If we’re stuck with a culture war, what targets are worth the effort, and what transgressions merit an attack? What do we punish, and what do we preserve?
Tale as old as time: Business offers a good product for a good price and becomes successful. Then comes the expansion and the franchising, and before you know it they're coasting on their old reputation while microwaving your Aramark "food."
The real issue is we've fucked our economy so badly that we can't seem to manage a place that just serves regular food for a regular price. Making a sandwich or a hamburger isn't rocket science and it should be cheap and easy -- but all that "other" bullshit piles up real quick.
Non-stop chase of money has damned sure preoccupied the Congress. Campaigning for (re-) election and stealing/taking bribes doesn't leave much time for governing.
Funny, I'm reading a book right now written in 1938 that says the same thing; says capitalism will kill itself because of this imperative. Yet here we are.
Our current gangster-crony capitalism runs on the idea of "maximizing short-term profit, and maximizing returns to investors", right? SO, what if we tweaked that just a little bit, and instead we could have, "maximize LONG-TERM SUSTAINABLE profit." Yes, that "sustainable" word is, well, "problematic", but I can't think of a better word. But the idea of making our economy more "long-term sustainable" seems much better than "get rich quick", and 'pump-and-dump" stock scams.... And, aren't Blackrock, Vanguard, etc., simply amassing(hoarding) resources for the long-term?....What I'm suggesting here could be one way to at least slow down that "chase of $" you speak of.... After all, you ARE a trusted name in razors!
I like the way you think. I'm not really in the "AOC-Tax-the-Rich" camp, but yes, I agree. Given that we have the I.R.S. & Federal Reserve, yes, that SHOULD be taxed as income, and not capital gains, because it accrues to the individual. And further, I'd like to see that money plowed back into the "grass roots", and not just wasted on watering plastic flowers, as much Gov't taxation seems to be.... If we did that, we'd still have rich & poor, but the poor would be much less poor, and the rich would still be rich. But the system doesn't exist to serve the people, it exists to serve the rich. The people exist to serve the rich. I don't know why the rich exist, but they do. So I just do my best to be an infectious carrier of hope, optimism, smiles, laughter, and positive thinking, and to spread immunity to negativity, pessimism & delusion. Looks like we ALL still have a lot of work to do. Better than being bored & depressed, anyway!....
Oh yeah. Here in the great, blue run state of NJ, the wind farm subsidies, etc. have jacked up our electricity bills 18% this year, with another 13% next year.
"Brave Search: The industry benchmark for labor cost percentage in fast food or quick service restaurants (QSR) is generally between 25% and 30% of total sales." Before I queried Brave I guessed it was about 30%. In high end restaurants I would guess labor is a bit more.
Freezing food products saves waste and improves quality. Most proteins begin to deteriorate immediately. Freezing food is one of the most important things to happen to food. Free zing proteins arrest microbes, etc.
Spot on SC, I lived a couple hundred yards from the original Chevy's in Alameda, and met my wife there. It was a fun place with fantastic, "fresh mex" food...then, eventually, they sold out to PepsiCo and the rest, as they say, is history.
On May 18, Aramark launched our partnership with Amtrak and Starr Restaurants. Amtrak announced the launch of an all-new Amtrak Acela First Class dining menu to be offered on trains traveling between Boston and Washington DC.
STARR and Aramark, whose facilities team provides food and beverage services regionally for Amtrak, have developed a fresh new menu to offer Acela First Class passengers an elevated and reimaged dining experience.
The company says in its annual report that the average customer check is $14. What ingredients can you expect when your full-plate dinner, in a restaurant, costs $14?
Challenged accepted (is it still cool to say that?):
After gym, I sometimes have lunch since I'm in town anyway. Here's my usual, and remember the amount is enough to fill up a man 183cm/6' tall and 100kg/220pounds heavy.
Baked potatoe, about the size of two tennis-balls. Topped with two manly handfuls of a salmon-and-mayo mix. Accompanied by a salad: lettuce (two kinds), cucumber, onions, corn (not a cob), tomatoes, and two dipping sauces. Fist-sized piece of bread, baked that morning and a knob of butter.
Coffee and free refills included.
128:-/$13:39. 61 cents to spare!
Sure, there are plenty of real expensive places in the citys but quality-wise, it's not much of a difference, just fancier.
I worked at Bennigan's when I was in college and went into management when I graduated in 1990. Our corporate recipe book was early in the transition from made fresh in store to frozen prepackaged. It had been part of Pillsbury (under Steak & Ale) when it was sold to Grand Met - UK liquor distributor for many brands you know. Because of tiered-house laws that prohibited liquor wholesale and retail sales under the same tent Grand Met had to spin it off.
But that whole multinational corporate streamlining for efficiency and consistency model had taken off and local stores weren't trusted to deliver the same consistent product, was the justification anyways, so they made it all the same somewhere else and shipped it into the stores to microwave and fry.
The most repulsive development and preview of what was to come was what I saw at a corporate managers training conference in Dallas in 1991-1992 when they rolled out the new steaks we would be serving. First they dimmed the lights in the auditorium for a slide show of different cuts of raw steak. We were asked to rate each steak we saw *solely* on appearance, what looked pleasing to the eye. Some had extensive marbling, fat, gristle, others were completely red, all meat, no marbling. And many cuts in-between. They gathered up all of our cards we had written our observations on and tallied them, proudly proclaiming that the completely red, all meat cuts received the highest ratings, like 75% of the room judged them the most visually appealing.
They then informed all of the managers in the auditorium that the cut that was judged the least appealing was the cut that was the highest USDA grade. And the cut that was judged the most appealing was the cut that was one of the lowest USDA grades, just above dog meat. The audience gasped.
This is when the kicker came - the corporate chef for Bennigan's had invented a patented new "butter-injection method" where they plunged needles filled with butter into the fat-less lean cuts of steak and injected them. quickly vacuum sealed and frozen and sent to the restaurants. The butter was supposed to act as a flavor-transfer agent, substituting for the marbling higher grades of meat contain.
Nice theory. When the steaks first came into the restaurant and we tried them they were awful. And customers weren't happy. Tasted like shoe-leather, texture all wrong, just a terrible product. A cut of meat just above what goes into dog food. Was the most expensive item on the menu. Under a corporation named "Steak & Ale." When I saw that, what corporate America was willing to do to chase a buck - the lowest grade of meat is the least expensive - while telling us their latest invention was the apex of food "science" I knew that restaurant chain wasn't long for this world. And it wasn't many years after that they went belly-up.
Since that experience I've avoided corporate restaurants like the plague. I know what makes them tick. I'll take an inconsistent local restauranteur over a consistently dubious corporate chain any day of the week.
PS - Romano's Macaroni was started by former Bennigan's/S&A managers. As was Applebee's, Hooters, Olive Garden, Outback and many large chains you've heard of.
I was a manager at Pizza Hut then the Olive Garden and then Boston Market. Samething you described happened at all three places. The only one really standing is Pizza Hut and it continues to buy cheaper to sell higher and tastes awful.
