What did my late Cuban parents do after my father retired? Well, they traveled to see their kids and grandkids. I guess that’s pretty normal. They also had breakfast on the road at “Cracker,” as they called it; took photos next to the logo; and brought back a bunch of things that my mother had bought. I guess that’s what grandmothers do.
We learned this week that Cracker Barrel decided to change its logo. Was it woke or just bad management? I don’t know, but some things are charming and remind you of this or that, or your father loving the breakfast menu.
Also this week we learned that some NFL teams decided that having a couple of guys dancing their cheers away is what the doctor prescribed. The NFL is the most profitable sports league in the U.S., so why mess with a winning strategy? Too many consultants, I guess.
It naturally offended some U.S. senators and a few guys like me, who don’t want to see feminized men taking jobs from women. This is not equality, but rather madness. It’s one thing to have men pick up cheerleaders at the high school game or yellers leading cheers at Texas A&M games. It’s quite another to use feminized men with hairstyle and legs. Sorry, but I don’t hear of any NFL fans wanting that.
I found these comments about companies run by experts who know nothing about their customers by Stephen Soukup very interesting:
Given what we already know about the Cracker Barrel executives, especially their overt pandering to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group and one of the most aggressive politicizers of American business, I fully expect Robby’s oppo-dump to be just as “crazy” as he says. I also expect that it will serve as proof that those executives were not doing what they were hired to do, that they violated their fiduciary duties to the company’s shareholders in an effort to advance their personal political preferences.
If that’s true, then Cracker Barrel shareholders and customers will have more than ample cause to be incensed. The rest of us—those of us who wish to see business and capital markets insulated from political activism and for corporate executives to return to their traditional fiduciary responsibilities—will be justified in our frustration as well. The logo redesign will be another example of the tip of the proverbial iceberg, the visible sign of behind-the-scenes political machinations destroying a company while also destroying its shareholders’ wealth.
Who is running these companies? I don’t know, but maybe the people responsible should ask grandparents eating breakfast about that logo or sit in the stands and ask fans about the cheerleaders. They may learn something, or at least understand the outrage. Of course, maybe they are too woke to care.
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Image: Ebyabe via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
