Tag: CEO

The Cracker Barrel Remarketing Plan Was A Horrible Decision: Betting on the wrong horse, which the Board who hired Julie Felss Masino certainly did

I think there needs to be context to this whole Cracker Barrel thing and the hiring of Julie Felss Masino, the CEO who has caused so much trouble.  The board of Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. consists of a board of directors that includes, Carl Berquist, Chairman a former Marriott CFO with decades of financial experience, Jody Bilney who just joined in 2022 and as previously a senior executive at Humana and Bloomin’ Brands, Steve Bramlage, just elected to the board in May of 2025 and current CFO at Casey’s General Stores, Gilbert Davaila who joined in 2020 and runs a multicultural marketing firm and has Disney experience, John Garratt, who joined in 2023 and is the former CFO and president at Dollar General, Michael Goodwin, who joined in 2024 and was a retired PetSmart tech executive with cybersecurity expertise, Cheryl Henry who joined in 2024 and is the former CEO of Ruth’s Chris Steak House.  Julie Felss Masino, the current CEO, was appointed to the board in November 2023, and Gisel Ruiz joined in 2020 as a former executive from Walmart and Sam’s Club.  Since 2019, traffic through Cracker Barrel restaurants has been down 20%. They have never fully recovered from their previous pandemic numbers, and this very woke board obviously wanted to try to boost sales and freshen things up to recover that lost traffic, which they thought was dying off.  A large portion of the Cracker Barrel customer base is literally aging out and dying off, and young people have not replaced them.  This group of characters set out to figure out how to return to the good old days and attract new customers.  Hiring Masino, who had 30 years of experience, including leading Taco Bell’s international growth to over 1000 locations, and had roles at Starbucks, which made her what they thought of as a good fit for driving innovation to the Cracker Barrel brand, came in with a lot of ideas that the customers just don’t like.   

So, it’s not enough to blame the current CEO of Cracker Barrel for the truly radical makeover that Old Country Stores have been experiencing.  Changing the paint scheme of the traditionally log cabin look of the restaurants from dark brown to a kind of soft white was a bad start.  And the interior decorating, rooted in tradition, was not a good move because it took away the ‘going to Grandma’s house’ kind of vibe that made going to Cracker Barrel while traveling far from home such a positive experience.  Comments about the Country Store entrance being less congested with stuff have fallen into the joke category because the response is that the store is less crowded. After all, it has fewer customers, and as a result, that’s what’s going to happen to the Cracker Barrel brand now that they have the perception of going woke.  So of course it’s less crowded.  I assess that Cracker Barrel hired too many woke individuals and let them onto the board, and that they are getting what they deserve.  That cast of characters, the Board at Cracker Barrel, mostly come from very woke backgrounds, and people of tradition would reject any change they would make. They underestimated what their real problems were.  Many companies have yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, which is something that we don’t discuss nearly enough. The answer that people trained in woke leadership, who are often the who’s who of corporate America, are not intellectually equipped to deal with the real problem.  In the case of Cracker Barrel, they are pricing themselves out of the market.  I go there frequently, and I can’t make a stop without spending $100 to $200 with my family every time.  And the price of the food should be around 30% less than that. 

Most of Cracker Barrel’s customer base is blue-collar and does not have a lot of money to spend on price increases, which is one reason for their declining traffic.  Financially, they are in trouble, with revenue at $3.47 billion but a net income of only $40.9 million.  And this overhaul, which has sparked widespread anger, will cost $700 million through 2027, with $180 million allocated through 2025 alone.  This is a board of directors that bet big on the wrong attributes and now their mistake is going to cost them tragically.  They have now far bigger problems than just some bad press.  They picked the wrong things to stimulate their customer base, which was obvious when Julie Felss Masino tried to go on Good Morning America and say that Cracker Barrel wasn’t going away, they still had the fireplace, the rocking chairs on the front porch, and the little triangle game to play while everyone waits for their food.  If those are the things she thinks Cracker Barrel is to customers, then she wildly missed the mark, and based on their financials, it’s a gamble that Cracker Barrel couldn’t afford to misdiagnose.  Cracker Barrel hired Masino to do just what she is doing.  The problem is that they all missed the heart of the real problem and pushed away their old audience in favor of a new one that would reject the product anyway.  Young people from many broken homes do not have traditional experiences with grandmas’ house, as previous generations did, so they are not attracted to the family tradition appeal.  However, many of them wanted that experience, and for them, going to Cracker Barrel was the only way they could achieve it. 