As a 60 year Southerner, I can tell you the food at Cracker Barrel sucked long before anyone put soy in anything. HOWEVER, as many things are, it was where your parents and grandparents stopped when you were traveling I95 to visit family because there was plenty of Mac and cheese, tons to look at and do for car-weary/hyper kids, and the staff was (back then) universally friendly, down home, genuinely nice ladies. And until the BLM/Cvid/rainbow crap, they kept customers because of that nostalgia. (Not me - we stopped with the kids outside of Richmond once in the early 90s and never went back!)
But, esp for Southerners, I think, it’s just the perfect example of not only general wokeness but of the pervasive corporate dismissal and erasure of our culture. We’re all dumb hicks down here who need to be told by our educated betters what’s good for us, and we’ll get it, good and hard. Except Southerners sniff that out miles away and mostly stopped going to Cracker Barrel by 2020. It’s just a rest stop maybe now, mostly when the kids need to pee.
RIP Cracker Barrel - soon to be buried in the same highway rest stop graveyard as Stuckey’s (pecan log rolls under the pitched green roof) and Hojo’s/Howard Johnson’s and their fried clam strips? Who’s next?
I still mourn the demise of Howard Johnson's and its clam strips. RIP Cracker Barrel because the new, Woke CEO needs to be taken down several notches. The stockholders are not happy with what the board of directors has accomplished.
Buc-ees needs a porch area off the one side of the building with a ton of rocking chairs to be a perfect stopping off point. There is so much going on there that I get sensory overload and mentally exhausted just walking in to take a leak. They need to add a place for folks to decompress and take in what they have witnessed inside.
As someone who lives >1,000 miles from the nearest Buc-ee’s, I happened to be driving through Buc-ee’s country a few weeks ago and stopped at a few. I’m sure the novelty would wear off at some point, but I thought it was awesome.
I went to a Buccees one Christmas Eve to get a gift for a gift swap and the place was packed! People were doing their Christmas shopping there. I got a fabulous oversized, tie dyed coffee mug with a peace sign on it and the buccee beaver and called it a day. On the way out I thought that Macys would be lucky to have that crowd of shoppers….
I have lived in the South for 15 years. I know, personally, many people who love Buc-cees. Cracker Barrel? Meh. Maybe if you’re a 76-yr-old couple with grandchildren in tow.
Well, I wonder whether you are too young to remember when these sterile corporate chain restaurants were actually kind of kitschy and cool. Pizza Hut had a woody dining room with red checked curtains that made it look homey. McDonald's in the 70s was all woody and homey with little plaster Hamburglers on the walls. My grandpa would treat us to dinner at The Sizzler, which was also decorated to look like someone's ranch house dining room.
Now, like the new high rises in NYC, everything seems to have had the life sucked out of it, and that includes the stripped bare new interior at Cracker Barrel, which, by the way, is the only place my friend's mother and I ate while driving my friend's stuff from NYC to Iowa after he died. After hours on the bland interstate, which could be anywhere there's grass and a few trees, it was comforting to sit in something resembling an American country home, and eat the chemicals you root out here. We would wander the aisles in the country store -- the stuff was fun to look at, and didn't feel cheap, like in the rest stops today.
As a Boomer, I can say that rest stops and restaurants back in the day all had some distinctive character and/or glamour that has been summarily removed in deference to globalism, and it hurts, it truly hurts, to witness this. They didn't just take Uncle Herschel off the logo. They erased him, just as they erased Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben -- friendly faces that actually DID celebrate the multi-cultural foundations of the United States.
We drive the New York Thruway a half-dozen times a year. The rest areas were, architecturally speaking, North Country and kinda Adirondack in style, and each one was different. Sure, they had all the chain restaurants inside, but clean restrooms and nice, human-sized dining areas that didn't make you feel like you were eating in the middle of Grand Central.
Over the last few years all of those have been bulldozed to make room for cookie-cutter "Applegreen" service areas. They're still clean, but now huge, definitely not cozy or quirky like the old ones. And they're all exactly the same. Soulless. I don't know what the state paid for this so-called upgrade, but whatever it was, it was totally unnecessary.
You’re reminding me of Route 66. In the 1960s, our family of seven would drive from Southern California to the Midwest every summer. It was great. Not any more, of course. I’ll just keep my memories.
Ah, you reminded me of when we moved from Chicago to SF in 1988, and the first place we stayed was a PINK PIG MOTEL AND RESTAURANT that was run by this old timer couple. There was a sense of originality and true humanity on the road in those days. Now it's so pitifully sterile.
My dad and I did the other direction on Route 66 to see my grandparents. We got off at Flagstaff and headed to Phoenix. It was an awesome trip! My dad would always come up with a new mode of transportation or route to get to Phoenix every summer. Thanks for the memories, Dad!
The stop off the I95 is about right. Granted, it's not what it was, but ripping up what nostalgia remains is just annoying. It's a chain restaurant so you get what you get, but I think it really is what it signals more than anything else. You can't even have your faux-folksy stuff, that's the message. It's also saying they're going to strip that down and make it "minimalist" and "hip" (in the least hip way possible). They're not even going to try to do a good job in the process.
Ever watched Coraline and that horrific moment where the guy with the dancing rats disintegrates into a pile of rats when told he's just a "copy of the real Mr. B" saying "not even that anymore..."? It's the corporate version of that. They decided to disintegrate into rats in front of everyone.
I grew up in the Bay Area, went to college at Cal Davis in the late ‘70s. Remember stopping at the Nut Tree many times on road trips. Another one-of-a-kind place that I fondly remember. I don’t think I want to know what has happened to it.
Blackrock is a $10 trillion behemoth. The bulk of that money is the untold number of pension plans they manage on behalf of unions and companies, both big and small. Larry Fink uses that clout to further his Leftist political agenda. There is no doubt this girl boss CEO at Cracker Barrel is there because he wanted her there.
Blackrock functions as a mail-in ballot bundling operation at the corporate level. Other people’s ballots (share proxies) are accumulated by Blackrock and voted, not in the interest of the true owners (the pensioners), but for the benefit of Larry Fink and his cronies. This company, and the others like it, are doing serious damage to the economy and the country and need to be busted up.
Could Fink be the reincarnation of Robert Maxwell? Maxwell fell off the Lady Ghislaine and "drowned" after he was found to have looted his companies' pension funds, originally to fund Iz'ril (honoring Lindsay Graham's pronunciation) black ops, later just for himself. Supposedly his totally accidental death happened right after he demanded Iz'ril's help in covering the missing pension funds.
I was in the "kinda amusing, really don't care, never have eaten there, never will, holy mother that new CEO is a train wreck" camp and then you had to come along and point out that the chain's primary benefactors and beneficiaries are Blackrock and Vanguard? Ahem.... CRUSH THAT SODIUM PACKED UNBLEACHED FLOUR AND CANOLA OIL FILLED CRACKER INTO DUST UNTIL THE ONLY THINGS LEFT ARE ITS BASE ELEMENTS!"
