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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I hated the new logo, but I don’t get how it was a “woke” thing or had anything to do with left/right politics. It seemed to me like a “sterile flat millennial-modernist design fatigue” thing. I’m very sick of flat designs and everything trying to look like the Apple Store.

I could buy that the politicizing was bot and troll driven.

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I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.

I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...

So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.

They did need to change the demographics. It is currently overwhelmingly “a bunch of old people who are going to die soon”. The same as the CBS network.

Old people are becoming more, not less

The new old people aren’t all of the sudden going to start watching CBS and going to Cracker Barrel.

100 %.I absolutely did not get the political view. Some people made the female CEO out to be the devil.

The logo is very corporate, some might say soulless now, but I get it; it's a first step to modernize the brand.

The logo change was rolled back.

> because apparently, one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy.

I think we can unanimously agree that serif fonts are an existential threat to civilization.

I really hope it was bots that drove the outrage. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what to say.

It’s a logo.

Seems like a plausible strategy to try to associate existing outrage with the cause the bot operator is trying to advance.

Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.

I think some people are convinced that everything they don't like about society (in this case, companies coming up with "sterile" logos) is Woke and generally part of The Culture War.

As they say, the internet makes you stupid.

It's not people that are "convinced". It's the bots.

> the internet makes you stupid.

Fifty percent of people were already of below average intelligence, and the average has been decreasing for years.

Based on the invalid premise that the most commonly held belief is the correct one the internet has now given those idiots super charged megaphones.

I think it is defined backwards. They aren't convined that "woke" isn't everything that they don't like. They define "woke" is whatever you don't like. Mixed in with bigotry and conspiratorial logic attributing the cause, of course.

Any event, no matter how insignificant, is cause enough for the right to manufacture outrage against that ever ill-defined "wokeness" and point the finger at "the radical left".

I would assume the association with “woke” comes from prior instances of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the butter lady all being sanitized such that any such sanitation is now associated with “woke politics.”

It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.

The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.

Insofar as I’m aware the Cracker term does indeed involve whips, but rather than whipping slaves, it was Florida Crackers driving cattle.

However, as relates to the business, I believe it’s meant to invoke a literal barrel of crackers an old timey good Ol’ fashioned country store?

Yes, but the term certainly evolved from its origin. And of course, the name Cracker Barrel was just about a literal barrel of soda crackers.

Cracker Barrel is a nostalgic homage to the old country store, which often featured a barrel of crackers as in actual crackers and sometimes a block of cheese. You could cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker. Cue “people don’t know this but you can just take the crackers! I have one thousand crackers!” meme.

This was also a feature in some bars in the Midwest and South. I doubt the idea of a communal cheese block has survived into modern times, certainly not post pandemic, but I remember stopping into a pub as a kid in Ohio and seeing one and yes I did help myself and am still alive. That block of cheese had to have been one foot by one foot at least.

But they kept the word "Cracker" in the logo! That's why it was so confusing. Was the outrage about them keeping the word? But then they changed the logo back to its original that also had the word? It just makes zero sense. That's why it seems plausible that it might have been inauthentic, even right-wing people are still capable of basic logical reasoning.

Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.

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