Many of those board members had no idea that Trump would be elected as president in 2024.  These decisions to change all these Cracker Barrel stores were already in place when he stepped back into the White House.  So, to the minds of many corporate types, nobody could have predicted that America was going to turn so hard toward the MAGA political movement.  Nobody really knew what was going to happen.  Well, I take that back a bit.  I knew what was going to happen.  But very few people listened much to their doom.  I predicted everything 100% correct, just for the record.  And if Cracker Barrel’s Board had listened, they would not be in the trouble they are in now.  The best thing for them to do would have been to dig into their traditional appeal and openly cater to the MAGA political base, because those are their customers.  To regain 20% of the lost customers from 2019, it’s essential to focus on pricing and expansion among conservative types who cannot afford to dine at the restaurant while traveling.  Going for a new demographic group was not the right move here.  And now, because they have adopted the woke approach, which many of the board members are trained to be very woke, and they hired their CEO to embrace the Biden and Obama-era political movements, they are getting what they thought they would.  But people don’t like it.  And there is no way to repair that now.  Once you lose a brand, such as what Disney is currently experiencing, and many other companies that have aligned themselves incorrectly with the MAGA movement and Trump as an America First president, you can never truly regain it.  And Cracker Barrel will lose a lot more than 20% of its customer base.  With a profit of only $45 million to deal with, they don’t have enough margin to lose 1% more.  So this reaction to their marketing plan to overhaul their image is much more disastrous than the media is reporting.  And it’s a shame because I have liked Cracker Barrel more than any other brand in that market sector.  But, I will find other alternatives, just as many others will too.  This was a poor decision by the Cracker Barrel Board to be so tone-deaf about changing political circumstances.  They bet on the wrong horse and will now lose big. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

If You Aren’t a Good Person, Linkedln Can’t Hide It: The Affair of Andy Byron

I think I have a little more hope for humanity after the very public reaction to Andy Byron getting caught at a Coldplay concert in Boston cheating on his wife with Kristin Cabot, the head of his human resources department.  It was the now-famous Kisscam embrace where the stadium was watching the jumbotron, and the camera panned to Andy, who promptly ducked out of sight.  Nothing says I love you like fleeing the public eye.  I mean, if you are going to have an affair, maybe he should have been more proud of it.  What kind of man did the boss of human resources think she was getting from a guy who would knowingly cheat on his wife with her, and even deny it in public when caught?  The whole incident was a multitude of bad that points to a multitude of worse.  However, a lot of good did come of it, as Byron was the CEO of Astronomer, an AI tech company with many billions of dollars.  After the public’s anger circulated the world, Astronomer dropped him as their CEO, which is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.  I mean, how can you make deals with people if they can’t trust you to at least be honorable to a person closest to you, as a wife?  What does it say about anybody if they can’t make one basic relationship at home work?  How are they supposed to create a culture among many employees if they can’t do it successfully?  I tend to be very skeptical of most people and the way they maintain their marriages.  I think people are too easily lax with the rules, and it shows a lot about their character when they do cheat.  I can’t imagine why a grown man with adult children would want to attend a musical concert.  But the public reaction to the affair was a pleasant surprise. 

Of course, kisscams all across the world started to make fun of the incident, as most people saw the way Andy Byron handled the whole situation as inherently evil.  It’s not a good idea to cheat on your wife.  But now you’re a billionaire and a successful person, maybe thinking of starting a new relationship to outpace the mistakes of a previous one.  That might appear to be a justifiable reason.  But with your head of human resources at your company?  Aren’t there other girls to cheat with if you are thinking of doing it?  And it looked like there were other people there from the office who knew of this affair because they were embarrassed too, once they were caught.  What does that say about everyone involved?  If you have to duck away from cameras, you are probably up to no good, and what’s worse is when someone does something anyway.  It reveals a lack of good judgment, which raises questions about why he was ever appointed as a CEO in the first place.  I know people go to a lot of trouble to look good on paper with their resumes and LinkedIn professional profiles, but they often fail to meet the expectations of reality, which is very common these days, especially in CEO positions.  Anybody who would go to a music concert as a middle-aged person with their head of human resources and openly flaunt an affair to the world, but acts like a coward when caught, is showing terrible judgment that fancy interviews and speeches can’t hide.  People are aware of this, and it highlights a deeper issue with individuals who run companies, as Andy Bryon did. 

