least they kept that aesthetic. And the aesthetic is memorable. It's as memorable as going to mcdonalds in the 90s and getting a little sonic the hedgehog toy and playing in the play pen. Or going to burger king and getting those pokemon toys back when they sold the gold cards (I still have the complete set of those somewhere). Or going to pizza hut because you got a free pizza for being a good boy and reading lots of books.
But you know what? over the years, those experiences are gone, and the world we used to live in is gone too. Corporations have decided, in their never ending quest for profits, to get rid of those aesthetics, to go in this bland direction of simplified corporate logos and almost soviet brutalist architecture, and to massively overcharge for worse and worse food.
It's like, for many of these places, the whole point of them existing is just gone. And yet, somehow they carry on, like lifeless zombies. I dont go to mcdonalds any more. The food sucks and it aint even cheap any more. Taco bell still has good food but people keep mentioning a $0.89 burrito in the 90s now costs $6 even though the consumer price index in 1995 was 152 and now it's only 322 (meaning the dollar is worth only slightly less than half and such a burrito should cost $2). But yeah, same corporate remodeling, black buildings and bland soulless architecture. Pizza hut doesnt even exist in my area any more, but same black buildings with simplified logos. And yeah, basically, cracker barrel was getting "the makeover." Ya know, the one where they take anything with any....character out of it and replace it with just the same old 2020s corporate blandness.
That is the real problem with the cracker barrel thing. It isn't wokeness or whatever the right wingers are on about, it's corporations just remodeling their businesses to be as bland and soulless as possible to extract as much money as possible. But in this era of universal sameness, we lost something. We lost the experience. We lost our roots. We have memories of how things used to be 10, 20, 30 years ago, and now that's all gone, replaced by soulless money making machines that eliminate all pretense of "an experience." It's just...give us your money and get out.
So...look. To the rightoids. Relax, we're not coming for your cracker barrels. If anything...you guys are right for once. Like a broken clock moment. Like always, you seem to be right for the wrong reasons, I mean, it's not "wokeness" that's doing this. It's corporations doing corporate things. Here's the thing. To give you an experience with aesthetics, and flavor, that costs money. What costs the least money possible? Grey soviet esque cubes of restaurants, with bland booths and tables, and bland aesthetics, etc. They wanna make money. Corporations hate spending money and they like getting money. So for them, they think, hey, we strip the experience out of the experience, and we replace it with bland nothingness, and stocks go up. Except, MAGA doesn't like it when you mess with their crap and they perceived this as a war on woke, so they went full throttle on ripping cracker barrel to shreds for doing this, because let's face it, it's alienating whatever customer base that place still has left (seriously, even with the aesthetics, the food is awful, don't eat there).
Like really, stuff like cracker barrel is the kind of american culture we should be preserving. Because cracker barrel is a cultural experience, for better or for worse. It's not for everyone, but it doesnt have to be. It beats bland nothingness.
Really, as I get older I'm full on the 2020s suck, and the world was better pre 2016 or something. Maybe pre 2020 with restaurants. I think what made restaurants bad in recent years is the post COVID quest for never ending profits sucking the fun out of everything. COVID was the tipping point there, and now the experience sucks. We really should "make america great again" by making our brands have character again. I actually would agree with the right to some extent on that. I hate how soulless this decade is. Every decade has its own character and aesthetics and this one is the decade of COVID, inflation, the corporate encrapification of everything, and now fascism. We are not in good times. Quite frankly, i think society peaked a while ago and now everything...kinda sucks. Gaming, politics, restaurants. it's all related. Just...everything is getting worse it seems. The america I grew up in is dead and dying and I dont like what's replacing it.
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