Your report about the food is pretty much what I'm hearing from everyone.Originally Posted by themanwho
There's an odd phenomenon in the business world -- and sometimes in the arts as well -- where a company will run from past success as if it's being chased.
If you did it before successfully, you can do it again. The only exceptions involve tech (evolves so quickly), fashion (same), or fads (again, same).
But what happens is that these companies get into a vicious cycle where they get complacent, their product/service degrades, competition swoops in and steals some of their customer base, and their response is, "Oh! We've gotta be more like them in order to compete!", and then they become a poor man's version of their competition. Myspace was a good example. They were huge, but eventually the site became slow, sloppy, difficult to navigate, and overrun with bots. Facebook then elevated because it was clean, easy to use, and had very few bots. Rather than fix their issues and bring back the site to its former glory, they first did nothing, and then eventually rebranded to be a knockoff Facebook. And that was that.
Cracker Barrel got cheap, perhaps because inflation was shrinking their profits, and they probably figured they could cut corners to get costs down. People like you noticed it sucked and didn't have a desire to go back. Instead of recognizing that 2024 Cracker Barrel tasted much worse than 2018 Cracker Barrel, they decided that what they really needed was a rebrand and renovatin.
Beyond stupid.
I think the problem here was that the CEO had nothing in common with the average customer, so she had no clue what was important to them. This can be overcome with good market research, but it seems they weren't interested in that. It seemed they were more interested in moving on and broadening their appeal, which often doesn't work if you're a longstanding brand.
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