When you are a compromised person, and let’s face it, we have a system that has been put in place in our employment culture where we put weak people in positions of power on purpose so that they fall very easily to every little woke rule, or letter from Larry Fink.  And CEOs like Andy Byron lecture the rest of the world toward progressive causes.  Much of what they do as leaders is cosmetic to cover up their lack of personal integrity.  They use their jobs to cover for their low moral conduct.  And nobody knows a person better than their family.  If things aren’t great in the bedroom and with your kids, we have a culture that has given the illusion that a job can replace those valiant efforts with a personal title of social respect.  And if you are cheating on your wife and kids with some other woman, especially one who is supposed to enforce a standard at the workplace against such actions, a level of hypocrisy has been revealed that clearly shows people have strong opinions about the matter.  And if people are outraged, that’s a good thing.  We often don’t get to see people like Andy Byron beyond news clips.  But behavior tells us far more about people, and that takes all the fancy talk you see on resumes and makes them much more real.  Nothing says I love you more than ducking for cover when trouble comes.  And nothing shows leadership more than violating all your company rules and showing everyone that you can’t even maintain a marriage.  So how can you lead a company, or even a department?  If you have such bad judgment on little things, then how can you guide billions of dollars of value to the proper place?  The answer is you can’t.

When Byron and his lover Kristin Cabot were caught, it was a classic male-to-female embrace from behind.  When a woman surrenders herself in such a passive way, it’s undoubtedly a mating response to further advancement, leading to sexual intercourse.  It’s an affirmation of safety, that the embrace of a man will make her feel secure with his arms around her, and she holding elements of his arms to show a willingness to be in the passive sexual role.  If the woman were doing the same to the man, it would be weird.  A larger male embracing a smaller female for sexual union by asserting safety and security to the recipient of sex is a classic signal that everyone understands.  But to affirm that it was all phony in an instant, that all the personal contact and pillow talk were as flimsy as Andy Byron himself, was something everyone also understood the moment he dodged the camera once he realized he was caught.  And she did too.  It was a fun affair as long as nobody knew about it.  Or that everyone at the office knew, but that they thought they could all conspire to keep it a secret from the world.  People don’t like that kind of behavior, and they let everyone know it in the aftermath.  And people were not understanding of Andy Byron.  They looked down on him, and that is a good thing.  That means people aren’t all out there cheating on each other at every turn.  That there are still a lot of people who think that their relationship to their families is still the most important one in their lives, and that if they aren’t successful there, they can’t be successful in other things.  Progressive, Democrat society would like to believe that job titles give people power that personal behavior can’t.  And no matter how we construct our culture to think that flawed people can be CEOs of big companies, the public has other opinions.  And if a man doesn’t dare to stand tall under fire, even when it’s just a camera pointed at him, how can he lead others in anything?  The answer is, he can’t.  Nobody can.  Flawed individuals create flawed companies and societies.  And people do expect leaders to be more than average and to stand tall under fire.  And to do the right things, even when it’s hard. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What Happens When Your Little Sister Plays With Your ‘Star Wars’ Toys: The Fate of all woke corporations

There are likely fewer people in the world who wrote as much about Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars property in entertainment as I have, or the fate of a multibillion-dollar investment, the Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida.  I was excited about it.  I have been a Star Wars fan most of my life, which is reflected in my work.  But it’s not just Bud Light that woke policies have crushed that the global push for a certain kind of CEO to now run these corporate boards ran by BlackRock have destroyed.  Knowing Star Wars as an entertainment property and a work of modern mythology, I could see early on the impact and ultimate failure of Disney’s quest to appease BlackRock and the other elements of the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum’s view of the world.  And it was evident in 2015 when the first of the next generation Star Wars movies came out in The Force Awakens that the future destruction of globalism was making itself most apparent.  What we have now is a kind of stubborn tenacity of globalism to impose itself on reality.  Whereas I have been saying for a very long time, many decades now, in writing, that the trend was going to destroy itself.  That was never more clear in how Disney as a corporation handheld Star Wars as soon as it purchased George Lucas way back in 2012 and have now chased off their audiences, which, prior to, looked to be eternally loyal.  I warned early on to all those who owned Disney stock to sell because the brands they, as a company, were building would fall apart, and that’s precisely what is happening.  As Disney is falling apart, so is globalism everywhere in the world. 

