[SPEAKER_00]: The liberal globalist order is on its brink and awakening a new conservative age.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Steve Turley joined me every day as we discover answers to today's toughest challenges and explore the re-bondalization of conservative civilization.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Turley Talks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, gang, it's me, Dr. Steve, your back porch professor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you're all having a wonderful Labor Day weekend.
[SPEAKER_00]: But unfortunately, things just keep getting worse for this woke CEO over at Cracker Barrel.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ninety-three-year-old founder of Cracker Barrel just delivered one of the most brutal corporate takedowns in recent memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of how Tommy Lowe, the man who literally unlocked the doors to the first
[SPEAKER_00]: Cracker Barrel back in nineteen sixty nine just declared war on the woken sanity destroying his life's work and is and the numbers prove him absolutely right now if you don't know if you didn't see the interview Tommy low didn't hold back when he sat down with a local new station and he described how the CEO Julian Masino is completely alienated from Cracker barrels customer base.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the CEO of the company
[SPEAKER_00]: doesn't relate to or understand her own customer base.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like the marketing executive of a Bud Light, who actually disparaged and insulted their working class customer base.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, Bud Light is still, they haven't recovered from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, cracker barrels going through very much the same thing in the founder, Tommy Lowe, ninety-three years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: He described Missino's seven hundred million dollar transformation project as throwing money out the window.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he called the failed logo redesign bland and pitiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so interesting because Masino built her career at Taco Bell and Starbucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these are companies particularly Starbucks that thrive on appealing to urban progressive demographics, which she was hired specifically to transform Cracker Barrel for more hit progressive customer base.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in doing so, all she did was demonstrate for everyone to see how much he fundamentally misunderstands what made the Cracker Barrel brand so successful for over five decades.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this ninety-three-year-old founder responded to that by pointing out that the CEO's trying to modernize Cracker Barrel to be like the competition, but the problem is Cracker Barrel doesn't have any competition.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chain succeeded precisely because it offered something authentic
[SPEAKER_00]: that corporate consultants couldn't replicate.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, this guy is absolutely brilliant.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a good old fashioned wisdom here.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows his customer base.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows and loves the Americana culture that Cracker Barrel caters to and he's absolutely excoriating this former Starbucks CEO for imposing Seattle Cosmopolitan values on a chain that prides itself on serving Appalachian the working class.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Macino's been CEO since July of twenty twenty three and her leadership has been a disaster
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the last couple of years, Cracker barrel stock has plummeted nearly seventy percent falling from peaks of a hundred and eighty dollars a share back in twenty eighteen to approximately sixty dollars a share today.
[SPEAKER_00]: By contrast, like Texas Roadhouse, for example, they thrived during that same period.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company was actually forced to cut its quarterly dividend by staggering eighty percent in May of twenty twenty four reducing it from a dollar thirty a share to now just twenty six cents a share so obviously when long time investors relied on that dividend income see their returns evaporate that's not just bad business that's a betrayal the very people who sustained your company for decades
[SPEAKER_00]: The logo fiasco alone triggered a fifteen percent stock drop before the company's emergency reversal when they came out and said no moss, no moss.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny because she used to be CEO of Taco Bell as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I digress in just days nearly a hundred million dollars in market value vanished.
[SPEAKER_00]: Precisely because the CEO ignored and turned her back on her core customer base, just to chase approval from a woe cosmopolitan crowd who were never going to eat a crack or barrel anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: No more than they would start drinking but light.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's absurd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the most telling moment came, Willow revealed that CEO, Missino, had never even met with him since taking control on twenty twenty three.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a series of the co-founder of your company, the man who represents your entire brand heritage, if you're the CEO, he doesn't even know who you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not leadership.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, that is absolute, falling.
[SPEAKER_00]: So bottom line, this founder, Tommy Lo.
[SPEAKER_00]: is message is crystal clear if they don't get back to keeping it country, then it ain't gonna work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cause that's what Cracker Barrel is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a symbol of Americana.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you destroy that symbol, you destroy the company.
[SPEAKER_00]: Simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now again, the good news in all of this is that following this financial catastrophe, Cracker Barrel didn't just reverse the logo decision, they reversed all of their silly, ridiculous, virtue-singling, woke antics, so they ever so quietly scrubbed their DEI and pride pages from their website after conservative active as Robby Starbucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: exposed them on social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no press release, no announcement, just a silent admission that their progressive positioning was destroying shareholder value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, this part of a larger pattern that Robby has helped generate across the country, this pattern of quiet retreat from woke policy spreading all across corporate America.
[SPEAKER_00]: companies like General Motors, Pepsi, Intel, they've all been systematically removing their diversity language from their SEC filings, taking down their pride pages and websites, all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: The market is spoken and virtue signaling is now recognized as a liability rather than an asset.
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk about the triumph, what's called consumer politics, where more and more people are voting with their wallets and they are deliberately boycotting companies that offend their conservative values.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you would think that cracker barrel would be the last company on the planet to go woke.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, there we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: They literally committed corporate suicide with another lunatic left to CEO leading the inevitable demise.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say the Tommy Lowe's
[SPEAKER_00]: devastating critique represents more than just one founder's frustration with current management.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a generational battle between authentic American business values at once ruled a day and a contemporary corporate consultancy culture that prioritizes progressive approval over customer satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: When a ninety-three-year-old man who built your company from nothing calls your leadership pitiful,
[SPEAKER_00]: When your stock is collapsed, seventy percent under your watch and your restaurant, your parking lots go empty across the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not dealing with normal market forces.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're watching a systematic destruction of American enterprise by ideological activists, we're learning the hard way that if you go woke, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: You inevitably go broke.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the question is whether Julie Messina will survive this crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question is whether American companies will learn that authenticity beats artificiality, that founders wisdom, Trump's consultants theories, and that the people who actually buy your products matter more than the activists who profit from destroying them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because when all a sudden done, only one thing more remain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tommy Lowe's simple truth that if you don't keep it country, you're going to lose it all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love you guys, have a wonderful Labor Day.
[SPEAKER_00]: God bless.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Turly Talks Podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Come back again tomorrow for another episode celebrating the rise of a new conservative age.