That is all.
(PS: No it isn't. If you ever start reading C.S. Lewis in the middle of the night thinking you are going to bed without picking up one more chapter...and then another...and another....and then it's 3AM...think again, bucko.)
I had an idea for Van Gogh chips. Pastel-colored tortilla chips in irregular shapes, imitating the paint chips Van Gogh used to eat. Could sell 1 ounce bags for $5 at art galleries.
I was lurking outside until very late at night, hoping to get at the ingredients by finding boxes in the trash. But they protect their dumpsters like Fort Knox.
But you might find him in front of a green screen with shots of a flooded street behind him. It was a bit of brave-assed journalism until the guy in the background went wading by in the ankle deep water.
Wife wasn’t cooking dinner that night? You showed us your abilities in the kitchen, Chris. It ain’t pretty, but dumpster diving isn’t the answer, my friend!! 😁
His time-consuming hunt for a Cracker Barrel must have run him late, but credit where it's due.... With pix/video and hands-on investigative research, Chris brings home the bacon (and microwave meatloaf). 😁
You know Trump is turning over management of the Panama Canal ports to Blackrock. Doesn’t seem like much of an improvement over the Chinese communists.
Yes, but. . . taking them, the overlords, to task over pulling the rug out from under a segment of people they have again signaled to have less than 0 regard for, of no account, is still worthy of outrage. I find it very satisfying that their casual cold rebrand is possibly crashing and burning. Improving the quality of the food and products would have been another way to go. My now sweat stained gardening hat is from a Cracker Barrel where I stopped on the umpteenth drive from VA to PA to see my slowly dying father, and pulled into a Cracker Barrel parking lot unable, in that moment to finish the drive. I craved the faux nostalgia not the food so I took a break and a breath of the hint of old timey liv’n, bought my broad brimmed ribbon bedecked hat, then traveled on. (Clean bathrooms were/are a big plus. And they were/are one of the few places, like Walmart and Cabelas where you could/can park your car or your camper and sleep in the parking lot. I don’t need that but I appreciate it, the offer.)
Kinda like the virtue signaling classic of Aunt Jemima syrup: Change the label, keep the poison.
Not to get all biblical, but Jesus covered all this a long time ago:
Matthew 23:26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
I use Mrs. Dash Extra Spicy. A few years back, when all the ridiculousness happened such as the elimination of Aunt Jemima, they removed the ‘Mrs’ from the label…because it’s somehow ‘offensive to women’ (WHO are these idiots that make these decisions, anyway?). It’s now a blank space above the word ‘Dash’. Every time I buy a new jar, I write the word ‘Mrs’ back on there before I put it in the cupboard. And the Land O Lakes butter package eliminated their beautiful Indian Maiden; that’s also now a blank space above the lake on the box. What a bunch of damned idiots.
They took Aunt Jemima out of the kitchen and put her back to work the fields. Just like they took the Indian girl off the butter box and put her back on a reservation. Now they’ve taken Uncle Herschel off his rocking chair and sent him off to the old folks home. 😱😢
Once again, Chris throws a fastball down the middle of the plate. Spot-on!
You cannot eat out without the risk of death. It is horrible…and deceptively addictive.
We go on a shit-food bender after our race—Round Table Pizza (the best pizza EVAH, full stop, if you disagree, you’re just wrong…), Mexican, and a few nights of sandwiches, burgers, etc…
I ate one driver thru burger meal—2 hours later I was hungry again—not hungry EXACTLY—I was withdrawing from sugar.
Cook your own food, better yet, learn to grow as much as you can, and only eat out 6-12 times a year. You’ll lose weight, and once again become sensitive to what food does to your mood, energy, psyche.
No, the table of sh!t culture is people so hungry for the Home and Belonging, and their own ancestors’ culture stolen from them, and roots, and intergenerational storytelling…that they will buy the plastic versions of it peddled by Merchants, and (want to) believe it’s real.
This has been behind everything vile since Siggy Freud’s nevvie crawled out from under the rock and invented the psywar field of PR for the Rots Childs to use in their war against humanity. In their goal of turning everyone on earth into a uniformly dark taupe herd of cattle.
Go to link and read the description of one meal at the Shartlesville Hotel in Pennsylvania. That was the 1930s they’re describing.
Places like that still existed when I was kid growing up in the Bankster-and-Reagan-raped, LBJ-repopulated Industrial Valley. They all went away in the go go go go hip cocaine 1980s. I saw places like that in Deep Appalachia into the ‘90s. Globo did away with them all.
And if anybody tried to just feed their neighbors for a few bucks, they got turned in to the state by the Merchant Class (by the ‘90s, largely Asian in PA, but also Greek and Italian). Stories. I have stories.
As a refinery/shipyard town kid desperately trying to get myself and my family out from under the engineered doom, a few times each summer when I could get a few bucks together for gas for the Beetle, I’d drive to the “mountains” (they hardly qualify for the definition, but we called them that) of central PA, and pack in to state lands, and live on bread and cheese and candy bars to get the luxury of sleeping in dark and green quiet and clean for one night. Then back to industrial hell, and the patchwork of waterfront and office gigs that kept roof over heads, food on the table, and openings to training that hopefully one day would bring other paths for me, and us.
There were real roadside diners up to the ‘80s, all over the place. The ones I’d save up for weeks to eat at were locally owned, the ingredients locally sourced (several of my favorites had a mill in the back room that you could hear them grinding grain grown by local farmers, for use in their scratch baking), and staffed by local people.
My favorite one, on the interchange/turnoff to Hawk Mountain (raptor reserve), went full Sysco in the late ‘80s, having been bought by Asian investors. Indians. They sold to some other kind of Asians later—I was gone by then and heard this second hand. But the downturn in quality was immediate. Like everything else Reaganomic and Globalismo, the goal was maximizing profit. Also the souvenirs went over in the ‘70s to plastic crap, no longer locally made.
Cracker Barrel made its gorjillions colonizing white Americans’ hunger for ancestral roots and continuity, locating that right in the middle of the Minotaur-labyrinth of the interstate highway system, while serving up an artificial replacement for max profit.
This entire media kerfuffle—clearly originating from CB PR—revolves around any one or more of several things:
There’s something to be gained by private equity in engineering a Q3 valuation hit, and/or
Globo’s mission of making white people forget their roots has finally succeeded, so that anybody born after 1970 literally has nothing but capeshit and game crap as cultural memory, and/or
They have thought up a new way to exploit white people’s aching hunger for roots, and will be rolling it out in 3, 2, 1……..
I hope you have some good friends and family in your life who make living worthwhile--people who love to cook for Saturday evening gatherings and lazy Sunday days, people who are happy to be alive and love each other and hang out even if they are difficult to deal with, people you can call when you're in trouble and need a hand, friends you can meet for breakfast when you need to talk. Because that is some dark, depressing slurry.
