The entire modern “conservative movement” is completely astroturfed. It’s all funded and sponsored by the elites, in order to convince people to reject policies intended to improve their own lives, in favor of policies that exclusively benefit the elites.
It’s almost as if someone figured out that conservatives, in an effort to feel the need to play the victim, will react negatively and thus be more engaged when presented with non-conforming news.
A sort of dissonance…that happens cognitively.
Conservatives love playing the victim.
Trans women existing = an attack on all women existing
Not being allowed to pressure children into praying at school = being denied religious freedom
Haha… It’s funny cause it’s true
Who had money on Cracker Barrel faking outrage about a plan that wasn’t to be?
People need to remember that these themed businesses are taking huge risk by maintaining their identity. If a CB goes out of business they practically take a loss on the building because no one wants to buy an old timey restaurant. It’s too niche. Companies are going to bland and grey so the properties are easier to sell. It was never about woke and everything to do with money as usual.
Especially since Cracker Barrel is publicly traded.
That said, I don’t think Cracker Barrel locations are all that different from Applebees or Chili’s. The “country store” is basically a waiting area, but with merch instead of more benches for waiting to be seated. Or it’s like Buffalo Wild Wings and its counter for order pickups and sauce sales.
I think the main intent here is to appeal to more people. A new logo could get people interested who weren’t before.
Most right-wing outrage has been driven by bots for a decade. Yeah, what’s new?
Imagine how much more successful any given business might be by simply… ignoring Twitter.
For all we know CB may have been behind the outrage
Peter Teil straight up told an audience that he will push ideas with tech.
Here, Gizmodo. Let me fix that title for you.
“Almost half the upset tweets on the most bottidden platform (twitter) about Cracker Barrel were likely from bots.”
Realistically, the upset was probably more about how the new logo came on all of a sudden, was very plain, and like how coca cola found out with new coke in the 1980s, it’s not necessarily that people love cracker barrel. It’s a part of their nostalgia they grew up with. They went with Grandma and Grandpa growing up. It was a special little stop on a family vacation to eat. They liked looking at the toys and candy in the gift shop and it was so weird and cool they had a store in the restaurant. It can be a company nightmare to screw with a logo that’s been around for decades that could have memories attached to it.
Especially the new one is pretty lame.
Exactly. I’ve been to Cracker Barrel maybe 2 or 3 times. I think the food is decent, especially since I didn’t grow up eating southern style food. I’m not really nostalgic for it, but will prefer stopping there over a fast food place if it’s near where we’re going to stop anyway on a road trip (i.e. to get gas).
The new logo sucks, and it looks like they ripped off Denny’s. Likewise the interior redesign completely kills the soul of the place. Crack Barrel isn’t a cool hunting lodge or something, it’s a place to get home-style cooking (or what I imagine southern-style home cooking to be like) away from home, so it should feel like eating in a kitchen, not a lodge. The store is like the box of toys and puzzles and whatnot grandma and grandpa would have on the coffee table while food is getting finished up and really adds to the vibe.
I don’t really care all that much about Cracker Barrel though. It’s not a place I’d ever go out of my way to eat at, but it’s still a decent option when I’m hungry and tired.
I like Cracker Barrel’s four vegetarian sides plate. I can pick reasonably healthy options and the price isn’t terrible. They are my preferred interstate-adjacent dining option on roadtrips. I’m even a loyalty member.
Yet I can’t imagine spending one microsecond thinking about their logo let alone being stupid enough to be manipulated into having an opinion and then believing it relates to politics. Unless you are the majority shareholder, your view is utterly irrelevant. Shut up and either patronize the place or not.
There are a lot of people today on the right who cosplay as libertarians but somehow care deeply about the logo of a company they don’t own.
Exactly.
I only go to Cracker Barrel on road trips and when they happen to be near where I plan to stop anyway. I don’t go out of my way to go there, but I do prefer them over fast food joints.
Their new logo is stupid, mostly because it reminds me of Denny’s. It doesn’t change whether I’ll go there, it only makes me think their logo is stupid when I do.
The point where I realized it was fake was when nobody was complaining about the font or going “Uhm, aktually it’s ‘typeface’!”
Someone got offended that they took the cracker off the logo.
I mean they took the barrel off too. What is cracker barrel without a cracker and a barrel?
To be fair, the new logo is kind of barrel shaped. It’s also Denny’s shaped…
cracker bargle
A bunch of my friends thought the logo change was dumb, too.
A bit rude to call them bots. ;p
There’s a difference between thinking the change is dumb, which is something that happens in an individual’s own mind as a passing thought, and thinking you suddenly need to tell everyone about it, and have arguments about it, and seek validations of your passing thought about it in large communities of other people and turn it into a national discussion. Bots are why everyone started talking about it, and that made people feel like they needed to tell everyone else what they thought about it too.
People were simply not losing any sleep over this (and never would have) until bots made it go viral. Some people might have legitimately formed such a thought without any significant outside influence, but it would have been an empty, meaningless, inconsequential thought, like thousands of others that likely go through everyone’s brain in any given day to be summarily dismissed and promptly forgotten.
The point the article is raising is that the attention economy has now weaponized such insignificant thoughts, and can exploit them into controlling people’s behavior, and thus, create actual real world consequences, the same way a hacker exploits access into a home computer to turn it into a botnet that they can orchestrate to perform actual attacks. It may not do any particular harm to the individual who has been motivated in this way, but it can do catastrophic damage to the targets of their collective wrath, scorn, and ridicule. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words might destroy civilization.
The idea though is that their thoughts are being influenced by bots
I hadn’t heard of the change, nor the outraged bot army.
How about those Epstein files?
Culture war keeps the rubes fighting the wrong people so that the real villains can keep robbing them.
No shit
