A. S. Hamrah is this magazine’s film critic and the author of The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002–2018 and the forthcoming Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025. Before he was a full-time film critic, Hamrah worked as a semiotic brand analyst. In 2007, n+1 published “The Haunting of Payless,” an interview between Hamrah and Emily Votruba about Payless ShoeSource, which had just ditched its old logo. Hamrah compared the rebrand to Lipton Tea’s, in which that brand’s avatar, the British yachtsman Sir Thomas J. Lipton, had been relegated to a small corner of the company’s packaging.
Last week, another rebrand kicked up a controversy, one much stupider and more haunted than anything Payless has done. After Cracker Barrel—the highway restaurant chain, biscuit emporium, and “old country store”—removed a drawing of a Thomas Lipton–ish old man from its logo, right-wing commentators, including Donald Trump, went after the brand for kowtowing to an imaginary DEI regime. Cracker Barrel executives got a call from the White House, and on Tuesday they reinstated the apparently beloved “Uncle Herschel.”
As a very belated second installment to his Payless conversation, we asked Hamrah about the old Cracker Barrel logo and the short-lived new one, fast-food semiotics, and the differences between “old country” racism and the MAGA worldview. —Lisa Borst and Will Tavlin
LISA BORST: Scott, is the Cracker Barrel controversy important?
A. S. HAMRAH: A lot of people are adamant in stating that it’s unimportant. I first saw that position explained by the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie in one of his Instagram reels. He was annoyed that people were taking this Cracker Barrel story seriously, that it was taking up a certain amount of space or time in the news cycle. Bouie said it was idiotic that everything has to become an example of the culture war, because, you know, some things just aren’t political. I think that’s an insufficient explanation, and doesn’t really get at what this controversy was about. Yeah, it’s an annoying story. But in its triviality it’s also very entertaining and revealing. And it’s funny.
WILL TAVLIN: But of course it’s also a political story.
ASH: The thing here is that the old-timey MAGA values supposedly exemplified by Cracker Barrel are not the real values of MAGA, which are instead more in line with the values of Cracker Barrel’s competitor, Yum! Brands. Yum! Brands is the conglomerate that owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC, which are often found together as “Ken-Taco Huts.” Like Cracker Barrel, they’re a southern company, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Cracker Barrel is based in Tennessee. The difference is that Yum! Brands, with its obnoxious, penetrative exclamation point, homogenized and made their brands simple and bland. They have internationalized their brands, de-Americanized them, though they are still icons of America whether they are here or in Mexico City, Paris, or Baku. If you look at the logos of Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, they’ve cut them down to the bone. KFC used to stand for Kentucky Fried Chicken, and now it’s just initials, it officially doesn’t mean anything besides “KFC.”
Speaking of bones, this kind of the creation of non-meaning reminds me of when, a decade or so ago, KFC tried to switch to a boneless, nuggets-style menu by claiming that Millennials had never even learned that chicken had bones. “Chicken” wasn’t “chickens” to young people, KFC claimed. It was just some abstract protein. A true semiotic scam.
LB: That cutting-down-to-the-bone seems to happen with a lot of branding these days. Everything from clothing logos to airplane livery seems designed to be as indistinct as possible. The specious critique of Cracker Barrel was that the new branding was woke, but to me this whole world of visual language always feels like it adds up to a pretty riskless and conservative landscape.
ASH: Yum! represents the real face of MAGA: this kind of corporate blandness, a lot of middle managers, executives making money by doing the worst things for the culture and the world. That’s the real face of MAGA. Profit at the cost of poisoning the entire population. Their avatar could be a guy in a red polo tucked into khaki pants with a cellphone holder on his belt. That’s their old-timey figure.
LB: And Cracker Barrel was up to something different?
ASH: Cracker Barrel had maintained its identity, as secondhand as it was. So the loss of specificity for Cracker Barrel, a specificity expressed in the logo with the barrel with the guy—“Uncle Herschel,” the “Old Timer”—next to it, is significant. It’s significant because all of a sudden, Cracker Barrel was Yummifying itself, making itself faceless and generic. But before now, in its refusal to be generic, it was a kind of last man standing. Or in this case sitting, next to his barrel.
