A Plan for Cracker Barrel’s Path to Recovery

Well, I mean, obviously, everyone at this point in the restaurant industry knows about the controversy about the new logo and potentially the remodels.

And you and I just commented, they announced they're going to stop all the remodels.

And so when you and I were talking about it, I said, well, Mike, let's get down to the numbers, right? You know, how is Cracker Barrel doing? And since you follow them, you have an intimate knowledge of it.

So let's just start out with what do the numbers tell you about the performance of the company in recent quarters?

In recent quarters, sales have been inflecting higher.

A lot of the data that management is looking at to project future sales is getting better.

So speed of service is improving, order accuracy is improving, guest sentiment is improving.

Turnover was down 14 percentage points in the last quarter.

Huge.

Huge.

And we were seeing that in the same-store sales results.

Restaurants, same-store sales.

Coming into the year, the street was looking at about 2% growth.

Now they've raised their estimates up to 3% for the year.

So things before the controversy were looking up.

So that's interesting from a timing standpoint.

So the whole thing blew up when the logo was revealed in mid-August.

Prior to that, you're telling me that performance has been strong by all metrics that you just talked about, which is a good thing.

You know, you watch yourself carefully.

And even the remodels, they've only done a few remodels.

Am I correct in that? Yeah, they

tested it.

They talked and we'll get deep into the remodels, I think, because I want to hear your viewpoint as well.

But they mentioned how it was tested in four and now it's been expanded to about 20, I think, in total.

They haven't given us any information about any sales lifts they've seen.