The entire modern “conservative movement” is completely astroturfed. It’s all funded and sponsored by the elites, in order to convince people to reject policies intended to improve their own lives, in favor of policies that exclusively benefit the elites.
It’s almost as if someone figured out that conservatives, in an effort to feel the need to play the victim, will react negatively and thus be more engaged when presented with non-conforming news.
A sort of dissonance…that happens cognitively.
Conservatives love playing the victim.
Trans women existing = an attack on all women existing
Not being allowed to pressure children into praying at school = being denied religious freedom
Haha… It’s funny cause it’s true
Most right-wing outrage has been driven by bots for a decade. Yeah, what’s new?
People need to remember that these themed businesses are taking huge risk by maintaining their identity. If a CB goes out of business they practically take a loss on the building because no one wants to buy an old timey restaurant. It’s too niche. Companies are going to bland and grey so the properties are easier to sell. It was never about woke and everything to do with money as usual.
Especially since Cracker Barrel is publicly traded.
That said, I don’t think Cracker Barrel locations are all that different from Applebees or Chili’s. The “country store” is basically a waiting area, but with merch instead of more benches for waiting to be seated. Or it’s like Buffalo Wild Wings and its counter for order pickups and sauce sales.
I think the main intent here is to appeal to more people. A new logo could get people interested who weren’t before.
I like Cracker Barrel’s four vegetarian sides plate. I can pick reasonably healthy options and the price isn’t terrible. They are my preferred interstate-adjacent dining option on roadtrips. I’m even a loyalty member.
Yet I can’t imagine spending one microsecond thinking about their logo let alone being stupid enough to be manipulated into having an opinion and then believing it relates to politics. Unless you are the majority shareholder, your view is utterly irrelevant. Shut up and either patronize the place or not.
There are a lot of people today on the right who cosplay as libertarians but somehow care deeply about the logo of a company they don’t own.
Exactly.
I only go to Cracker Barrel on road trips and when they happen to be near where I plan to stop anyway. I don’t go out of my way to go there, but I do prefer them over fast food joints.
Their new logo is stupid, mostly because it reminds me of Denny’s. It doesn’t change whether I’ll go there, it only makes me think their logo is stupid when I do.
Imagine how much more successful any given business might be by simply… ignoring Twitter.
For all we know CB may have been behind the outrage
Peter Teil straight up told an audience that he will push ideas with tech.
Who had money on Cracker Barrel faking outrage about a plan that wasn’t to be?
Someone got offended that they took the cracker off the logo.
I mean they took the barrel off too. What is cracker barrel without a cracker and a barrel?
To be fair, the new logo is kind of barrel shaped. It’s also Denny’s shaped…
A bunch of my friends thought the logo change was dumb, too.
A bit rude to call them bots. ;p
There’s a difference between thinking the change is dumb, which is something that happens in an individual’s own mind as a passing thought, and thinking you suddenly need to tell everyone about it, and have arguments about it, and seek validations of your passing thought about it in large communities of other people and turn it into a national discussion. Bots are why everyone started talking about it, and that made people feel like they needed to tell everyone else what they thought about it too.
People were simply not losing any sleep over this (and never would have) until bots made it go viral. Some people might have legitimately formed such a thought without any significant outside influence, but it would have been an empty, meaningless, inconsequential thought, like thousands of others that likely go through everyone’s brain in any given day to be summarily dismissed and promptly forgotten.
The point the article is raising is that the attention economy has now weaponized such insignificant thoughts, and can exploit them into controlling people’s behavior, and thus, create actual real world consequences, the same way a hacker exploits access into a home computer to turn it into a botnet that they can orchestrate to perform actual attacks. It may not do any particular harm to the individual who has been motivated in this way, but it can do catastrophic damage to the targets of their collective wrath, scorn, and ridicule. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words might destroy civilization.
The idea though is that their thoughts are being influenced by bots
The point where I realized it was fake was when nobody was complaining about the font or going “Uhm, aktually it’s ‘typeface’!”
I hadn’t heard of the change, nor the outraged bot army.
How about those Epstein files?
cracker bargle
tl;ds looked like a bot got hold of it
Culture war keeps the rubes fighting the wrong people so that the real villains can keep robbing them.
Honestly I just thought it was funny they got rid of the cracker and the barrel.
Through the course of the controversy, I learned that the “cracker” was the Uncle Herschel mentioned in the menu a few times. He’s a character of theirs, something of a mascot, though a much subtler one than most other restaurant mascots. He’s in the art but his name isn’t widely advertised. A couple menu items have his name in them (e.g. Uncle Herschel’s Breakfast), but the name is not connected to the mascot in the logo.
Oh, I also thought it was funny that they said they changed the logo to be more inclusive (I guess of people who don’t look like Uncle Herschel), but they still don’t operate in California due to that state’s progressive policies, so they can shove their “inclusive” talk. Actions speak louder than words. They do hire women, and people of color, which is a great start for a restaurant so steeped in “Southern values,” but you can’t say nobody is excluded from the table while excluding an entire state based on the politics of its government. That’s just as dumb as rock groups refusing to play whichever Southern state did a stupid thing most recently.
The cracker in Cracker Barrel is that the barrels are “Cracker Barrels”
Exactly! Barrels full of crackers. And the new logo kinda looks like a barrel (it also kinda looks like Denny’s, but that’s neither here nor there).
They do hire women, and people of color, which is a great start for a restaurant so steeped in “Southern values,”
I’d say that having women and people of color cook for you has been a Southern value for a long time.
