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Here's your host, Donovan Aikison.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome back to another episode of Dawn Talk.
Glad you can join me.
Today is Friday.
It's August 29th, 2025.
Hope the hell you're doing all right.
So, I wanted to take a little bit of time and just simply talk about this whole Cracker Barrel kerfuffle.
And, you know, Cracker Barrel is really kind of a, it's kind of a Southern staple, if you will.
It's, it's one of these old country store type deals.
You can literally, the one that I've been to in my hometown here, which I've only been a handful of times.
It's, it's not really my cup of tea.
It's not really my scene.
I'm not a big Southern food style connoisseur.
Let's put it that way.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I love me some fried chicken.
I love me some turkey and dressing.
There's a lot of, a lot of good things there.
So, I'm not discounting the quality or, or the types of food that they, that they serve.
But you walk in the front door and it literally is like this whole country store where there's knickknacks to buy all kinds of other little things.
And then you walk on around and then that's the actual restaurant.
So, unless you've been living under a rock this past week, Cracker Barrel, like a lot of companies have been doing, they decided that they needed to do sort of a, a rebrand.
They needed to update the way the stores slash restaurants look and they were going to go to a more, I've heard it, I've heard it described as a minimalistic type of logo.
And when that was released, there was a certain segment of the populace, certain segment of the voting demographic that just lost their damn minds.
And it all had to do with the fact that the original Cracker Barrel logo has a gentleman sitting on a bench, basically next to a barrel, and then you've got the words Cracker Barrel.
And so, in Cracker Barrel's attempt to minimalize their logo design, they did away with the gentleman sitting on the bench, they did away with the bench, and they sort of did away with the barrel because the reason why I say sort of is because the words Cracker Barrel looks like it's on sort of a placard design that is supposed to make you think of a barrel.
I don't think they pulled it off, but as you can imagine, a certain segment of the voting demographic lost their ever-loving minds, claiming that this is wokeness, probably some DEI nonsense.
And of course, then there were pictures that were floated across the internet, whether you're on Twitter, Instagram, Blue Sky, didn't matter, Facebook, all of them, of what the store supposedly was going to look like.
Now, I am not going to say this with 100% certainty, but everything that I can find out about this particular image is fake.
It's AI.
However, it is in line with the design that a lot of restaurants have gone to.
And I didn't really think anything about it until I saw a YouTube video, Kyle Kaczynski, and he played a video.
It was basically, it was either a TikTok or an Instagram reel.
I got it off of Instagram.
But go to Instagram, and I'll put a link in the show notes for this, but Pearlmania500.
Now, he's a guy, I cannot remember his first name, but he is a guy that I first was introduced to by Philip DeFranco.
Philip DeFranco, a longtime YouTuber, 20 years now, used to be out in California, recently moved to North Georgia to be closer to his wife's family and some other things.
So he's in my neck of the woods now.
And what I mean by my neck of the woods is Georgia, because I'm in South Georgia, he's in North Georgia.
But he had this guy on one of his daily streams that he was experimenting with for a while.
And he does that from time to time.
He'll try new things.
He'll throw shit at the wall, see what sticks, see what he has the stamina to continue to do.
And there was a while there for several weeks, he was doing a morning stream of about half hour to 90 minutes, depending.
Where they would go over the notes of the day, what they were going to do when he went to record the actual PDS.
Anyway, so this guy, again, I cannot remember his first name.
Alex Perlman.
There we go.
Alex Perlman.
Just go to Instagram.com slash Perlmania 500.
And that's spelled P-E-A-R-L, mania, M-A-N-I-A 500.
And you'll see his stuff.
He's a political commentator.
He's a comedian.
He's kind of cool.
But when Kyle had no idea who the guy was.
And so he played this particular video.
And it's something I did not realize.
It's something that I think it's interesting.
And so I'm going to play it for you here.
So you're going to let you're going to hear the audio part of it.
In the video, he's got building designs on one side.
The old designs of like McDonald's and Taco Bell and Cracker Barrel and Pizza Hut.
And then on the right side, he's got their modern building designs.
And something he brings out is very, very interesting as to why all of these buildings
and all of these logos are starting to look the same.
So this, by the way, is all because of Wall Street.
This is all because of the stock market.
Because of investors, private equity, and the demand to get more value to shareholders.
This has nothing to do with wokeness or DEI, you stupid sleeping babies.
Okay, I'm going to explain this to you.
McDonald's, the way McDonald's is structured is McDonald's owns the land underneath this building.
They own the land.
They're the biggest landholders in the United States when it comes to commercial properties.
The franchisees then rent the building on top of them.
And you know what happens?
Sometimes McDonald's go out of business.
McDonald's goes out of business.
They want to put a different business in there and they want to sell the land underneath it.
Well, guess what?
When you have a building that can only be a McDonald's or can only be a Pizza Hut or can only be a Cracker Barrel or only be a Taco Bell, guess what?
It's harder to sell those businesses.
So every business has slowly been turning into a gray or beige box because you know what happens when you put a vape store inside of an old Pizza Hut?
