One thing that may be driving the "menu diet" are the rising food and labor costs.
This is one of my favorite examples of people who cite Kodak as being short-sighted - which in hindsight I don't think they were. They KNEW the end was coming.
It's no wonder they sat on that patent!
Changing the menu I can see would upset some folks. Dropping an item or altering a recipe you might like I can see upsetting other folks. Changing the type or theme of the restaurant I can see upsetting a few more. But the logo - without even changing the name? I've got two words for that:
Well, hell, any organization that would try to provide working men and their families, pride, dignity, a living wage and a comfortable retirement has to be communist, right?
lol some would think so.
The corned beef Ruben was the only thing I ever ate there outside of breakfast. We haven't been there in years though, preferring local mom and pop eateries along our routes.
Cracker Barrel's CEO dismissed warnings from a top investor who called the rebranding 'obvious folly'
Julie Felss Masino and board ignored Sardar Biglari's criticism of $700M transformation plan calling it 'obvious folly'
By Asra Nomani FOXBusiness
Published August 26, 2025 8:51am EDT [Updated August 26, 2025 9:17am EDT
Cracker Barrel’s CEO dismissed warnings from a top investor who called the rebranding ‘obvious folly’
SEC filings reveal that investor Sardar Biglari warned CEO Julie Felss Masino and her board at least four times the company was in “crisis."www.foxbusiness.com
That day, Cracker Barrel's new CEO, Julie Felss Masino, got on the phone with investors and unveiled the details of a "strategic transformation plan" her board of directors had approved. The first of "five pillars" in the plan would be "refining" and "evolving the brand across all touchpoints."
Over the next months, Masino and her board of directors dismissed at least four warnings by a top investor, Sardar Biglari, that the rebranding was "obvious folly," filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveal.
"Cracker Barrel is not a broken brand but it has a broken board," he wrote, in a scathing seven-page letter to shareholders.
She will wind up on the BOD of another company or two until the inner circle finds another job for her.
It was obvious that as early as the late 1980s that the Kodak film photography business model faced its impending doom. The problem was that the early digital cameras had few features, weak performance, and they were priced beyond the means of nearly everyone. Therefore, film based photography continued to thrive, enjoying strong sales and popularity until around 2000, when digital photo technology greatly improved and became much more affordable to attract a mass market. At its core, Eastman Kodak was a chemical company. Many analysts have expressed their belief that when the inevitability of digital photography dominance first became apparent, Kodak management should have changed its direction to concentrate on becoming a strong chemical company and sold off its photography assets. And we today have a situation in which the sales of new dedicated digital cameras has fallen off the cliff, displaced by iPhones, etc. Just look through eBay to see the present prices of used, formerly high-end, DSLRs are. Few want them today, except maybe for some pros. Ordinary people are perfectly happy using the cameras built into their smartphones and most wouldn't accept a new Canon or Nikon DSLR as a gift. Who wants to carry around a heavy complicated brick when you can stick your iPhone in your pants pocket?This is one of my favorite examples of people who cite Kodak as being short-sighted - which in hindsight I don't think they were. They KNEW the end was coming.
Yes, Kodak sold cameras but they never made money on cameras. They made (and sold) a LOT OF film, and processing chemicals, and photo paper, and developing services, and processing equipment, and stuff for movies and slides and microfilm, etc. ad nauseum - NONE of which exist for digital cameras. If they had embraced digital photography at that point, they would have alienated 95% of their business, and they knew it because Kodak had the one thing for digital photography that nobody else had - the patent. Can you imagine the reception the guy who developed digital photography got from the bosses at Kodak when he came to them with a product that literally eliminated the vast majority of how they made their money???
Kodak knew in their bones that the end was coming, just a sure as CDs replaced vinyl records and MP3s replaced CDs and streaming replaced MP3s. They rode film photography to the bitter end, but in the end they knew they just couldn't compete with foreign manufacturers making digital cameras because there was no easy conversion from their existing business to the new model. It was sad, but it was as inevitable as the tides.