4B: Girlboss with no connection whatsoever to company, product, consumer, or place. She is interchangeable to the company, and the companies she works for are interchangeable to her.
Nobody really likes cracker barrel or considers it "authentic", but many people used to eat at the place with their grandparents and play the "ignoramus" peg game waiting for their food. In the South, they are usually out on by themselves on the highway, and might have been the only sit down place for 15 miles in either direction--not "within a few hundred yards of a Panera Bread, and an Olive Garden, and possibly an Applebee’s and a Chili’s".
That must be a California phenomena, and presumably what the CEO is leaning into. And that Californication/Everything-is-Chipotle/Panera-now (Denver, I know) is precisely what is putting so many people off and provoking their ire.
Back when the lockdowns started, I remember chuckling at the SNL sketch mocking people for wanting the Applebee's to reopen. In retrospect, I was wrong. AppleBee's does suck and isn't worth saving, but the "ApplesBee's militia" was right in that is was worth fighting for if for nothing else but to make a stand where you can against the vapid sneering and condescending blob trying to consume everything in its path.
One of the nice things about living in a backwater like Vermont is that there are not many chain restaurants around unless you're in a "big" city. We've got to drive a half-hour to get to the nearest McDonald's, so there are plenty of local places to choose from. Actually, local places are pretty much all you've got to choose from around here.
In a nearby village near a well-known ski resort is a pizzeria owned by a local guy and his son. They officially close at 6:30 pm, but every morning they make x number of pizza dough balls and that's it for the day. If you want a family sized pizza and all they've got left is a couple of small pizza doughs, you're out of luck. When they use up that day's prepared pizza dough, they're closed. Last Friday that was at 3:16 pm. We got the last pizza, but what a pizza! The best around.
But I firmly and enthusiastically support our obligation to mock these people mercilessly.
Did you read the company's apology letter? Probably written by the girlboss ceo or some other commune of girlboss executives, provided to them by a cabal of girlboss managers.
You're right. This is another corporate entity, majority owned by blackrock, et al, poisoning us with corporatism and sellout to the finance gods. It's silly to actually contemplate eating there.
But we need SOCIAL COST to the people who foist this malarky on us. So we are duty-bound to publicly humiliate them.
Tale as old as time: Business offers a good product for a good price and becomes successful. Then comes the expansion and the franchising, and before you know it they're coasting on their old reputation while microwaving your Aramark "food."
The real issue is we've fucked our economy so badly that we can't seem to manage a place that just serves regular food for a regular price. Making a sandwich or a hamburger isn't rocket science and it should be cheap and easy -- but all that "other" bullshit piles up real quick.
Because it's not enough to make 10% EBIT, we have to then scale, drive efficiencies, reduce costs to make the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF PROFIT.
I feel dirty. The nonstop chase of $ has ruined this society.
Non-stop chase of money has damned sure preoccupied the Congress. Campaigning for (re-) election and stealing/taking bribes doesn't leave much time for governing.
And don't get me started on MSM.....
I hear you, brother:
MSM
Pharma
Big food
Wall Street
MIC
Not "MIC", but "MIFPC"....you forgot "Financial-Pharmaceutical"....
Funny, I'm reading a book right now written in 1938 that says the same thing; says capitalism will kill itself because of this imperative. Yet here we are.
Weird, almost like human nature is predictable or something ;)
"That which can be predicted, can be controlled, humanity included." -
James Burnham?
Our current gangster-crony capitalism runs on the idea of "maximizing short-term profit, and maximizing returns to investors", right? SO, what if we tweaked that just a little bit, and instead we could have, "maximize LONG-TERM SUSTAINABLE profit." Yes, that "sustainable" word is, well, "problematic", but I can't think of a better word. But the idea of making our economy more "long-term sustainable" seems much better than "get rich quick", and 'pump-and-dump" stock scams.... And, aren't Blackrock, Vanguard, etc., simply amassing(hoarding) resources for the long-term?....What I'm suggesting here could be one way to at least slow down that "chase of $" you speak of.... After all, you ARE a trusted name in razors!
I like the way you think. I'm not really in the "AOC-Tax-the-Rich" camp, but yes, I agree. Given that we have the I.R.S. & Federal Reserve, yes, that SHOULD be taxed as income, and not capital gains, because it accrues to the individual. And further, I'd like to see that money plowed back into the "grass roots", and not just wasted on watering plastic flowers, as much Gov't taxation seems to be.... If we did that, we'd still have rich & poor, but the poor would be much less poor, and the rich would still be rich. But the system doesn't exist to serve the people, it exists to serve the rich. The people exist to serve the rich. I don't know why the rich exist, but they do. So I just do my best to be an infectious carrier of hope, optimism, smiles, laughter, and positive thinking, and to spread immunity to negativity, pessimism & delusion. Looks like we ALL still have a lot of work to do. Better than being bored & depressed, anyway!....
ttyl, thnx!
Paying $15 to $18 an hour to make said burgers and sandwiches really drives your pricing through the roof.
We sure could use a man like Milton Friedman again.
I read that in Caroll O’Connor’s singing voice
Written in the same!
Lol
And not just that. I'm sure you've noticed that your household bills (electricity, water, rent) have increased tremendously over the last few years.
Businesses have to pay those same bills.
Oh yeah. Here in the great, blue run state of NJ, the wind farm subsidies, etc. have jacked up our electricity bills 18% this year, with another 13% next year.
And unlike your home, lights in businesses pretty much have to be on all the time.
Have you seen the price of housing and food? If you pay less than $18 per hour, it’s starvation wages.
Do you know what percentage of the cost of the food at Cracker Barrel is labor? I don’t but figure you can tell me since you appear to be an expert.
"Brave Search: The industry benchmark for labor cost percentage in fast food or quick service restaurants (QSR) is generally between 25% and 30% of total sales." Before I queried Brave I guessed it was about 30%. In high end restaurants I would guess labor is a bit more.
I don’t know it. But I appreciate the acknowledgement of my expertise.
Spoilage is a huge loss for restaurants. Best way to avoid that is frozen, microwaved food.
You know it is a problem for the "foodies" when NPR is in the case: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/07/08/200106073/france-battles-scourge-of-ready-to-eat-meals-in-restaurants
This has been a huge problem in France for years, so much so, they just gave up and let in the 3rd world, like here
https://archive.ph/Rw2jn
Freezing food products saves waste and improves quality. Most proteins begin to deteriorate immediately. Freezing food is one of the most important things to happen to food. Free zing proteins arrest microbes, etc.
The “ stockholders” require more profit and sales.
Spot on SC, I lived a couple hundred yards from the original Chevy's in Alameda, and met my wife there. It was a fun place with fantastic, "fresh mex" food...then, eventually, they sold out to PepsiCo and the rest, as they say, is history.
Wow. In one sentence, you encapsulated the entire American social zeitgeist.
I hope you've watched the films by that name, "ZEITGEIST", & Zeitgeist - Addendum....
They're on YouTube....