WT: What is a cracker barrel, anyway?
ASH: A cracker barrel is a barrel filled with saltines or soda crackers, which you can pronounce “sody” crackers if you’re really trying to be old-timey, over which men would sit around in a general store. Maybe they would have a checkerboard over the barrel and be playing checkers on it. And they would just chew the fat and talk about, you know, the evening plans for their secret fraternal organization. There is a negative side to this, of course.
This was all depicted as taking place in 19th-century and early 20th-century general stores in the South, which is what the Cracker Barrel atmosphere was referring to. Like in one of John Ford’s Will Rogers movies from the 1930s. A place where wisdom is being dispensed. In addition to being a casual dining restaurant, Cracker Barrel has a gift shop and sells rocking chairs outside on their front-porch retail space. But like Yum!, they decided to separate their signifier from their signified, that was the corporate decision, to get rid of it in their communications.
WT: The new logo seems particularly vacant.
ASH: Josh Johnson, the stand-up comedian, had some insight about this. He’s on The Daily Show, which now that I think about it is like the fake version of the New York Times, where Bouie works. Johnson’s Black, despite his name, which sounds like the name of an old guy who would be in a Cracker Barrel already. He did a very funny monologue about how objectively terrible the new logo is. He was saying the first thing you notice about it is that they’ve eliminated two things, right? They’ve eliminated the barrel, and they’ve also eliminated, you know . . . the dude. The guy.
WT: The cracker?
ASH: Yes, the joke was that he didn’t want to say “cracker.” He was very wittily tiptoeing around the word, refusing to say what is also a pejorative term for a white person. But he’s correct, right? And no one else in all the commentary on this wanted to say this one simple, obvious thing. From their logo, Cracker Barrel eliminated the two things that they are: the barrel and . . .
WT: The C-word.
LB: But so these people on the right got upset because, what, they felt attached to the cracker, or represented by him or something?
ASH: It’s not that they feel attached to this figure or word or represented by it. It’s that it has become a sign for something missing in their lives. It’s a question of a civilizational difference between Cracker Barrel and KFC, one that still tries to maintain a connection to its community, and the other, which is deracinated and generic. One represents a certain kind of gathering of citizens, in a residual form, even if it’s a damaged or historically racist one. The other, more dominant one just represents the maw of capitalism, destroying everything as it makes what are basically poisonous products for people to eat all over the world. Johnson picked up on this. He said in his monologue that what Cracker Barrel really represents is a last-stop, last-chance on the highway to get real food, and that if you’re hungry and you skip it, you’re going to have to drive another 45 miles to eat at a place where all they offer is, as he put it, “a Snickers-flavored cup of hemlock.”
WT: Why is Trump able to exist as this avatar of Yum! style capitalism, but somehow disguise himself in the clothing of old-timey values?
ASH: You’re speaking metaphorically, but Trump doesn’t dress that way. His suits and long ties are purely corporate. That’s a key question, though. Why is MAGA able to present itself as this repository of core American values, while at the same time, underneath it all, it’s just this rapacious form of capitalism that doesn’t care about people’s health or the environment? Why is that? I think it’s because they want both things. They want a world that’s run like Yum! Brands, yet they want to cling to the symbols of an earlier world that they think may have existed at some point, and that they understand that customers cling to. But they can’t quite locate it; they point to it as being over there somewhere, and state they can get back to it “again.” And Trump himself, despite his own fast-food obsession, is like this Uncle Herschel or Old Timer figure in a way. He likes to stand around and talk and talk and talk, dispensing wisdom like a modern blowhard version of Will Rogers. But then he pretends he’s working at a McDonald’s, not at a general store. Similarly, Robert Kennedy hates artificial red dye in food but also hates vaccinations. That’s taking us back on both fronts, though it seems in a way, contradictory.
WT: In Trump’s case, the barrel is Truth Social.
ASH: “Social” is the key word. Like an ice cream social. The image of two or three or four men talking around the barrel—that is the social element of this. And that element has been totally removed by Yum! Brands restaurants, like Pizza Hut Express, which you find at the airport or in weird places where you don’t expect it, shoved into corners.
