Also, Cracker Barrel was founded in 1969. It was always fake nostalgia bait for white people. Who else was pining for the 1800s at that point? People are talking about the logo change erasing their culture or whatever, which I guess is true if your culture is a truckstop restaurant with knickknacks on the walls.
The Wild West was super popular around that time. Little House on the Prairie, was published in the 30's/40's, so the push for more old west stuff 30ish years later (when the adapted the books I to a show) kind of marks the end of the nostalgia driven media from that generation.
I had never thought about it, but cracker barrel being from that 60/70's cowboy craze makes a shitload of sense.
hey, i'll have you know some damn good food comes out of truck stops. best worst bbq chain i know started in one. best tacos next town over are served at one.
Tangentially related memory: In the early nineties, my grandparents took my sister and me to their favorite Cracker Barrel (and we went to a lot of Cracker Barrels with them), somewhere in or around Pennsylvania.
It was more or less the same, notably bigger, and right when you walked in, there was a big, old busted barrel, with a plaque that claimed this to be the cracker barrel for which the chain was named. It had several broken planks, and if you looked inside, you could see chewed-open boxes of crackers... And as soon as you looked, a mouse would zip out of the cracker box so fast it'd make you jump, and everybody in the gift shop would laugh their asses off.
Then they let you in on the joke, and the cashier showed you they press a button behind the counter that triggers the mechanical mouse, and you join the in-group of people in the gift shop waiting for the next unsuspecting victim to walk through the front door.
The chewed open boxes should have been a big clue. The barrel was the packaging. I'm also guessing they weren't crawling with maggots, as would be found in a traditional cracker barrel.
It's also where the phrase "bottom of the barrel" came from - by the time you reached that, they got nasty!
Not specific to soda crackers
Yeah that sounds more like some kind of protein or produce. Maybe on a ship.
Not necessarily, it was just the way most goods were shipped and stored back then. I read the memoirs of a guy who grew up around the mid 19th century, and his posh city family bought a barrel of butter from the countryside, because that was supposedly the best one. They stored it in the cellar and the barrel lasted a year, so that bottom of the barrel butter unsurprisingly became vile.
Obviously it could apply to anything. The more perishable the more applicable. Crackers seem like they might last a lot longer than these other items we are mentioning.
/c/hailcorporate
The PR for Cracker Barrel is off the hooks as of lately. Previously I had no idea what Cracker Barrel was and I had never heard of it. But now... I still have no idea what it is, but I have heard of it.
Gift shop/restaurant with a country-ish theme. Like the restaurants have big wooden porches with big rocking chairs, if that tells you anything about the vibe.
Fun fact: most Cracker Barrel restaurants are built just off an interstate exit. They use GIS for planning and hope to catch travelers as they stop for gas and food.
That's my main memory of Cracker Barrel. It was a place we'd sometimes stop and eat at when I was a kid during the family road trips. In that sense, I have some good memories associated with them, but I'm not particularly nostalgic for the brand and I've not been to one in years.
Literally never seen a cracker barrel store in my life. Hope they go out of business before I get the chance, they sound like a shitty corporate restaurant.
The restaurant has a gift shop. I haven't been in a very long time but it was always overpriced Americana crap made in China. And it's not like a counter you can buy a tshirt at, it's a whole ass store attached to the restaurant. They're ultra proud of that bullshit.
Where is this brand common?
In the deep south before the Civil Rights Act
Also the Midwest, because they spread a bit after the Civil Right Act.
They're in 43 states.
They're actually smart about their locations. Almost always off a freeway. Say what you want about the food but when you're traveling and the alternatives are truck stops and gas stations, seeing that cracker barrel sign is a godsend!
I assumed they had gone out of business until the failed rebrand. If this is some kinda 4d chess to get people talking about them it's working great.
A bunch in the south east.
And the food is great. The shops are better if you're a child. Lol
My headcanon is still that the guy in the pic is white, and would always sit outside the store leaned over a barrel, and everybody knew the store by seeing that guy and the barrel.
Huh, and here I thought it had to do with the cracker and the barrel on the logo.
The name wasn't ever changed though, just the logo.
Why the fuck wouldn’t you just use boxes? The goddamn crackers are square. What a waste of space.
Barrels are mostly air and water tight
Because reusability.
What I want to know is why the fuck we don't just use barrels today.
We do. they're just bigger and more space efficient:
(And they're reused just like barrels were. That's how Walmart got all that radioactive shrimp).
That's what I was surprised by. Maybe barrels were very common and the round shape was more resistant to stress/impacts than crates at the time? Although someone said the crackers at the bottom didn't hold up that well so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because the square barrel was not that successful
I think it’s called a crate. I’m pretty sure they are a thing that exists.
No no I'm talking about something made of wood like a barrel but square, like you could stack them.
They did actually invent square barrels at one point but they fell out of use shortly afterward because they were much harder to roll than regular barrels.
That’s why square joints never became popular.
TIL Americans don’t know what crackers are, I thought all the white people comments were just jokes.
Nothing sounds worse to me than dusty crackers from an old wooden barrel. Beer, sure, but crackers is sailing coloniser bleak.
ugh dusty beer
also most of us don't do christmas crackers, we just do food crackers like saltines
The nostalgia is the point. Nobody stores crackers in barrels anymore, but everybody did then because it was the best option at the time. Same reason the save icon is a floppy disk.
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.