I learned it by watching Bray!
otherwise known as the enshittification of everything
Read “Aramark” as “Amtrak” - which also works, I suppose.
Amtrak makes weirdly adequate food, not that I experience it often.
Have I got some wonderful news for you.......
https://www.aramark.com/industries/business-and-government/workplace-experience-group/workplace-experience-group-blog/starr-restaurants-and-amtrak-collaboration
On May 18, Aramark launched our partnership with Amtrak and Starr Restaurants. Amtrak announced the launch of an all-new Amtrak Acela First Class dining menu to be offered on trains traveling between Boston and Washington DC.
STARR and Aramark, whose facilities team provides food and beverage services regionally for Amtrak, have developed a fresh new menu to offer Acela First Class passengers an elevated and reimaged dining experience.
yuck
Michelin could not be reached for comment.
The “good product at a good price” is totally debatable here. Their food is awful. It is commercial kitchen food with a ‘soythern’ slant!
NOW their food is awful, but what about when they were opening up new locations everywhere 50-60 years ago?
The company says in its annual report that the average customer check is $14. What ingredients can you expect when your full-plate dinner, in a restaurant, costs $14?
Challenged accepted (is it still cool to say that?):
After gym, I sometimes have lunch since I'm in town anyway. Here's my usual, and remember the amount is enough to fill up a man 183cm/6' tall and 100kg/220pounds heavy.
Baked potatoe, about the size of two tennis-balls. Topped with two manly handfuls of a salmon-and-mayo mix. Accompanied by a salad: lettuce (two kinds), cucumber, onions, corn (not a cob), tomatoes, and two dipping sauces. Fist-sized piece of bread, baked that morning and a knob of butter.
Coffee and free refills included.
128:-/$13:39. 61 cents to spare!
Sure, there are plenty of real expensive places in the citys but quality-wise, it's not much of a difference, just fancier.
Dog food, gravy, mashed potatoes.
Probably why In-n-Out doesn’t franchise. Though it is expanding. And I heard HQ is moving to Tennessee?
We just got our first WA In-n-Out and the parking lot was jammed the whole day. Good burgers, crappy fries, IMO.
Were the fries kinda floppy? Ask for them “well done.”
Every time! Same with Five Guys! I'll try the "well done" ask next time. (it DOES work at Five Guys!)
Fries are crappy at all locations.
Pass it every day! Haven't been there yet, but I have been to the one in Keizer, OR!
They will still have some ‘corporate presence’ in SoCA. The deal in TN is a family member is moving part of the company to TN.
I worked at Bennigan's when I was in college and went into management when I graduated in 1990. Our corporate recipe book was early in the transition from made fresh in store to frozen prepackaged. It had been part of Pillsbury (under Steak & Ale) when it was sold to Grand Met - UK liquor distributor for many brands you know. Because of tiered-house laws that prohibited liquor wholesale and retail sales under the same tent Grand Met had to spin it off.
But that whole multinational corporate streamlining for efficiency and consistency model had taken off and local stores weren't trusted to deliver the same consistent product, was the justification anyways, so they made it all the same somewhere else and shipped it into the stores to microwave and fry.
The most repulsive development and preview of what was to come was what I saw at a corporate managers training conference in Dallas in 1991-1992 when they rolled out the new steaks we would be serving. First they dimmed the lights in the auditorium for a slide show of different cuts of raw steak. We were asked to rate each steak we saw *solely* on appearance, what looked pleasing to the eye. Some had extensive marbling, fat, gristle, others were completely red, all meat, no marbling. And many cuts in-between. They gathered up all of our cards we had written our observations on and tallied them, proudly proclaiming that the completely red, all meat cuts received the highest ratings, like 75% of the room judged them the most visually appealing.
They then informed all of the managers in the auditorium that the cut that was judged the least appealing was the cut that was the highest USDA grade. And the cut that was judged the most appealing was the cut that was one of the lowest USDA grades, just above dog meat. The audience gasped.
This is when the kicker came - the corporate chef for Bennigan's had invented a patented new "butter-injection method" where they plunged needles filled with butter into the fat-less lean cuts of steak and injected them. quickly vacuum sealed and frozen and sent to the restaurants. The butter was supposed to act as a flavor-transfer agent, substituting for the marbling higher grades of meat contain.
Nice theory. When the steaks first came into the restaurant and we tried them they were awful. And customers weren't happy. Tasted like shoe-leather, texture all wrong, just a terrible product. A cut of meat just above what goes into dog food. Was the most expensive item on the menu. Under a corporation named "Steak & Ale." When I saw that, what corporate America was willing to do to chase a buck - the lowest grade of meat is the least expensive - while telling us their latest invention was the apex of food "science" I knew that restaurant chain wasn't long for this world. And it wasn't many years after that they went belly-up.
Since that experience I've avoided corporate restaurants like the plague. I know what makes them tick. I'll take an inconsistent local restauranteur over a consistently dubious corporate chain any day of the week.
PS - Romano's Macaroni was started by former Bennigan's/S&A managers. As was Applebee's, Hooters, Olive Garden, Outback and many large chains you've heard of.
"Tell us how good the food looks" is a terrible metric in the first place and everybody who suggested it should have been fired immediately.
I was a manager at Pizza Hut then the Olive Garden and then Boston Market. Samething you described happened at all three places. The only one really standing is Pizza Hut and it continues to buy cheaper to sell higher and tastes awful.
As a 60 year Southerner, I can tell you the food at Cracker Barrel sucked long before anyone put soy in anything. HOWEVER, as many things are, it was where your parents and grandparents stopped when you were traveling I95 to visit family because there was plenty of Mac and cheese, tons to look at and do for car-weary/hyper kids, and the staff was (back then) universally friendly, down home, genuinely nice ladies. And until the BLM/Cvid/rainbow crap, they kept customers because of that nostalgia. (Not me - we stopped with the kids outside of Richmond once in the early 90s and never went back!)
But, esp for Southerners, I think, it’s just the perfect example of not only general wokeness but of the pervasive corporate dismissal and erasure of our culture. We’re all dumb hicks down here who need to be told by our educated betters what’s good for us, and we’ll get it, good and hard. Except Southerners sniff that out miles away and mostly stopped going to Cracker Barrel by 2020. It’s just a rest stop maybe now, mostly when the kids need to pee.
We won’t miss you, Cracker Barrel.
RIP Cracker Barrel - soon to be buried in the same highway rest stop graveyard as Stuckey’s (pecan log rolls under the pitched green roof) and Hojo’s/Howard Johnson’s and their fried clam strips? Who’s next?
I still mourn the demise of Howard Johnson's and its clam strips. RIP Cracker Barrel because the new, Woke CEO needs to be taken down several notches. The stockholders are not happy with what the board of directors has accomplished.
The clam strips were my favorite as we traveled old US 301 south to Florida .
Same. Only clams I ever liked, and we always stopped at one on the way to visit my great grandmother to get the pointy-top ice cream cones.