LB: It’s antisocial food, food for DoorDash. You can eat it by the cracker barrel in your own house.
ASH: By yourself, yeah.
LB: But you know, the old logo was prescient in this regard. There’s really just the one cracker. He’s not in community.
ASH: But his presence implies a community. Which is different from Colonel Sanders when he was on the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket. Colonel Sanders did not imply a community. He was a figurehead, which the Old Timer is not.
LB: Colonel Sanders was like a face on some expired currency.
ASH: Confederate currency. Or he was like the lone overlord of a plantation, who had fought in the Civil War and lost, and reinvented himself by selling simple fare that somehow he got ahold of a secret recipe for. But you know, Colonel Sanders, like Thomas Lipton, was all in white and became a figure of colonialism haunting his own brand, a ghost. Then he could be made fun on KFC’s TV commercials. Cracker Barrel’s Old Timer is not personified to that extent, and he wasn’t ghostly.
LB: He’s not really a mascot or a character, he has no specific mythology.
ASH: None of that. He’s not based on a real person. But still, he was perceived at the corporate level of ownership as haunting the brand, too. They wanted to get rid of this ghost.
LB: But you can’t kill a ghost.
ASH: And in trying to kill him, they angered the people who see themselves as the core constituents of their brand. And those people realize that by eliminating him, the whole thing just becomes Yum! Brands, impersonal, fast, cardboard food you eat in your car.
WT: Have you seen these videos of people going through the Taco Bell drive-thru and ordering, like, 16 million waters from the AI assistant?
ASH: That’s a good example of the difference between Cracker Barrel and a Yum! Brands restaurant, which is that Yum! Brands thinks they can replace their employees with AI. Which, of course, leads to these various problems. It was 18,000 water cups.
WT: What’s the affirmative case for the rebrand?
ASH: One thing a lot of people said about the Cracker Barrel rebrand was, oh, they’re trying to appeal to younger people somehow. People analyzing this in the news were saying, you know, the core Cracker Barrel consumer is aging, they’re getting old.
LB: Right, they’re facing a demographic cliff. It’s like the people who donate to the opera.
ASH: So the thinking is, we have to somehow appeal to new customers, because eventually our core customers are all going to die. I mean, personally I think their basic cohort could live another 30 years.
LB: If they cut down on the gravy.
ASH: But that is an absurd rationale for doing something so generic. When that generic logo came out, no one who saw it liked it, including people who would never go to a Cracker Barrel. And then people realized getting upset about that was essentially funny. And then people started making their own funny Cracker Barrel logos.
WT: I saw one where they spelled it “Crakr.”
ASH: There’s one with, like, Nosferatu rising from the name—another haunted image—and they’ve made the font look like heavy metal lettering. Another one was just the new generic Cracker Barrel logo, but instead of saying “Cracker Barrel,” it says “Release the Epstein Files.”
LB and WT: [Laughing very hard]
ASH: So that, again, is about core MAGA values. The new generic logo exists to hide something. And if we just flip it over, on the back side it says, “Release the Epstein Files.” That’s what this audience actually wants. And that’s the one thing MAGA won’t give it.
WT: This seems to be related to the defining paradigm of the Trump administration—the ability to obfuscate its aims and repackage them as desirable for its base, even if the aims and the repackaging are in total opposition and will hurt that base.
ASH: Right, all the alleged values of making America great again appeal to this nostalgia factor, which Cracker Barrel represents and which is redolent of a racist America. But it’s really just hiding this, you know, capitalist domination of the world and the exploitation of other people.
WT: Lisa mentioned DoorDash. Why does the new Cracker Barrel logo look like a tech company’s?
ASH: It looks like an app logo, on the iPhone store or whatever. It’s this square shape with rounded corners. Something that would be on your phone. Maybe it is part of a desire is to make Cracker Barrel more like something DoorDash would deliver.
WT: Delivered by a “Barrel-ista.”