As scary as a post-President Trump world has been with all the horrible revelations that have been revealed, we are actually better off because market forces are proving that wonders of capitalism envisioned by the great Adam Smith book The Wealth of Nations to be as reliable as anyone could hope it to be.  Out of all the presently trained economists with PhDs in the study of social behavior and the flow of money, it really all points back to that seminal work that was released to the world when America was founded that has turned out to be exclusively true.  Disney had the money and power to hire anybody they wanted to be successful.  Just ten years ago, they looked to be an unstoppable entertainment company, but like the world presently is in general, all members of the Bilderberg group, and the World Economic Forum, Disney is a dismal failure that literally can’t do anything correctly.  They can’t produce new content that anybody wants, and what they do put out from their entertainment classics is so burdened with woke politics that it has turned away half the nation from enjoying their products.  Disney bet on their brand and thought it was so great that no matter how much wokeness they proposed, they assumed, as they all did when they adopted this Chinese communist model of corporate rule of the world, that people would follow them as leaders of culture and that progressive politics would rule the day.  Yet what they found out has been completely the opposite.  Markets serve people; they don’t shape culture.  They represent culture. 

That was never more apparent than when Disney built the Galactic Star Cruiser Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida, connected to the Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios.  I was very excited about Disney’s attempts and wanted them to work.  I was a big fan of the Star Wars Land and went to it as soon as it opened with my wife, and we made a nice vacation out of it.  I thought it was a stunning experience for a kid who grew up loving Star Wars, so I wanted the experiment to work.  But I saw the trouble too and had been talking about it, at first, very politely.  I did several radio shows with various guests around the country talking about the danger of woke Disney, which at that time, nobody understood what “woke” was.  And sadly, everything I said as a warning sign for Disney turned out to be true.  Disney didn’t understand Star Wars.  It was being run by a woman, hand-picked by George Lucas, to continue what he had built.  But she got swept up into this New World Order of the global citizen movement and turned Star Wars into what a little sister would do to your Star Wars toys when everyone was kids.  Girls might take your Star Wars figures and put lipstick on them, and instead of them having epic battles, she would sit them at a table and have them drink tea.  Kathy Kennedy essentially did that to Star Wars, designed for 8- to 12-year-old boys, and started producing all the content for girls.  And she thought that the boys would stick around and that the market expansion would now be more inclusive of girls and empower women. 

So when the Star Wars hotel opened as a kind of cruise ship last year, right after the Covid lockdowns, after ten years of development and over a billion dollars in investment, fans were stunned to learn that the $6000 per room 2 day all immersive experience was essentially the little sister version of Star Wars.  Star Wars is about rebellion against tyranny.  Not singing songs and drinking drinks in a bar with aliens walking around.  But Disney didn’t listen to the fans; instead, it lectured them about what it would be like, and the results were devastating.  Just over the hotel opened to great fanfare, it is now projected to close in September of 2023 because it just never took off.  People rejected the idea, and it wasn’t so much the money; the lack of the Star Wars experience ultimately destroyed it, really, before it ever got off the ground.  It proved something that will eventually happen to all corporations who have embraced woke policies, from Ford and General Motors to Bud Light, Miller Light, and Target.  Corporations don’t and never will run the world.  They will always serve society in general.  Not the other way around.  I warned everyone.  Some people listened, and those that did are better off today than they were.  Just as I have warned about the climate that still wants to vote for President Trump as opposed to the corporate approach of Ron DeSantis, they don’t know what they are doing.  Professionals who make their living off these kinds of things have drunk the Kool-Aid and found out that there is a lot of bad stuff in there, and they’ve learned it too late.

In general, what happened to Disney and the Star Wars hotel and brand is a warning of what will happen to everyone in the future of corporate globalism.   People don’t want woke and corporations who assume that their products are so beloved by the public that people will follow anything.  Corporations who believe that have another thing coming.  And that was never more obvious than in the closure of the Star Wars hotel so soon after it opened.  The smartest people in the world with the most financial resources could not change the kind of reality that Adam Smith articulated in his economics studies.  And those rules apply in every market sector.  Entertainment just being one that is obvious.  Which is a fine indicator of things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

My Defense of the ‘Star Wars’ Hotel: If it brings joy to people, which is does, its worth doing

I think it’s a huge story, even if it only concerns a small part of the overall population. After all, the topic of the day is shareholder capitalism that is attempting to be destroyed by the Desacrators of Davos strategy of stakeholder capitalism. And few companies are a bigger target for them than Disney Entertainment in the United States. Progressives have jumped all over the Disney Company. And now the Star Wars property they purchased from George Lucas in 2012 reflects the attack accurately from the Desecrators of Davos, the progressive incursion into all our lives not through the front door of politics, but through the backdoor of finance and business. Star Wars is an excellent meter to measure this kind of thing. It started out from the mind of George Lucas as a warning to 8 to 12-year-old boys how not to grow up to become evil. And today, it is the very definition of state control and authority to the compliance of the nanny state; everything Star Wars wasn’t. Naturally, fans are very upset about it and are letting Disney know. And now, after working on it for a decade and spending over a billion dollars developing their live Star Wars experiences at Disney World and Disneyland, the much talked about Star Wars hotel called, The Galactic Starcruiser is open for business, and all eyes have been on it. Many Star Wars fans are hating it and have been speaking out against it. So I have been watching it closely, and I have thoughts on it that are very much relevant to all our corporate problems in America. The challenge of wrestling away from the Desecrators of Davos insurgents our American concepts of capitalism from the imposition of state-controlled stakeholder capitalism is the challenge. Ironically, this Star Wars hotel finds itself right in the middle as a form of art displayed for all the world to see.

