While driving through northern Arkansas on the way to a wedding in rural Missouri earlier this year, I decided to treat an old college friend from Bangladesh to a meal at that bastion of Americana: Cracker Barrel.
I hadn’t been to a Cracker Barrel in years, but it was just as I remembered it — the cluttered general store area full of knick-knacks, the kitschy memorabilia cluttered on the wall, the intentionally dated homestyle atmosphere, and the relatively quick service. It was, in a word, quaint. Exactly as advertised. My friend was not particularly impressed. When he expressed that he didn’t get why Cracker Barrel is so great, I responded, in jest, “That’s why you’ll never be an American.”
The executives who run Cracker Barrel obviously share the same opinion as my Bangladeshi friend, since they’re replacing the old-timey charm that makes Cracker Barrel a special place with the same soulless, whitewashed aesthetic that can only be dreamed up and approved in an equally soulless corporate boardroom or at a high-rise consultancy firm.
The typical Cracker Barrel’s aesthetic is very obviously an idealized version of yesteryear’s America, but in a natural, sincere way. It effortlessly harkens back to a simpler time — a time your grandparents knew and lived in — when mom-and-pop general stores and diners hadn’t yet given way to the march of progress. And that’s the entire appeal of the restaurant: For an hour or so, you can go back and indulge in a bit of harmless nostalgia.
By contrast, this new aesthetic tries to pay lip service to that same sense of wizened charm but ultimately comes off as spiritually sterile, manufactured, and hollow. Every decorative item on the wall in the video above looks like it could have come from Chip and Joanna Gaines’ Hearth and Hand line at Target — trying way too hard and not enough at the same time.
It looks … like every other middle-grade sit-down restaurant, just with some rolling pins and the odd chicken picture hung up on the wall — maximized for efficiency rather than the customer experience. It’s hard to imagine sitting down and having a long conversation with your family over several refills of sweet tea in a place like this.
So why make these changes? It seems as though declines in guest traffic in recent years helped convince the corporate suits that the restaurants needed a more “modern” look to bring in new customers.
Cracker Barrel has admittedly declined in quality over the last few years (like everything else), and corporations often delude themselves into believing that the problem is not that they’ve cut corners on quality and customer service but that their decor is “outdated.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the company is making tweaks to its menu, like adding shrimp dishes (yay?), but the biggest investment is undoubtedly in completely sterilizing the decor, with the company’s finance chief stressing to the WSJ that the renovations require “a lot of capital.”
For now, only a fraction of Cracker Barrel’s stores have been “spruced up” — around 40 of 660 locations as of May — and the extent of the so-called “glow-ups” varies, the Journal reported in June. However, the social media backlash might convince the company to back off any further attempts at “modernizing” what is designed to be nostalgic.
Cracker Barrel, founded and based in Tennessee, has a distinct rural Southern identity, but this remodelling push trades that identity for a rootless, intentionally drab imitation. The loss of distinct culture and character in American cities and towns as big box stores and chain restaurants take over has been commented on for years. Whether it’s Cracker Barrel’s Southern decor or distinct regional accents, the differences that make America such a unique place are giving way to a monoculture that’s being pushed, intentionally or otherwise, by corporate and media forces.
Hayden Daniel is a staff editor at The Federalist. He previously worked as an editor at The Daily Wire and as deputy editor/opinion editor at The Daily Caller. He received his B.A. in European History from Washington and Lee University with minors in Philosophy and Classics. Follow him on Twitter at @HaydenWDaniel