I miss the Toasties :(
Stuckey’s was such an exciting stop on drives to see my grandparents in Atlanta in the 1970s. We always got pecan pralines.
Oh man, the clam strips. 😋
My mother’s Friday night favorite when I was little. Clam strips at HoJo’s.
Hojo clam strips 👍
But just remember.....Jacques Pepin (one of the best normal chefs out there) worked for HoJo's 1960'-70.
Buc-ees > Cracker Barrel (in the current "New South" imagination, "by a Country Mile.")
Buc-ees needs a porch area off the one side of the building with a ton of rocking chairs to be a perfect stopping off point. There is so much going on there that I get sensory overload and mentally exhausted just walking in to take a leak. They need to add a place for folks to decompress and take in what they have witnessed inside.
Oh have I heard of the legendary Buc-ees. Never been to one. They aren’t out here in the West!
They are in Texas. A scary place. Practicing to have stores without humans entirely.
Arizona is getting one--being built on I-10 on the way to LA. Not sure where you are but maybe your neck of the woods is on their list!
I’m in SoCA. Not a lot of available real estate along the very crowded freeways.
I agree. Hope they see your suggestion!
Last time I was in a Buc-ees the aroma was a disturbing combination of teriyaki beef jerky and flatulence.
I'm seeing a cologne
Seeing is better than smelling.
Wow!
Could not pay me enough to step foot in a Buc-ees ever again. Once was enough. An absolute nightmare.
Buc-ees is a consumer theme park. Im not a fan but the bathrooms are excellent. Only problem is it is a ten minute walk to get to them.
As someone who lives >1,000 miles from the nearest Buc-ee’s, I happened to be driving through Buc-ee’s country a few weeks ago and stopped at a few. I’m sure the novelty would wear off at some point, but I thought it was awesome.
Word.
They have great bathrooms. Doors that close and locks that work (is that too much to ask?).
I went to a Buccees one Christmas Eve to get a gift for a gift swap and the place was packed! People were doing their Christmas shopping there. I got a fabulous oversized, tie dyed coffee mug with a peace sign on it and the buccee beaver and called it a day. On the way out I thought that Macys would be lucky to have that crowd of shoppers….
Not even remotely true. Maybe in some multiverse version of this one, but definitely not this one.
I have lived in the South for 15 years. I know, personally, many people who love Buc-cees. Cracker Barrel? Meh. Maybe if you’re a 76-yr-old couple with grandchildren in tow.
Totally agree. They never were good. Unless you like the carb load
Well, I wonder whether you are too young to remember when these sterile corporate chain restaurants were actually kind of kitschy and cool. Pizza Hut had a woody dining room with red checked curtains that made it look homey. McDonald's in the 70s was all woody and homey with little plaster Hamburglers on the walls. My grandpa would treat us to dinner at The Sizzler, which was also decorated to look like someone's ranch house dining room.
Now, like the new high rises in NYC, everything seems to have had the life sucked out of it, and that includes the stripped bare new interior at Cracker Barrel, which, by the way, is the only place my friend's mother and I ate while driving my friend's stuff from NYC to Iowa after he died. After hours on the bland interstate, which could be anywhere there's grass and a few trees, it was comforting to sit in something resembling an American country home, and eat the chemicals you root out here. We would wander the aisles in the country store -- the stuff was fun to look at, and didn't feel cheap, like in the rest stops today.
As a Boomer, I can say that rest stops and restaurants back in the day all had some distinctive character and/or glamour that has been summarily removed in deference to globalism, and it hurts, it truly hurts, to witness this. They didn't just take Uncle Herschel off the logo. They erased him, just as they erased Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben -- friendly faces that actually DID celebrate the multi-cultural foundations of the United States.
We drive the New York Thruway a half-dozen times a year. The rest areas were, architecturally speaking, North Country and kinda Adirondack in style, and each one was different. Sure, they had all the chain restaurants inside, but clean restrooms and nice, human-sized dining areas that didn't make you feel like you were eating in the middle of Grand Central.
Over the last few years all of those have been bulldozed to make room for cookie-cutter "Applegreen" service areas. They're still clean, but now huge, definitely not cozy or quirky like the old ones. And they're all exactly the same. Soulless. I don't know what the state paid for this so-called upgrade, but whatever it was, it was totally unnecessary.
Soulless is right. McDonalds' interior looks like a beiged-out corporate cubicle. What in the world happened to America's restaurants?
Heartbreaking.
Why. I want to know WHY.
Me too. So wasteful.
Jemima and Ben are in Heaven holding hands.
With the Land O’ Lakes native woman paddling a canoe. A moment of silence as we continue to erase our culture.
Oh! the classic Pizza Hut lunch buffet of the 70's and 80's!. Italian for Lunch!
Not sure I’d refer to it as Italian, or even pizza, but a good deal nonetheless! 👍
You’re reminding me of Route 66. In the 1960s, our family of seven would drive from Southern California to the Midwest every summer. It was great. Not any more, of course. I’ll just keep my memories.
Ah, you reminded me of when we moved from Chicago to SF in 1988, and the first place we stayed was a PINK PIG MOTEL AND RESTAURANT that was run by this old timer couple. There was a sense of originality and true humanity on the road in those days. Now it's so pitifully sterile.
I do a lot of road trips… You can still find it in the little towns off the beaten path… Much rarer, but still delightful.
My dad and I did the other direction on Route 66 to see my grandparents. We got off at Flagstaff and headed to Phoenix. It was an awesome trip! My dad would always come up with a new mode of transportation or route to get to Phoenix every summer. Thanks for the memories, Dad!
My sentiments exactly.
Stop, you're making me mourn yet again the Jackrabbit Trading Post on Route 66.
Tardigrade! Ha ha!
Taco Bell was like a little adobe taco stand when I was a kid… outdoor seating only. We loved it!
Yes! And Dunkin Donuts was frosty pink and my friend had to wear a pink maid uniform! It was great!
The stop off the I95 is about right. Granted, it's not what it was, but ripping up what nostalgia remains is just annoying. It's a chain restaurant so you get what you get, but I think it really is what it signals more than anything else. You can't even have your faux-folksy stuff, that's the message. It's also saying they're going to strip that down and make it "minimalist" and "hip" (in the least hip way possible). They're not even going to try to do a good job in the process.
Ever watched Coraline and that horrific moment where the guy with the dancing rats disintegrates into a pile of rats when told he's just a "copy of the real Mr. B" saying "not even that anymore..."? It's the corporate version of that. They decided to disintegrate into rats in front of everyone.
I grew up in the Bay Area, went to college at Cal Davis in the late ‘70s. Remember stopping at the Nut Tree many times on road trips. Another one-of-a-kind place that I fondly remember. I don’t think I want to know what has happened to it.
In the midwest it was Stuckey's, pale blue, so glamorous, with pecan divinity on sale.
Blackrock is a $10 trillion behemoth. The bulk of that money is the untold number of pension plans they manage on behalf of unions and companies, both big and small. Larry Fink uses that clout to further his Leftist political agenda. There is no doubt this girl boss CEO at Cracker Barrel is there because he wanted her there.
