American business has lost the last shred of the plot.
Cracker Barrel’s bone-headed “rebranding” — more on this below — is only the ne plus ultra of a long, stupid march through formerly beloved brands toward a joyless, millennial-gray final destination.
These are choices we’re making. Bad choices. Anti-beauty choices. Anti-human choices.
Look around you. What do you see? Alleged restaurants that look like industrial warehouses. Businesses that we used to call bakeries — everything is just a “store” now in modern corporate-speak — now decorate their interiors according to surgical sterile-field protocols.
Everything is hard, not soft. Everything is gray, not green. Everything is fluorescent, not incandescent. Everything is aluminum, not velvet.
Hamburglaring our history
You know what I mean because you see it everywhere. The built world has been drained of color, curve, ornamentation, and whimsy. The desiccated architectural corpses of abandoned Pizza Huts with their distinctive step-peaked roofs litter the suburbs. I found these sad to look at until I realized that Pizza Hut is in a better place now, where there’s no more pain.
It’s McDonald’s we need to worry about. Cast your mind back to your childhood when you first met Ronald, Grimace, and Mayor McCheese. Most McDonald’s restaurants had a playground for kids with colorful characters. The buildings themselves promised fun and piqued your imagination. Like Pizza Hut, McDonald’s roofs had angles and character. They were painted bright red with French-fry-yellow accents.
Francois Lochon/Getty Images
Observe a McDonald’s today. The buildings are the best representation of the Brutalist revival taking over modern architecture.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
At best, they’re abstract, cubist boxes that offer the eye no rest. Hard edge overlaps hard edge. All ornamentation is stripped. Color is canceled. You get gray and brushed aluminum, and you better damned well like it.
The worst part is how the company has kept one bit of color — the famed golden arches. Stuck on these industrial boxes as an afterthought, you’d be forgiven for thinking McDonald’s is making a joke at our expense: “Look what we took away from you. Lol. Lmao.”
These buildings aren’t restaurants; they’re wholesale crematories at the back of an industrial park.
Auto pilot
Automobiles are the same.
No, dear reader. Let me stop you before you start typing that comment. All cars don’t look exactly the same “because aerodynamics, and this is the optimal shape, and they have to do it to meet emissions standards.” That’s the “well, it’s not really as bad as you say” excuse.
It’s just not true (and it is as bad as I say). If it were true, then every single car would be exactly the same as every single other car. But they’re not. There are SUVs, for example. If “they have to do it for aerodynamics” were true, this size and shape of vehicle would not exist. Oversized, elevated rectangular boxes, by their nature, are un-aerodynamic. A Chrysler Airflow from 1934 has a much higher aerodynamic rating than any modern “luxury truck” and still manages to be pleasing to the eye.
It’s not “because they have to because government.” It’s because there’s something wrong with us. We’re sick at heart and sick in the soul, and our emptiness finds three-dimensional expression in the sea of white, black, gray, and silver cars that all look precisely the same as every other maker’s car in that vehicle class.
Crimes against coziness
These are choices we’re making. Bad choices. Anti-beauty choices. Anti-human choices.
You’ve likely heard of the recent kerfuffle over the “rebranding” of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain. Cracker Barrel is a chain of down-home restaurants that serve unfussy American food like your grandmother used to make. Created in 1969, the founders wanted to offer a restaurant that would remind people of the comfortable general stores and wayside diners that once dotted the American rural landscape. Nothing fancy, just plain food cooked well and served in an atmosphere that invited you to sit down, take a load off, and have supper with other good people.
Staff would travel to flea markets and estate sales to pick up real Americana to stick up on the walls. There were framed pictures of famous boxers and lacrosse sticks, big kerosene lamps that used to light and heat the general stores. The effect was a combination of grandma’s attic and grandpa’s work shed, with a little bit of Christmas thrown in.
Take a look at how Cracker Barrel used to look.
Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images
Now, take a look at the “refreshed” Cracker Barrel.
From your grandparents’ house to the prison commissary.
RELATED: Bud Light insider reveals what led to Dylan Mulvaney controversy
Scott W. Grau/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
A woman’s touch
Who makes these decisions? What kind of person takes a beloved restaurant brand and sticks up her middle finger to the customers? A middle-aged, corporate, almost certainly liberal-woke-Karen type. And here she is, Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino, cackling on breakfast television behind oversized look-at-me glasses, telling the audience how much everyone just SUPER LOVES what we’ve done, and we’re doing it all out of LOVE 4 U!!!!!
American business apparently learned nothing from the Bud Light fiasco. In that case, a younger Karen named Alissa Heinerscheid sent the company’s profits into the toilet by making fun of her own brand’s “frat boy” image and slapping the face of a demented drag queen on the cans.
Keep the curves
America, we have to come back to our senses. The world doesn’t have to conform to Karen’s diktats. Karen hates us and hates the things we like, which is why she punishes us. But we’re not her children (do say a prayer for them), and we don’t have to listen to her.
God gave us a world of curve, color, romance, and beauty. For thousands of years, men have tried to follow this example by piling up stones and locking logs together in pleasing shapes that ennoble us and make our souls sing. The deracination of the beautiful and the divine started long ago with churches. We don’t build anything worthy of the name “cathedral” any longer; instead, we put up Brutalist boxes and stick a Mary-on-the-halfshell on the lawn.
The sickness that compromised matters spiritual is now devouring things temporal.
Beauty is our patrimony and our birthright. Let’s take it back.
Lifestyle, Rebranding, Beauty, Cracker barrel, Bud light, Mcdonald’s, Branding, Intervention
