Cracker Barrel Drops New Logo And Removes Pride Page
The restaurant chain dumped LGBTQ+ Alliance and DEIB Team information amid a social media firestorm from conservatives over a logo switch-up.
Featured Image: Photo by Paul Weaver/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
If you’ve ever checked out the Cracker Barrel website (why would you?), you’d read: “Cracker Barrel is where folks can get comfortable.” Once again, the company has proven that, really, they mean only a particular type of folk.
The Southern-style restaurant chain has quietly taken down its Pride web page and is redirecting visitors to the “Culture and Belonging” section and its assurance: “Everyone feels at home at Cracker Barrel.” LGBTQ+ Alliance and DEIB Team information has disappeared altogether, replaced by trite and meaningless messaging, like “You make the moment” and “In it together.”
“In connection with the Company’s brand work, we have recently made updates to the Cracker Barrel website, including adding new content and removing of out-of-date content,” a Cracker Barrel spokesperson confirmed to Fox News Digital.
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The timing aligns with the restaurant’s logo debacle. The chain recently underwent a $700 million rebranding that included a snazzy new menu and logo, the latter of which drew a surprising amount of right-wing backlash. The new logo, which removed the featured barrel and man, named Uncle Herschel, simply read, “Cracker Barrel.”
Cracker Barrel announced it would be dropping the new logo earlier this week, after the barrage of outrage became too much. Whatever happened to nostalgia? Plans to lure in younger customers with a modern font ignited an outcry of “wokeness”. Surely this must be part of the DEI regime’s agenda!
Even Trump joined the chorus, urging the company to keep the old logo, adding sage advice based on his own example of making the U.S. the “HOTTEST” country—because until he had a second go at trampling the Rose Garden, “it was “DEAD.”
IMAGE: “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again” via Truth Social
The crumb doesn’t fall far from the biscuit. Don, Jr. got in on the action, reposting a rant from @WokeWarRoom and adding his own take on X: “WTF is wrong with @CrackerBarrel ??” (We all know that Junior is an enthusiastic consumer of the “Classic Meatloaf” special when he’s not dining on inlaid marble at Mar-a-Lago.)
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Image: via X
Well, folks, Cracker Barrel may have put on a superficial show of support for a spell—along with a large swath of the corporate universe that was happy to add glittery signs to our parades when it was good for PR, and to rip them down when the going got tough. Cracker Barrel’s track record is particularly notorious given its history of brazen discrimination against its own LGBTQ staff. Back in the early 1990s, the restaurant made headlines for refusing to “employ individuals… whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values which have been the foundation of families in our society.”
Specifically, they gave notice to a cook (now activist), Cheryl Summerville, in 1992: “This employee is being terminated due to violation of company policy. The employee is gay.”
Boycotts were launched, pension fund holdings leveraged, and eventually the company rescinded its policy, and queer folks were again allowed to serve coffee and hashbrowns to a mostly conservative following that didn’t want those employees there in the first place. It took more than a decade for the company to change its policy to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Small wonder that customer traffic is declining, revenue is pointing downward, and rankings are in the bottom third for employee retention. We’re crying tears into our gravy.