Blackrock functions as a mail-in ballot bundling operation at the corporate level. Other people’s ballots (share proxies) are accumulated by Blackrock and voted, not in the interest of the true owners (the pensioners), but for the benefit of Larry Fink and his cronies. This company, and the others like it, are doing serious damage to the economy and the country and need to be busted up.
Could Fink be the reincarnation of Robert Maxwell? Maxwell fell off the Lady Ghislaine and "drowned" after he was found to have looted his companies' pension funds, originally to fund Iz'ril (honoring Lindsay Graham's pronunciation) black ops, later just for himself. Supposedly his totally accidental death happened right after he demanded Iz'ril's help in covering the missing pension funds.
You know who your real master is by whose name you dare not say.
They got in trouble for the proxy vote thing.
That being said, Trump needs to take Larry Fink out.
And Fink is now a head honcho at WEF.
🙌 Amen!
And now Señor Fink will be heading up the WEF! That will be a Big Job to fill KLaus Schwab’s leather Gucci loafers!
I was in the "kinda amusing, really don't care, never have eaten there, never will, holy mother that new CEO is a train wreck" camp and then you had to come along and point out that the chain's primary benefactors and beneficiaries are Blackrock and Vanguard? Ahem.... CRUSH THAT SODIUM PACKED UNBLEACHED FLOUR AND CANOLA OIL FILLED CRACKER INTO DUST UNTIL THE ONLY THINGS LEFT ARE ITS BASE ELEMENTS!"
That is all.
(PS: No it isn't. If you ever start reading C.S. Lewis in the middle of the night thinking you are going to bed without picking up one more chapter...and then another...and another....and then it's 3AM...think again, bucko.)
Just don't eat the Lovecraft Cthulu chips! 😮
I had an idea for Van Gogh chips. Pastel-colored tortilla chips in irregular shapes, imitating the paint chips Van Gogh used to eat. Could sell 1 ounce bags for $5 at art galleries.
Well I know where one of them is chilling and NOT eating those! (Thanks for making me laugh though.)
Chris, your post has just arrived with us in England just after 1000 a.m. which makes me think you must have been up all night with indigestion.
I was lurking outside until very late at night, hoping to get at the ingredients by finding boxes in the trash. But they protect their dumpsters like Fort Knox.
Now THAT'S a real reporter! You won't catch David Muir doing that :)
But you might find him in front of a green screen with shots of a flooded street behind him. It was a bit of brave-assed journalism until the guy in the background went wading by in the ankle deep water.
As long as his clothespins were intact, it's all good.
Sharp eyes!! Those raincoats are off the rack and Mr. Muir deserves the fitted look! Clothespins will do in a pinch. Get it? 😜
What clowns 🤡these media idiots are!
Wife wasn’t cooking dinner that night? You showed us your abilities in the kitchen, Chris. It ain’t pretty, but dumpster diving isn’t the answer, my friend!! 😁
It's barely after 2 AM on the west coast! Chris and I are still going strong!
(I was literally getting ready for bed when this post hit my inbox)
Well 2 a.m sounds about right for a bout of indigestion.
His time-consuming hunt for a Cracker Barrel must have run him late, but credit where it's due.... With pix/video and hands-on investigative research, Chris brings home the bacon (and microwave meatloaf). 😁
BINGO! Captured my sentiment exactly!
Now boycott Blackrock-controlled businesses--that's real WAR that requires commitment.
It would be extremely hard to find a business that ISN'T controlled by blackrock. 😑😭
And Fink is now a head honcho at WEF.
It would be extremely hard to find someone else with such an apt last name for the type of person it is.
You know Trump is turning over management of the Panama Canal ports to Blackrock. Doesn’t seem like much of an improvement over the Chinese communists.
Oh fuck, you said a lot there.
Agreed.
Yes, but. . . taking them, the overlords, to task over pulling the rug out from under a segment of people they have again signaled to have less than 0 regard for, of no account, is still worthy of outrage. I find it very satisfying that their casual cold rebrand is possibly crashing and burning. Improving the quality of the food and products would have been another way to go. My now sweat stained gardening hat is from a Cracker Barrel where I stopped on the umpteenth drive from VA to PA to see my slowly dying father, and pulled into a Cracker Barrel parking lot unable, in that moment to finish the drive. I craved the faux nostalgia not the food so I took a break and a breath of the hint of old timey liv’n, bought my broad brimmed ribbon bedecked hat, then traveled on. (Clean bathrooms were/are a big plus. And they were/are one of the few places, like Walmart and Cabelas where you could/can park your car or your camper and sleep in the parking lot. I don’t need that but I appreciate it, the offer.)
Place a dagger between your teeth and climb the rigging with me - Cracker Barrel's going to Davy Jones' locker!
Kinda like the virtue signaling classic of Aunt Jemima syrup: Change the label, keep the poison.
Not to get all biblical, but Jesus covered all this a long time ago:
Matthew 23:26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.
27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
Nothing new under the sun.
I use Mrs. Dash Extra Spicy. A few years back, when all the ridiculousness happened such as the elimination of Aunt Jemima, they removed the ‘Mrs’ from the label…because it’s somehow ‘offensive to women’ (WHO are these idiots that make these decisions, anyway?). It’s now a blank space above the word ‘Dash’. Every time I buy a new jar, I write the word ‘Mrs’ back on there before I put it in the cupboard. And the Land O Lakes butter package eliminated their beautiful Indian Maiden; that’s also now a blank space above the lake on the box. What a bunch of damned idiots.
Let's not forget the Cream Of Wheat man.
They took Aunt Jemima out of the kitchen and put her back to work the fields. Just like they took the Indian girl off the butter box and put her back on a reservation. Now they’ve taken Uncle Herschel off his rocking chair and sent him off to the old folks home. 😱😢
Whatever happen the Happy Cream of Wheat Man?
Good question!! I loved cream of wheat! Especially the chunks. Where’d it go? I’m totally a Yankee but I love grits too! 👍
Pearl Milling Company. An American tradition since 2021.
We refill the Aunt Jemima bottle.
We kept one, unopened. My heirs can fight over it.
It’ll be worth millions! Like ancient Greek artifacts, Ancient USA history: The Prewoke Period. 😂
Beef tallow is the good stuff from cows 🐂🐄
I was confused if Chris meant tallow or butter as well.
Or lard.
And butter!
Once again, Chris throws a fastball down the middle of the plate. Spot-on!
You cannot eat out without the risk of death. It is horrible…and deceptively addictive.
We go on a shit-food bender after our race—Round Table Pizza (the best pizza EVAH, full stop, if you disagree, you’re just wrong…), Mexican, and a few nights of sandwiches, burgers, etc…
I ate one driver thru burger meal—2 hours later I was hungry again—not hungry EXACTLY—I was withdrawing from sugar.
