MEANINGLESS MOD.

Once upon a time, Canada meant red-coated Mounties and Canadian Pacific trains tackling the Selkirks and the Rockies.  From far and wide, a beaver stood on guard for that company.

Sometime during the declining years of the American High, a lot of railroads engaged in makeovers, sometimes, it seemed, to conceal the fact that they even were railroads.  It might have been putting new paint on rusty steel without chipping it first.

Had the Tonight Show recorded in Boston, the whole country would know about the Boston & Maine and New Haven of the era.  "Herbert Matter could put new paint on the New Haven and on the Boston and Maine, but if the trains were unreliable, it made no difference."

What of Lippincott and Marguiles?  "There were other memorable railroad image updates, some of them tied to Lippincott & Margulies. One was notorious, the “mating worms” logo of the new Penn Central of 1968. Another was Amtrak’s “pointless arrow” and patriotic red, white, and blue of 1971."

Canadian Pacific, which at the time was a transportation company flying planes, sailing Empress class ocean liners on the seven seas, operating trucks to go where the trains did not (something that was heavily regulated Stateside) and for all I know stabling sled dogs to meet the trucks where the road ended and the snow pack began, and operating hotels in the big cities and the resorts of the Rockies, engaged in one of those image updates, in which lots of money went into creative types coming up with a Motion Mark.

These were colour-coded, orange for the Concorde they never flew and the conventional jets they did fly, green for the funnels (a square shape on a raked funnel is an abomination, but that's the way they sailed) and brown or gold for the china at the hotels.

With that background in mind, dear reader, let us contemplate, with Pajamas Media's Matt Margolis, Cracker Barrel's simplified herald.

When Cracker Barrel unveiled its new logo this week, the company framed it as a blend of tradition and progress. Conservatives, however, erupted with outrage. Personally, I think folks need to take a breath, and I’m going to tell you why. I have a feeling many of you won’t agree with me, but hear me out.

“Anchored in Cracker Barrel’s signature gold and brown tones, the updated visuals will appear across menus and marketing collateral, including the fifth evolution of the brand’s logo, which is now rooted even more closely to the iconic barrel shape and word mark that started it all,” the company explained in a press release.

It's the same sort of corporate-speak that accompanies the roll-out of a new herald, whether at a corporation or at a university.  Northern Illinois University was way ahead of Cracker Barrel coming up with a simplified herald that looked like a Stratego piece the better to conserve pixels on their web page.  The faculty didn't like it, but, oh, well.

And cleaning up the pixels might have been what Cracker Barrel's redesign team had in mind.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, the new logo doesn’t really work for me. I don’t understand why the shape isn’t an actual barrel, and there’s a bit too much negative space. But I get why they did it. In an era where every brand has to look good shrunk down on a smartphone screen—or plastered across social media platforms—sleeker, bolder, minimalist designs often win out over detailed, old-fashioned imagery with too many details that don’t scale well.

Whether it “makes sense” aesthetically is another story, but from a corporate standpoint, I see the logic.

That said, while I don’t exactly celebrate the redesign, I’m not in the camp that thinks this is some Bud Light-level disaster. Some on the right have compared this decision to Dylan Mulvaney’s partnership with Bud Light, claiming Cracker Barrel just detonated its longtime customer base. That’s ridiculous. Changing a logo—even a clumsy redesign—isn’t remotely on the same scale as aligning your brand with a dude who pretends to be a girl.

In Cracker Barrel's situation, Billy Binion argues in Reason, the restaurant might have had a bit of the problem the railroads were dealing with in attempting to distinguish themselves from railroads.

Cracker Barrel's logo change did not come out of left field, despite that some just noticed. It's part of a sustained makeover effort to lift the company out of a fairly dire financial slump. That doesn't mean the strategy will work—that the logo alteration sent the stock tumbling may very well be an indicator it won't (although the jury is still out on its long-term effects). But Cracker Barrel didn't need to "go woke" to go broke. Because it was, colloquially speaking, already broke.

The company's troubles—with or without the Old Timer—are reflected in its valuation. In April 2021, Cracker Barrel stock was selling for $175.09 a share, according to its market trajectory on TradingView. Earlier this month, prior to any logo drama, it was selling for $57.27—a plunge of more than two-thirds, which, by any standard, is pretty grim. That didn't happen overnight, nor is it even Cracker Barrel's nadir. The company has steadily sagged over the last several years, its value dipping as low as $37.33 per share last September.

The chain is not alone. In February, Denny's announced that it would close up to 178 locations by the end of 2025.  Not long before, TGI Fridays and Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy. All of these restaurants can be classified under the same general umbrella as Cracker Barrel, with the exception that people cannot fault a misplaced controversy over wokeness for their failures. The biscuits could not even save Red Lobster. The business landscape is changing. It's rough out there.

Cracker Barrel, for its part, appears to be aware of this, and has been trying to adapt for a while. The logo is just the latest change. It has also updated its decor, for example, to give off a more modern vibe, and made changes to its menu. The effort, it seems, is tailored in part to attracting a younger demographic, who have never exactly been Cracker Barrel's target market. (In one of its more seismic shifts, the company also began selling alcohol about five years ago.)

The changes, at least at the moment, look to be fairly fruitless. Older customers—Cracker Barrel's bread and butter—have been slow to return en masse post-pandemic. And the business likely always faced an uphill battle in trying to rebrand for a new audience, because the company's appeal is so squarely married to its specific old-time charm.

So it goes; the long-time diners would prefer the country-store clutter to the whitewashed walls and Martha Stewart shelving.  They weren't coming in the way they used to.  Canadian Pacific invested heavily in dome cars and stainless-steel streamlined coaches and sleeping cars: those still roll, for the present, on Via Rail's cross country train.

The motion marks?  Gone.  Canadian Pacific restored the beaver a few years ago, and he's standing on guard from the Bay of Fundy to Lázaro Cárdenas.

The chap sitting by the barrel?  He might be resting now, but if there still is a Cracker Barrel (the traditional casual dining sector of the restaurant business being under some stress) a future management might restore him.