ASH: But really all these logos originally began as highway signs. Signs you see when you’re driving along the highway, on this huge, tall pole, to return to what Josh Johnson was saying. The logo has to be very simple, so that you can identify it quickly as a driver.
LB: Is the idea that the new logo was supposed to be more legible at 70 miles per hour?
ASH: Who knows? They don’t know what they’re doing anymore. Semiotically, it’s detached from all these kinds of things that it was originally designed for. But this kind of sign was always part of the corporate blandification of the American travel experience. The idea of the app is funny, because it turns out that apps are all like these highway signs, really. Like you’re traveling on the information superhighway when you’re on your phone.
LB: That’s good stuff. A delivery-app version of Cracker Barrel is also funny because it returns the idea of “homestyle cooking” to the literal home.
ASH: No, no, you can’t have “homestyle cooking” at home. Because if you’re having it at home, it’s not homestyle. Homestyle cooking only exists in a restaurant space, which is like home, but better. It’s nicer and less lonely and you have to behave like a human being there. Again, this gets at the fact that the big idea behind Cracker Barrel is that it’s like a general store, but it’s also a restaurant. But of course it’s not a general store, because a general store is providing people with actual ingredients and dry goods and stuff to make things at home. Cracker Barrel is just a restaurant, and a gift shop, but it’s referring to the things that you would find in a general store to make this kind of food at home. Even if they sell pancake mix to go.
LB: Where did all these restaurants come from? I mean chains with, like, stories and mythologies—this kind of dining experience that also points to something else, to some other place.
ASH: Well, there was the initial success in the first fast food restaurants in the 1950s, and casual dining—McDonald’s on one hand, Howard Johnson’s on the other. Plus the additional leisure time people had, to travel and drive around, led to the idea that people needed to be fed as they were moving about in their cars. They weren’t going to have every meal at home anymore. And it had to be standardized somehow, because before that, it had been a joke in American culture that diner food was bad. You know, this 1930s or ’40s cartoon idea, like in the Blondie comic strip with Dagwood eating at a lunch counter, or in film noirs: this depiction of diner food as overcooked, the waitresses were surly, the soup was disgusting, there were flies.
WT: You might witness a stick-up.
ASH: So from the point of view of the food business, a friendlier, cleaner experience had to evolve.
WT: Hence the emergence of Friendly’s.
ASH: And the food business felt like these places had to have something homey—they should remind people of restaurants in their town that they liked and trusted. You know, the pizza parlour in my town, or the general store in my town, is now also all these other places on the road. All these restaurants, whether they’re casual dining restaurants or fast food restaurants, started out with a kind of a story.
WT: Wasn’t IHOP one of these ventures?
ASH: The story of IHOP was all about internationalism, but not the generic kind. it was like IKEA—Scandinavian. It was the International House of Pancakes, and it was international because, you know, there were various syrups of the world there. In America, we only have maple syrup, or fake maple syrup, like Aunt Jemima, who’s another racist mascot. But according to IHOP, in Sweden, where they were pretending they were from, there was, you know, boysenberry syrup. There was lingonberry syrup or something like that. Now you could get all that at IHOP. And IHOP, originally, was always in an A-frame building, which is seen as Scandinavian. And they had flags. Scandinavian flags on strings, banners hanging on the front of the restaurants, like flags at a used car lot.
WT: Like the UN.
ASH: But as time passed, they got rid of that. And it was no longer the International House of Pancakes. Now it’s just IHOP. So this is the progression of the semiotic sign, right? From an actual thing like Swedish pancakes, which exist and are eaten in Sweden, to an American restaurant that’s referring to these, to the point where they just eliminate the references and serve pancakes in addition to everything else, and for whatever reason have some non-standard syrups.
LB: Even the name just becomes this strange set of syllables.
ASH: It becomes this two-syllable acronym and no one understands why that has anything to do with pancakes anymore.
LB: But it’s not even an acronym anymore. It’s just a fake word that sounds like an Apple product.