Star Wars is all about fighting back against institutionalized systems. But under Disney, they are all about yielding to that institutionalization. That was the critical error Bob Iger, and Kathy Kennedy made with Star Wars under the ownership of Disney. They should have followed the George Lucas plan. Instead, they ended up with a massive mess that will never be fixed. That is sad, but it’s why fans are so angry at Disney. However, I see some good in it all, and I think personally, Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World is one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. I will never forget my vacation there in 2019 with my wife. We had about two or three days of the best time I’ve ever had visiting the Star Wars park there at Hollywood Studios and other attractions. It was the first time she and I had been kid-free in about two decades, and we were able to enjoy all that just as a couple. So I am still grateful for that experience, and I can see why people would want to go to the Galactic Starcruiser, which is essentially a Star Wars cruise in space. It’s very ambitious; it costs around 4 to 6 thousand per person to do and is essentially a Fantasy Island experience.   For three days and two nights, you enter the world of Star Wars all immersively and practically live a live Star Wars novel, which I think is pretty cool. Now I’m a gun at my hip kind of Star Wars fan. Not a sit around and play games kind of guy, and eat food and listen to music. If I don’t get to wear a DL-44 on my hip and go laser tagging, it’s not a lot of fun for me. It would cost me about $100K to take my clan. I checked it out, thought about it, and decided they’d like it, but not for that price. But, I know quite a few employees at Disney, many at the executive level, and I understand what they’ve done. They did their best. I also follow quite a few influencers on YouTube who work in the Orlando region, and they love the Starcruiser. They are much more social butterflies than I am, and I think it’s great in the world we are living in today that there is something like the Starcruiser for them. And in that context, I hope the Starcruiser is successful for Disney. Because I’d like to see, it remain an option. 

While at the Cincinnati Comic-Con this past September, I had a chance to talk to Timothy Zahn about this modern Star Wars stuff, and he’s pretty much where I am. He’s the guy responsible for all the great novels that came from Star Wars, going all the way back to the 90s when he started the trend. My wife and I have read well over 200 Star Wars novels. We are not fans of the new stuff since Disney bought Lucasfilm and turned radically more progressive. But at that Comic-Con, as Zahn signed a few books for me because I do love his books, we talked about the joy of those comic cons. There are people there who have had bad childhoods, society has let them down, religion has let them down, and they find refuge in Star Wars. They like to dress up and escape the world’s disappointments with some form of art, and Star Wars gives them that refuge. And I remember how it was in Hollywood Studios in the early days before Disney bought Lucasfilm. There were Star Wars weekends in May that were actual celebrations. I can’t blame Disney for wanting to give those fans what they dreamed of, a Star Wars land all their own, and even a hotel experience that allowed people to cosplay for three full days eating, thinking, and living Star Wars in a much better way than they would a comic con. That’s one of the reasons I read so many Star Wars books. In my crazy, very stressful life, those books were great places to relax and think about big concepts. I love them or have loved them. The Star Wars hotel was a chance to throw away the disappointments of politics, life itself, and live a fantasy. And that I think is a very useful thing. 

Even with all the politics, I might still do it with my family at some point. Seeing what Disney has done, they have tried hard to thread the needle and give everyone what they want, which usually means everyone is a little disappointed. But, knowing what we do about the world, I think we should all feel proud that we have a culture that can actually pull off something like this for this amount of money and commit resources to even attempting to do it. The Galactic Starcruiser is enormously ambitious, and if it survives, it could evolve over time in a positive direction. My grandchildren would get quite a kick out of it because the experience is essentially an escape room, a broadway play, and a novel all wrapped up into one experience. I can think of people who are very sick and dying of cancer, who are kids who would love for this to be the very last thing they did in life. They would die happy. They want to escape their problems, and art does that for human beings at its highest form. It’s not so much hiding from the pains of life as much as it gives the mind emotional distance from massive disappointments. And if this Starcruiser experience can do that for people, at any cost, then I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I hope that Disney can keep it going because there sure was a lot of love that went into it for all the right reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business