Cook your own food, better yet, learn to grow as much as you can, and only eat out 6-12 times a year. You’ll lose weight, and once again become sensitive to what food does to your mood, energy, psyche.
bsn
This saga encompasses most of the major challenges to society today:
1. Concentrated financial power (Blackrock ownership)
2. The loss of quality to increase profits (the food sucks)
3. Corporatism and homogenization of a brand ($700m in marketing for a "new" brand)
4. Girlboss trying to make her mark on the enterprise (ceo direct from central casting)
5. Absolute shit food full of sugar, fat and chemicals (I'll have nightmares about those ingredient lists)
Yes. It runs the table of shit culture.
No, the table of sh!t culture is people so hungry for the Home and Belonging, and their own ancestors’ culture stolen from them, and roots, and intergenerational storytelling…that they will buy the plastic versions of it peddled by Merchants, and (want to) believe it’s real.
This has been behind everything vile since Siggy Freud’s nevvie crawled out from under the rock and invented the psywar field of PR for the Rots Childs to use in their war against humanity. In their goal of turning everyone on earth into a uniformly dark taupe herd of cattle.
Go to link and read the description of one meal at the Shartlesville Hotel in Pennsylvania. That was the 1930s they’re describing.
https://archive.org/details/pennsylvania-dutch-cook-book-of-fine-old-recipes-copy
Places like that still existed when I was kid growing up in the Bankster-and-Reagan-raped, LBJ-repopulated Industrial Valley. They all went away in the go go go go hip cocaine 1980s. I saw places like that in Deep Appalachia into the ‘90s. Globo did away with them all.
And if anybody tried to just feed their neighbors for a few bucks, they got turned in to the state by the Merchant Class (by the ‘90s, largely Asian in PA, but also Greek and Italian). Stories. I have stories.
As a refinery/shipyard town kid desperately trying to get myself and my family out from under the engineered doom, a few times each summer when I could get a few bucks together for gas for the Beetle, I’d drive to the “mountains” (they hardly qualify for the definition, but we called them that) of central PA, and pack in to state lands, and live on bread and cheese and candy bars to get the luxury of sleeping in dark and green quiet and clean for one night. Then back to industrial hell, and the patchwork of waterfront and office gigs that kept roof over heads, food on the table, and openings to training that hopefully one day would bring other paths for me, and us.
There were real roadside diners up to the ‘80s, all over the place. The ones I’d save up for weeks to eat at were locally owned, the ingredients locally sourced (several of my favorites had a mill in the back room that you could hear them grinding grain grown by local farmers, for use in their scratch baking), and staffed by local people.
My favorite one, on the interchange/turnoff to Hawk Mountain (raptor reserve), went full Sysco in the late ‘80s, having been bought by Asian investors. Indians. They sold to some other kind of Asians later—I was gone by then and heard this second hand. But the downturn in quality was immediate. Like everything else Reaganomic and Globalismo, the goal was maximizing profit. Also the souvenirs went over in the ‘70s to plastic crap, no longer locally made.
Cracker Barrel made its gorjillions colonizing white Americans’ hunger for ancestral roots and continuity, locating that right in the middle of the Minotaur-labyrinth of the interstate highway system, while serving up an artificial replacement for max profit.
This entire media kerfuffle—clearly originating from CB PR—revolves around any one or more of several things:
There’s something to be gained by private equity in engineering a Q3 valuation hit, and/or
Globo’s mission of making white people forget their roots has finally succeeded, so that anybody born after 1970 literally has nothing but capeshit and game crap as cultural memory, and/or
They have thought up a new way to exploit white people’s aching hunger for roots, and will be rolling it out in 3, 2, 1……..
I hope you have some good friends and family in your life who make living worthwhile--people who love to cook for Saturday evening gatherings and lazy Sunday days, people who are happy to be alive and love each other and hang out even if they are difficult to deal with, people you can call when you're in trouble and need a hand, friends you can meet for breakfast when you need to talk. Because that is some dark, depressing slurry.
I don't eat out at all anymore. If you make your own food, you know what's in it.
4B: Girlboss with no connection whatsoever to company, product, consumer, or place. She is interchangeable to the company, and the companies she works for are interchangeable to her.
Nobody really likes cracker barrel or considers it "authentic", but many people used to eat at the place with their grandparents and play the "ignoramus" peg game waiting for their food. In the South, they are usually out on by themselves on the highway, and might have been the only sit down place for 15 miles in either direction--not "within a few hundred yards of a Panera Bread, and an Olive Garden, and possibly an Applebee’s and a Chili’s".
That must be a California phenomena, and presumably what the CEO is leaning into. And that Californication/Everything-is-Chipotle/Panera-now (Denver, I know) is precisely what is putting so many people off and provoking their ire.
Back when the lockdowns started, I remember chuckling at the SNL sketch mocking people for wanting the Applebee's to reopen. In retrospect, I was wrong. AppleBee's does suck and isn't worth saving, but the "ApplesBee's militia" was right in that is was worth fighting for if for nothing else but to make a stand where you can against the vapid sneering and condescending blob trying to consume everything in its path.
There was no Cracker Barrel presence in CA until recently (Victorville in 2017 according to the Interwebs), so a California and modern phenomenon.
I was actually surprised that there are any in CA.
If all of this, whatever this is, only produced the immortal prose:
“Until the sea gives up her dead,” I always cry at the Red Lobster hostess, categorizing her authentically with those who go down to the sea in ships.
Then it was worth it.
Good take.
Patronize your local greasy spoon.
They are nearly non-existent these days. 😪
One of the nice things about living in a backwater like Vermont is that there are not many chain restaurants around unless you're in a "big" city. We've got to drive a half-hour to get to the nearest McDonald's, so there are plenty of local places to choose from. Actually, local places are pretty much all you've got to choose from around here.
In a nearby village near a well-known ski resort is a pizzeria owned by a local guy and his son. They officially close at 6:30 pm, but every morning they make x number of pizza dough balls and that's it for the day. If you want a family sized pizza and all they've got left is a couple of small pizza doughs, you're out of luck. When they use up that day's prepared pizza dough, they're closed. Last Friday that was at 3:16 pm. We got the last pizza, but what a pizza! The best around.
And all restaurants get their base food from SysCo.
Those are all run by beaners or jeets now. Not even a good old fashioned black short order cook to be found.
Great point, Chris.
But I firmly and enthusiastically support our obligation to mock these people mercilessly.
Did you read the company's apology letter? Probably written by the girlboss ceo or some other commune of girlboss executives, provided to them by a cabal of girlboss managers.
You're right. This is another corporate entity, majority owned by blackrock, et al, poisoning us with corporatism and sellout to the finance gods. It's silly to actually contemplate eating there.
But we need SOCIAL COST to the people who foist this malarky on us. So we are duty-bound to publicly humiliate them.
I would bet a kidney that the wall-of-empty-words apology letter was written by a crisis management consultant.
I'm sure you're right. But my scenario calls to mind a better visual ;_)
I’ll bet a kidney yours is safe.
It read like ChatGPT