Cracker Barrel
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. is an American chain of combined restaurant and gift stores with a Southern country theme. The company was founded by Dan Evins in 1969; its first store was in Lebanon, Tennessee. Cracker Barrel’s menu is based on traditional Southern cuisine, with appearance and decor designed to resemble an old-fashioned general store.
About Cracker Barrel in brief
Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, Inc. is an American chain of combined restaurant and gift stores with a Southern country theme. The company was founded by Dan Evins in 1969; its first store was in Lebanon, Tennessee. As of September 1, 2019, the chain operates 660 stores in 45 states. Cracker Barrel’s menu is based on traditional Southern cuisine, with appearance and decor designed to resemble an old-fashioned general store. Each restaurant features a front porch lined with wooden rocking chairs, a stone fireplace, and decorative artifacts from the local area. It engages in charitable activities, such as its assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina and injured war veterans. The chain’s stores were at first positioned near Interstate Highway exits in the Southeastern and Midwestern United States, but expanded across the country during the 1990s and 2000s. In the early 1990s, the company became the subject of controversy when founder and CEO Dan Evin instituted an official company policy prohibiting the hiring of any individual whose sexual preferences fail to demonstrate normal heterosexual values. Following massive public backlash and large shareholders such as the New York City Employee Retirement System threatening to vote out the entirety of upper management, theCompany reversed the policy. In May 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had settled a lawsuit alleging that Cracker barrel employees at approximately 50 of the company’s 500 locations discriminated against minority customers. In July 2001, shareholders stripped Evins of his position as President and CEO of theCompany, replacing him with Michael A.
Woodhouse. At the Company’s 2004 annual meeting, shareholders voted to reelect Woodhouse as CEO, while also granting him Evins’ title as Chairman of the Board, effectively merging the roles. The same year, shareholders forced the company to vote unanimously to add sexual orientation to Cracker Barrel’s non-discrimination policy, with the term officially being added the following year. The firm pledged to implement a series of changes, including to strengthen and make public its non- discrimination policies, retrain andor terminate employees in violation of the new policies, and pledged to focus on improving minority representation and civic involvement. The first restaurant was built in September 1969, serving biscuits, grits, country ham, and turnip greens, and was intended to attract the interest of highway travelers. In February 1970, the firm leased land on gasoline station sites near interstate highways to build restaurants. These early locations all featured pumps on-site during gasoline shortages in the mid to late 1970s. Into the early 1980s the company reduced the number of gas stations on- site, eventually phasing them out altogether as the company focused on its restaurant and Gift Store business. In 1987, the. company had more than 50 units in eight states, with annual sales of almost USD 81 million. It grew consistently through the 1980s and 1990s through the market by 1992, attaining a value of USD 1 billion by 1992. It became a publicly traded company in 1981 to raise funds for further expansion, raising more than half a million shares, raising USD 4.6 million.
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This page is based on the article Cracker Barrel published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
