I have no history with Cracker barrel.
At least I didn't have a history with Cracker barrel until I found out that they
allow overnight parking in their parking lots.
I always just thought of them as like, you know, Applebee's or olive garden,
you know, it's just another chain restaurant.
And then when I finally went inside, I thought, okay,
they have the cartoon Southern thing.
The way that olive garden has cartoon Italian or Outback has cartoon Australian,
or Applebee's has whatever it is that Applebee's has.
I didn't really think anything about it.
But Cracker barrel gets into a lot of controversy, racism,
discriminatory policies, even shootings.
And yet the controversy that snowballed,
that just won't let cracker barrel go, is so minor.
I'm talking about the firing of Brad's wife.
This ruckus started on February 27th, 2017.
When a guy named Bradley Reid Byrd wrote a message on Cracker barrel's Facebook
page. And it said, why did you fire my wife?
Six wards that almost broke the internet, frankly.
Bradley is married to a woman named Nanette who had worked for 11
years up until that date at Cracker barrel. And on that date,
she was called to some hotel conference room and fired by a regional
manager.
And the excuse that she was given for her firing was that she wasn't working
out,
which seems like a weird thing to say to someone who's been working there for 11
years, Cracker barrel didn't answer him,
but people started expressing support from all over the world.
On his personal Facebook page.
Bradley wrote a diatribe about it and asked people if they would please go on
Cracker barrel's Facebook page and ask them why they fired his wife.
People were happy to oblige.
And pretty soon every comment on Cracker Barrel's Facebook page had something to
do with Brad's wife. And then the memes
started showing up.
The songs, the YouTube videos.
Oh God, the products.
Cracker barrel made a decision pretty much right away to just ignore the trolls,
you know? And, you know, the idea being, you ignore them, they'll go away.
They're going to get bored with this and go away. Hardly.
When I was getting mercilessly, mercilessly bullied on the school bus -Yeah,
we'll talk about that some other time - my parents told me to ignore them and
they would go away. And they did go away.
They went away when we got to junior high school,
because then there were other things to think about.
They did not go away because I ignored them.
And these trolls on Cracker barrel's pages didn't go away either. In fact,
they spread to other platforms pretty soon,
they were on Twitter and Instagram and all over the place.
It's not technically illegal to say why somebody was fired
or bad mouth an employee's performance,
but you have to make sure it's 100% provable because if not,
you're really setting yourself up for a lawsuit. Okay.
There's finally a gas station on this stupid turnpike. Anyway,
I'm going to jump off and get some fuel.
So right when you would think this thing would be dying down,
it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
People magazine did a thing about it. Inc magazine did a thing about it.
It was in all these business publications.
That's when the job offers started rolling in.
I think that Chick-fil-A was first or they were the first to put it on a
billboard anyway, and then Wendy's was after that. And I think,
I want to say even Hooters offered her a job,
but there were a lot of job offers on the table.
Brad's wife could really have found herself a nice job by the end,
except that it didn't really like exactly end. I mean, it ended,
but it didn't end like with an ending, you know, it was more,
it was more like junior high school, you know,
where - it's not like the kids stop wanting to beat my ass.
It's just that they had more important things to do so they didn't get to do it
as often. You know? There's still some activity though. I mean,
if you search hashtag you'll still find, you might find something posted today.
Last time I looked, there was things that were posted last week, but you know,
even Brad has pretty much tapered off. I really wanted to dig into it though,
because of a comment that I found,
this one is from August of 2019. And he said,
"my Cracker barrel moment was when you tried to blackmail and held back,
my wife's earned bonus because the blackmail didn't work.
Hashtag against the law." He's not saying that they tried to bribe
him to be quiet. He's saying blackmail. So like, do they have something on Brad?
Like how could Cracker barrel blackmail him?
I want to know more about that.
And that's when I decided to reach out to Brad because I liked doing the
interviews and I thought, wow,
how cool would that be to have Brad tell us what's going on? You know,
what's happened. So I sent him a message and I waited and you know,
I was going to do this video a couple of weeks ago,
but I held off because I was pretty optimistic that I would hear back from him.
I didn't hear back from him. So I think Brad Cracker Barreled me.
The question that comes up for me is why did everybody like jump on this so
much? Why did this get so much attention?
I think Brad's wife became a stand-in. As divided as we are, you know,
as politically, socially, whatever,
we've all been through injustice in the workplace.
Maybe not as dramatic as getting fired after 11 years of faithful service.
It could be as simple as our greatness going unseen,
because we all think we're great, right?
I read somewhere that 90% of the workforce in any given establishment thinks
they're in the top 10% of the workforce. So yeah,
that math is impossible.
We could hold her up and praise her as the best worker of all time,
even though we really don't know anything about her,
we can pester her bosses the way we can't pester our own.
And we can even have a little fun bullying,a bully because let's face it.
Cracker barrel is a bully. And that brings me to another question.
Do you think Cracker barrel is still going to let me park in their parking
lot after I post this? I hope so.
Cause that's where we're headed right now. We're going to Cracker barrel in st.
Joseph, Missouri, or maybe st. Robert, Missouri.
I can't, I don't know. I'm getting the saints mixed up,
but we're going to Cracker Barrel. Last time I was in Missouri,
I slept
at
there.