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Bulwark Takes

Cracker Barrel’s Glow Up Is a Glow Down

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

Politics, Society & Culture, News, News Commentary

4.71.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sonny, JVL, and Hannah Yoest take on the Cracker Barrel rebrand, from the missing barrel man to the minimalist junk drawer décor. Is this about chasing Gen Z, corporate blandness, or American nostalgia gone wrong?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Building a coffee business, serving the best Americano in town is up to you.

0:23.0

But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the SumUp point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.com.com. To learn more. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleagues, Hannah Yost and Sunny Bunch, and we're going to break down the big news from today.

0:27.7

Cracker Barrel, the beloved American institution, has been ruined by woke. I'm kidding. It's not

0:33.5

ruined my woke, but they made like a big logo change and we're all having a lot of freak out and feelings about it.

0:40.2

Before we delve deep into what is happening at Cracker Barrel, the most urgent news of the day, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the feed.

0:47.0

Because every once in a while, you'll get a fun video like this instead of a video about the end of the republic.

0:52.9

Hannah, when Cracker Barrel debuted their new logo on Thursday,

0:57.0

shares the publicly traded company plummeted 12%.

1:00.0

So the market doesn't like the new logo.

1:02.0

Will you start out by telling me what your thoughts as a graphic design professional are?

1:08.0

It's part of a larger trend.

1:10.0

We keep seeing all of these heritage brands take

1:13.5

a really iconic logo and then shift to we're going to we're going to capture the youth. We're

1:19.6

going to outreach and get Gen Z in our stores with a new identity that is fresh and young. And it

1:26.6

doesn't work. They have taken the figure

1:30.9

with the barrel off and are now have like this shiny new. It's not even like but it's it's still

1:38.4

you still have like the classic font. It's still the same colors. There are, there are traces, like, it's not a full

1:45.1

departure like Jaguar, like you don't, you don't have like this huge departure, but like

1:51.0

they are erasing like crucial elements of the logo that made it iconic and, and part of

1:58.5

the American nostalgia thing that they were going for.

2:01.6

Did you like the old line art man next to the barrel in the cracker barrel?

2:06.6

Because I never, I just thought that was too busy in terms of like, when you reproduce it, that logo had to be reproduced at a pretty big size in order for all the detailed lines in it to work. If you think about it, like, well, but where was their logo? It was on billboards, on road trips. So, like, for what they were, it worked really well because, like, you're driving on the road and you see this. Like, it's telling you what you need to know. Like, come on in in we've got a good old southern boy and a barrel of

...

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