Scattered, Smothered, And Covered…
To this day, one of my all-time favourite podcast episodes is from David Farrier’s Flightless Bird, and it's the episode he did about Waffle House. If you haven’t listened, David is a delightful Kiwi marooned in America, and Flightless Bird is him chronicling his attempts to try and understand it.
The episode was top-of-mind for me these past two weeks because Linkedin was awash with lukewarm takes about Cracker Barrel’s well-intentioned logo update. This, followed by more mainstream coverage after the brand did a full 180, and the White House tried to take credit for it.
To be blunt: I really couldn't give a f*ck about the Cracker Barrel logo.
It’s just yet another example of the loud minority driving the narrative, and a brand losing track of what actually matters strategically. I’m not convinced that most of the people making noise about the new “woke” logo actually frequent Cracker Barrel. And, the double self-own is a truly spectacular feat.
But the whole debacle has made me think about the impressive resiliency of Waffle House and how it has been able to carefully modernize while other brands have faltered. It really is the anti-Cracker Barrel.
At a glance, they’re both Southern-born chains, steeped in American tradition, but they occupy different spaces and lean on different mythologies - even though they were founded around the same time.
The origins of Waffle house lie in shift work. It was a place you could come to get great service and a hot meal, even at 2am when you clocked off from the factory or hospital. It’s fast and it's functional. The brand’s mythology grew around that.
Cracker Barrel was founded 14 years later, and from day one it was selling a memory. Designed to mimic the country store of its founder’s childhood, it was nostalgia packaged and scaled. Rocking chairs, checkerboards, jars of candy from a world that may or may not have actually existed.
And that’s the key difference. Waffle House became mythologized because it's real. It didn’t have to manufacture its story. People did that for them.
Cracker Barrel, on the other hand, has always been simulation. It’s a stage set of the country, rather than the country itself. The whole brand is built on simulacra. Scaled copies of a past that may have never really existed.
The challenge with brands like these is that they age poorly. What initially reads as comfort or tradition eventually slides into kitsch, and as culture moves on, you’re forced to modernize or die.
Those modernization efforts are always challenging and contentious. And, they’re rarely judged rationally because change can so easily feel like a betrayal of the memory the brand was supposed to protect.
Waffle House doesn’t carry that burden. It never promised to be the guardian of some mythological past. It promised to be open at 3am and serve you delicious hashbrowns, no matter who you are. And that promise is oddly future-proof.
But Crackler Barrel isn’t alone. A lot of legacy brands are caught in the same bind.
And sadly for them, they aren’t Waffle Houses.
They’re built on nostalgia, heritage, or tradition, and they’ve locked themselves into a version of the past that culture has outpaced. This puts them in a bit of a lose-lose situation and that’s why we see so many brands run afoul.
So what’s a girl to do?
Do you guard the illusion, or break it, in the name of a return to growth?
Whatever your choice, acknowledging that you’re deliberately making that strategic choice makes all the difference.
It shapes how you defend your decisions to your stakeholders.
It shapes how you’ll design research, and who you’ll talk to.
It sets the stage for how you prepare your comms & marketing.
But most critically: It gives you solid footing to fall back on when things get spicy.
Because in the end, the worst thing you can do is stumble into change without realizing which game you’re playing… Waffle House or Cracker Barrel.