Business and the stupid conclusions we accept
Back in 2013, I set foot in a JC Penny for the first time in a decade. The chain had made a high-profile deal with Ellen DeGeneres and was in the process of modernizing their stores and bringing in new fashion lines, which included some colorful, comfortable socks. Things were really looking up for this old brand.
To say that I was in a JC Penny is remarkable because it was the only real option growing up, but was not even on my radar as an adult. The store made me think of a specific kind of person who would go there, you know? Like grandmas looking for birthday sweaters for their grandchildren. But I was going into that store for myself. For cool socks, no less.
A month later, the CEO was being forced out. His great sin was lowering the regular prices on everything and bringing attractive clothes into the stores.
Of course, that’s not what the headlines said.
JC Penny brought in this CEO because they were struggling — just like every mall anchor store in America was struggling. And they brought him in to update and modernize the JC Penny experience. And he did. But a big part of their customer base, grandmas buying bland clothes, didn’t like the changes, particularly the lower prices, which seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? What they wanted was what they had before: higher prices and coupons and sales that made the prices seem lower. They didn’t want lower prices—they wanted to get lower prices with coupons. They liked the game of it more than they liked knowing they were paying less.
This lesson, about knowing your base, was the lesson everybody seemed to be taking from it, rather than the fact that the store was struggling before, that the board had brought the CEO in expressly to change things, and that returning to the previous practices didn’t solve those very existential problems. But the CEO was sent packing and the board of directors who brought him in and sent him out made a public apology to Wall Street and grandmas everywhere.
Expanding the brand
I keep thinking about this last week whenever I would see something about Cracker Barrel, a restaurant as over-extended and burdened by nostalgia as any there is. Like JC Penny, it has a particular clientele that is aging and prospects that are dwindling. They hired a CEO to right the ship and, while I was pissed they got rid of Uncle Hershel’s years ago, I also wanted the menu to change; and more than anything, I wanted to not hate myself for eating there.
Everyone has an opinion about brand changes, particularly around logos. So as Cracker Barrel revealed their intentions to rebrand as, shocker, a restaurant people under the age of 45 might want to set foot into, people who never took a high school art class wanted to share their thoughts about the design of the logo and culture warriors took a break from attacking trans people and librarians to take up arms for the sake of white supremacy and fears of genocide at a resteraunt planted at every exit on the freeway. Even the tin-pot dictator-in-chief weighed in, proving once again that there actually isn’t a substantive problem with the new logo. They just like being pissed off about white people stuff.
Cracker Barrel didn’t walk the logo back because white people all over the country banded together in a show of solidarity for a chain restaurant that serves the blandest gravy on the planet. There wasn’t enough time for that. It lost $100 million in valuation, meaning Wall Street didn’t like what it was seeing, in part, because people were freaking out. In other words, fake money that doesn’t exist dropped quickly and accountants panicked. Not because anyone messed up. Backlash has a way of overrepresenting itself in the data.
It was also part of the design.
Not by the company, but by the activist investor on the board, who, last fall, argued that this move would kill the company, something the investor knows something about, as a wealth extractor and brand destroyer. He wasn’t so much predicting as promising.
Missing from the response to the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle is the same half of the story ignored in the JC Penney Problem a decade ago: the brand is staring at a future on life support and change is necessary. Remodels are useful. Brand updates are normal. And yet, when the change arrived, guess what? Some people didn’t like it and treated it as more important than the Epstein Files.
And one of those people was on the board, trying to tank his own company.
Liking change is never the point, however. When change is necessary, it takes guts to make the change. The public was wrong about JC Penny, and given the chance, a revitalized brand might have helped, not only the chain, but other mall stores, bringing a different impression of shopping. Or perhaps given the brand a better chance of surviving into the next generation.
Cracker Barrel isn’t a widely attractive brand at present.
Which is why the Right Wing went hard to protect it. Because it doesn’t want Cracker Barrel to be more inclusive — they want the opposite — to make the world adapt to it. The white guy in overalls, the knick knacks and old-timey brands, the fake-history and the nostalgia-based experiences — it is all performing common culture; if you’re a white southerner of a certain age. Or a northerner who dreams of a mythical Dixie that never was. Literally the opposite of common. More like controlled.
The point was always money. Not money lost on an aborted brand change or the supposed wrongness of the attempt, but the money the company already didn’t have. The money it is bound to not have in the future. I expect a few more conservatives might performatively go to Cracker Barrel for a couple of months now, to show their support. And perhaps Cracker Barrel will join Chick-fil-a and Steak and Shake as brands worth boycotting. But this isn’t the whole story. Or the take-away.
The future looks bleak for a brand that refuses to connect with the next generation. Especially one that is so bullishly accepting its place in the zeitgeist as another culture warrior destination for false nostalgia with so little to offer the uninitiated beyond knick knacks and bland gravy.