ASH: It’s like a former acronym. A post-acronym. And this is a whole corporate strategy. You know, UPS no longer stands for United Parcel Service. For whatever reasons, corporations feel that they have to eliminate their original story, such as with KFC, as we discussed. They find it limiting. “What if we’re really not about being United or about parcels or about Kentucky or chicken with bones in it? What if those things aren’t our real business?” Pizza Hut, another Yum! Brands brand, has also eliminated its original story. When it first went national, it had an old-timey feel—it was meant to remind you of pizza parlours, something that probably not very many people have now experienced in their original incarnation.
WT: And why was it a hut again?
ASH: Well, I don’t know, supposedly it was a hut because the original owners only had a certain amount of room on their original sign, so they could only fit eight letters.
LB: They could have called it Pizza Pad. Pizza Dig . . . s.
ASH: There was a restaurant called Pizza Pad in Boston, next to the Rat, as I recall, which was Boston’s CBGB’s. But “hut” was a very post-war word. It was a remnant of this army surplus, Quonset hut era in the late 1940s, early ‘50s.
WT: It’s funny, because all these places were referring to something that was kind of imaginary. But today we have the Tesla diner, which is referring to something that’s somehow even more mediated than these other restaurants.
ASH: The Tesla diner is supposed to be a reference to car culture, the car culture diner of American Graffiti, in which people pull into the diner and a waitress comes over on a roller skates and takes your order and you can eat in the car from a tray attached to the door when the window is rolled down. It’s like Mel’s Drive-In from American Graffiti, which is also in Happy Days, which was a real place before the movie and became a franchised casual dining restaurant, with restaurants all over California. At one point they got in trouble for refusing to serve the Black Panthers. Mel’s was looking back in a nostalgic way on something that people really liked, which could be franchised and made generic and bland and also has something to do with George Lucas, so there would be autographed photos of George Lucas on the wall. The Tesla diner is trying to be like the American Graffiti diner, but the cyber version of that. It’s in this futuristic mode that is also supposed to be our present. But of course nobody wants that to be our present, or future.
LB: Where should a long-distance driver stop to eat these days?
ASH: The newer, better corollary of Cracker Barrel is Waffle House, which is paradoxically older than Cracker Barrel. Waffle House is still a successful chain, and it essentially supplanted Cracker Barrel because it’s more contemporary in its branding, and it’s not tied to any kind of racist tropes. Cracker Barrel had civil rights violations in some of their restaurants in the South. They were discriminating against Black patrons and Black employees, and they got involved in lawsuits in the ‘90s and 2000s and had to announce changes in their policies. I don’t think Waffle House had that kind of issue. It’s also a southern chain, but it’s seen as a more diverse space.
LB: Right. And whereas people go to Cracker Barrel after church, Waffle House is open all night and has a sort of party vibe. At least in my experience.
ASH: Yes. Waffle House represents a kind of madness. They are always staying open during natural disasters, or opening up right after disasters, when other places are still closed. They respond to the present situation. But more basically, one thing Waffle House is for is: you’ve gone out and done your evening activities, whatever they are. Now you’re gathering at Waffle House for the post-mortem, for the post-game analysis of your night out.
LB: To soak up the booze with smothered hashbrowns.
ASH: It’s the opposite of Cracker Barrel, where you’re supposed to be nice. You’re supposed to be nice and predictable and everybody is a God-fearing consumer. But at Waffle House, anyone could be there. Satanists, whoever. Non-eaters. They serve everybody and treat everybody the same. At Waffle House the status of people as consumers is in question.
WT: You worked for some time as a semiotic brand analyst, which is why we thought to ask you about all this. But it occurs to me that some of these insights you’ve shared also have to do with the fact that you once worked in a Roy Rogers. You’ve seen how the roadside sausage gets made.
ASH: My first job when I was 15 was working at a Roy Roger’s restaurant. I got a job at the first Roy Rogers in Connecticut. The chain was named after the 1940s singing cowboy movie star, who was its figurehead in almost the same way that Colonel Sanders was the figurehead of Kentucky Fried Chicken, except Roy’s image wasn’t used. His face wasn’t part of the signage or the packaging or anything. On the job we had to wear a cowboy hat and a western-style shirt. I worked in the kitchen, frying chicken in a deep fryer.
LB: The hat stayed on while you fried?