Now, in the future, they'll just pull the Pizza Hut sign off and you'll go, I think that might have used to be a Starbucks.
I don't remember.
I don't know.
But all the buildings used to look like this.
It's also easier to do upkeep on it.
They all have the same dumb awning with these weird little latches attached to them.
They don't have to have the special McDonald's only custom ordered roof or the special Pizza Hut red shingle or making sure that they have to do this special lighting underneath Cracker Barrel or whatever was going on with Taco Bell back in the day.
They're all buying from the same company.
They're all using the same parts.
That brings down their cost.
They're not building play places anymore.
It's not because of wokeness.
It's not because, oh, gay people.
No, it's because insurance for a play place costs more than just having a fucking McDonald's because the purpose of all these buildings is to just pay off the property taxes while the land underneath it gets more and more expensive.
So eventually you can sell it to somebody like in the case of Cracker Barrel, maybe the fact that they have land that's connected to the edge of every single highway exit by mid-tier cities all across the United States.
Maybe that'll be a good play for somebody who wants to put up electric vehicle supercharge stations.
Oh, look how they're all conveniently right here off the highway and we have robots that can serve everybody $12 hot dogs.
I don't know.
I'm just spitballing here.
But none of this has to do with wokeness, DEI, LGBT, black people, immigrants.
None of that shit was caused by this.
This was completely caused by Excel spreadsheets and people going, hmm, if we do less, we can cash out with more.
And that's the American dream to do fuck all and to cash out with a lot more money.
OK, so there you have it.
Very, very interesting from Alex Perlman about the real reason, the real reason why we've started seeing over the last several years, all of these buildings look practically the same.
And if you go to the link that I'll have in the show notes or go to his Instagram page, Instagram.com slash Pearl Mania 500 and find that video, you will see exactly what it is that he's talking about.
And, you know, on the one hand, I don't have a problem with the design of these buildings.
We have one that he did not list.
But when I started seeing the supposed redesign, the building redesign for Cracker Barrel, one of the things I noticed is how much it looked like our new crystals.
I say new in air quotes.
It's it's been here several years, but they tore down the original crystals and built a new one.
And it is eerily similar to all of the other designs in his example video.
So everybody out there that was clutching your damn pearls, claiming that Cracker Barrel was, you know, go go woke, go broke.
You're idiots.
Honestly, you're you're ignorant.
I'll back off from saying that you're an idiot.
I'll just say that you're ignorant.
You didn't get the full picture.
You rose up and started bitching and moaning and saying that it was all for wokeness.
It was all for D.E.I.
They're supporting this cause.
They're supporting that cause, et cetera, et cetera.
And of course, unfortunately, especially when, you know, the president of the United States, as he is want to do now, weighs in on what he thinks they should do, which is something a president should never, ever, ever do.
I don't care if you're a Republican.
I don't care if you're a Democratic president.
I don't care if by some miracle of chance you manage to win that office as an independent.
Shut your fucking mouth when it comes to what these corporations do.
Let let social pressure do exactly what it did.
But I got to tell you, in my own opinion, if he had not said a single solitary word about Cracker Barrel's rebrand and their logo redesign, they probably would have weathered the storm and come out on the other side with their new minimalistic logo, their new whatever buildings, however they're rebuilding those, remodeling them.
And within two years, nobody would have given a shit about the fact that that logo no longer has the white dude sitting on a bench.
But because he came out against it, that just added fuel to that Southern Pride fire and then the company reversed course.
Now, I doubt they're going to reverse course on the building redesigns.
I imagine, I don't know this for sure, but if I was, if I were to make an educated guess, I would say they're going to continue to remodel those buildings.
They'll just keep the old logo.
Or they may come up with a redesigned logo that still incorporates the dude sitting on the bench.
It doesn't matter to me.
I don't care.
You know, I'm a child of the 80s.
I'm a Gen Xer.
I remember how cool all the McDonald's looked, especially when they had the play areas.
I remember how cool Pizza Hut looked because it looked like a damn hut.
Taco Bell, even though it's Tex-Mex, had a lot of that Mexican style.
I forget what you call it.
I want to say Adobe, but that's probably not right.
But it had that aesthetic.
Now, yeah, they all freaking look the same.
They're a square, maybe rectangular building.
They go up a certain height.
And Alex is probably right.
It makes it easier if a business fails in that, if a franchise fails in that.
They can just come in, make minor modifications inside, make minor modifications on the outside,
put up a new sign with the new logo for the new business, and rock and roll Bob's your uncle.
There you go.
So a little bit of tidbit that I think was worth investigating.
It was worth sharing.
You can let me know your thoughts.
You can text the show at 229-796-4009.
That is 229-796-4009.
Or you can send me an email.
The email is dontalkshow at gmail.com.
Again, that is dontalkshow at gmail.com.
Or the text line is 229-796-4009.
Anyway, that's it for this episode.
I hope you've learned something.
And have a good day.
We'll see you later.
Bye.
We'll see you later.