I hated the new logo, but I don’t get how it was a “woke” thing or had anything to do with left/right politics. It seemed to me like a “sterile flat millennial-modernist design fatigue” thing. I’m very sick of flat designs and everything trying to look like the Apple Store.

I could buy that the politicizing was bot and troll driven.

I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.

I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...

So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.

100 %.I absolutely did not get the political view. Some people made the female CEO out to be the devil.

The logo is very corporate, some might say soulless now, but I get it; it's a first step to modernize the brand.

> because apparently, one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy.

I think we can unanimously agree that serif fonts are an existential threat to civilization.

I really hope it was bots that drove the outrage. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what to say.

It’s a logo.

Seems like a plausible strategy to try to associate existing outrage with the cause the bot operator is trying to advance.

Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.

I think some people are convinced that everything they don't like about society (in this case, companies coming up with "sterile" logos) is Woke and generally part of The Culture War.

As they say, the internet makes you stupid.

I would assume the association with “woke” comes from prior instances of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the butter lady all being sanitized such that any such sanitation is now associated with “woke politics.”

It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.

Any event, no matter how insignificant, is cause enough for the right to manufacture outrage against that ever ill-defined "wokeness" and point the finger at "the radical left".

The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.