Julie Felss Masino, the CEO of Cracker Barrel, just Bud-Lighted all over herself. She and her counterpart, Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid of Bud Light fame, are products of elite northern private colleges. Both fell prey to their deference to woke versus reality. Both caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to their companies as a result of tone deaf decisions.
The problem began when both women insisted on going by three names, which is never a good thing. It makes me think of notorious villains like John Wilkes Booth, John Wayne Gacy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sam Bankman-Fried and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Do not trifle with Cracker Barrel customers. They are red-blooded Americans. And their blood is about as thick as Cracker Barrel’s gravy.
The iconic wood-burning (carbon-emitting) fireplace at Cracker Barrel is important to us Southerners. This company was steeped in the scriptures of the South. When white smoke is seen bellowing from a Cracker Barrel fireplace, it means a new SEC coach has been named.
If you were going to rebrand Cracker Barrel, do it with some realistic underpinnings. Call it: “When Waffle House is Too Busy,” or “When You See a Big Line at Chick-fil-A.”
Both Waffle House and Chick-fil-A are well-run, private companies. At Waffle House you get about the same breakfast as at Cracker Barrel, but quicker and cheaper — and there’s a pretty good chance you can see a fist fight.
The truth is, there have been some woke missteps by Cracker Barrel. But this is the normal cycle of a company.
I saw it in my 35-year career on Wall Street. The founder is a badass, self-made conservative; he runs a tight ship. He dies. Then soft, first-generation wealth, trust fund-type kids take over. “Tommy Boy” comes in and puts his prep school buddies and other dilettantes on the board, the widow puts her Episcopal priest and a college professor on the board, and then begins the downward spiral. The board becomes MoveOn.org. The same dynamic happens with foundations. It is called “donor drift.”
What the Cracker Barrel CEO and the Bud executive who decided to have a transgender sell the blue-collar beer Bud Light missed was that Americans love their nostalgia-based brands.
Don’t PC on us and tell us it is raining.
Digging in, it is not totally a “woke go broke” story. Yes, they have an idiot ex-Disney DEI shakedown consultant on the board. But wokeness is to obsess about social justice ideology and grievance-driven reparations, which makes you virtue-signal to the detriment of your business. But just as not everything libs dislike is “racist” or some form of “phobic,” not everything that bothers conservatives is “wokeness.”
Cracker Barrel stock peaked at $176 four years ago. It’s now in the mid-50s. Their model was not working; they needed change. Like Red Lobster, TGI Fridays and, tragically, Hooters, all of which filed for Chapter 11 and reconstituted themselves in bankruptcy to face the new business realities, Cracker Barrel was headed that way.
You can adapt. In this column, I offered some business advice to Hooters when it reorganized in the age of Uber Eats and Door Dash delivery. I suggested Hooters go to a food delivery system with its waitresses and call it Knockers.
Yes, both aforementioned executives are young, elite, private school liberals who made bad decisions. But these are great things I love about free markets and capitalism. It is race-, color- and gender-blind. It identifies winners and losers based on their actions and outcomes. You must know your customer or hire someone who does.
In his “Pyramid of Greatness,” “Parks and Rec” libertarian Ron Swanson said of capitalism, “It’s God’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor.”
Contact Ron Hart, a syndicated op-ed satirist, author and TV/radio commentator, at @RonaldHart on X.