ASH: The chicken would arrive in boxes, frozen, and you had to unpack and clean it, push the guts out with your finger through the bones. And then you had to dredge it and put it in the deep fryer. I proved to be good at this. My manager, his name was Mr. Fine, was impressed. He gave me a promotion.
WT: How nice.
ASH: But later it turned out Mr. Fine was homeless. He was living in his car in the parking lot of the Roy Rogers, and he got fired eventually because he got caught taking a shower in the big kitchen sink, using the sprayer extension as the showerhead. And I thought at the time, it’s great that this homeless man, who showers in the sink, recognized my ability as a fryer of chicken. He saw that in me and he promoted me and gave me a raise.
WT: Did you quit there eventually, or what happened?
ASH: No, Will, I still work there.
LB: Do you feel like it’s left you with any lingering wisdom about the state of fast food?
ASH: Well, I hear they’re trying to revive the Roy Rogers chain now.
WT: It did seem like a distressed asset.
ASH: I guess it’s interesting that it was a movie star that was the figurehead of the first place I worked. And in fact, years later, I had an interesting experience regarding Roy Rogers. When I worked in television brand analysis, I was doing a job for an entertainment news show that was on every night, syndicated. It was shot in Studio City in Los Angeles, on the old Republic Studios lot where Roy Rogers made his films, which was by then owned by CBS. This nightly entertainment news show had its set there, and I had an all-day session with them. I still smoked at the time, and I went out back to have a cigarette during a break. And all of a sudden, I was on the old Republic Pictures back lot.
LB: Like in Day of the Locust.
ASH: They still had a small-town street, but all the buildings on the small-town street exterior set were now offices. And along the sidewalk, in this little small-town set that you walked into when you left the main building, they had the handprints of Republic Studios actors who had worked there pressed into the concrete, like at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I looked down and I was standing on the hoofprints of Trigger and the handprints of Roy Rogers. And in that moment, I was like, wow, look where I’m standing now. I used to work for this guy. And his horse.
LB: I read a piece in the Financial Times that linked Trump’s criticisms of Cracker Barrel—he wrote on Truth Social that the company should “admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll)”—to the much more substantive and muscular financial interventions he’s been making recently, like acquiring a stake in Intel and trying to control the Federal Reserve. The FT called this “European-style dirigisme,” although to me it seems like the President going after Cracker Barrel for being too woke is like the most American thing that’s ever happened.
ASH: The only way the Cracker Barrel story is like that is that it’s seen as a cave-in to MAGA. You have this thing that everybody immediately understood was ridiculous and bad and ugly, which was the new logo. It’s stupid and it doesn’t work. They reverted to the old one after right-wing people made a lot of noise about it, but really it was not so much a cave-in as an acknowledgment that they had failed. So, to group Cracker Barrel in a space with, I don’t know, Nvidia—it’s kind of a stretch.
LB: You don’t think Cracker Barrel is like the Fed?
ASH: No. It’s not even like the American Eagle jeans thing with Sydney Sweeney. That was a dumb campaign about “genes,” based on a pun on the word “jeans,” which is their product. The point of similarity is that “cracker” can be read as a pun, in fact crackers may be called that because of cracker barrels in the first place; there is, on some level, racism involved. But in the Cracker Barrel case, it’s inadvertent. The pun is slightly below the level of consciousness.
LB: Almost more of a sex-in-the-ice-cubes kind of thing.
ASH: Well, but those subliminal messages were never really there. At Cracker Barrel, the pun was there, but people pretended it wasn’t. American Eagle, on the other hand, was doing it on purpose, to be provocative. Part of the reason people are so annoyed by the silliness of the Cracker Barrel controversy is that it has followed so closely after the American Eagle one. That was annoying, a real groaner, and it was designed to rile people up with this cutesy eugenics angle. Cutesy eugenics is a thing now. Like, we’re so bad, you know? It wasn’t funny or entertaining at all. Whereas with Cracker Barrel, there’s this idea that it was an already racist brand, almost by accident. And they were trying to get past that. By eliminating the barrel, and the, you know . . .
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