This Labor Day, Ask Why States Like California Restrict Freelance Work
Six Labor Days later, Assembly Bill 5 remains an adversarial law that handcuffs independent professionals' ability to work as they choose.Six Labor Days later, Assembly Bill 5 remains an adversarial law that handcuffs independent professionals' ability to work as they choose.Why Cracker Barrel’s disastrous rebrand was inevitable
What’s going on with Cracker Barrel?
The restaurant chain just rolled out a full rebrand, courtesy of CEO and president Julie Felss Masino. It’s so ambitious that the rebrand itself even has a name: “All the More,” a perfectly vague and nauseating brand for a perfectly vague and nauseating rebrand.
Every decision must be backed up by consultants, data firms, and PR agencies so that when things flop, no one at the top can be blamed.
Here's the old logo:
All those little details — the barrel, the old white guy, the dark-yellow pinto-bean-shaped background, the phrase "Old Country Store" — have been thrown out in favor of something with all the charm of a fintech logo:
And it's not just the logo. The company has redesigned the inside of the restaurants, too, from their trademark cluttered, homey feel, with tchotchkes and old pictures and fishing reels ...
... to something "cleaner" with white walls and minimal decor. All the little quirks and nuances that endeared the brand to consumers in the first place — gone. What used to have an idiosyncratic, country-store feel now resembles a generic $14-per-taco shop in Austin.
Refinement racket
There's nothing groundbreaking about this makeover, of course. It's a prime example of what wriiter Paul Skallas (better known online as LindyMan) calls “refinement culture:” the endless corporate drive to shave away quirks, details, and character until everything looks the same — flat, safe, and soulless.
There's also nothing surprising about the backlash. People don't like refinement culture. Burberry learned this back in 2018, when the company went from this ...
... to this:
Not only did it swap the pleasantly ornate logo for something in a blandly utilitarian, sans serif font, the company completely jettisoned the image of the knight — a reference to the brand's beginning as a purveyor of equestrian apparel.
This "new look" lasted all of five years before Burberry came to its senses and returned to what was already working.
Tone-deaf functionaries
Why didn't Felss Masino learn from Burberry? Or, for that matter, from Bud Light's more recent Dylan Mulvaney fiasco?
As for Bud Light, it's likely that Felss Masino didn't think she was making the same mistake as her counterpart at Anheuser-Busch; obviously she hasn't done anything as egregiously misguided as pushing "trans" on an audience with no interest whatsoever in seeing a narcissistic gay man pretend he's a girl.
But at bottom, Felss Masino exhibits the same tone-deafness — a clear inability or unwillingness to understand her customers and the direction of mainstream culture in general.
So what did Cracker Barrel think it was doing? To answer that, you need to understand the function of people like Felss Masino.
She doesn't create anything. Never hath she shifted a zero into a one. She is a managerial bureaucrat who just goes from one company to the next.
Not only is she a managerial bureaucrat, she's not a particularly good one. Cracker Barrel is not the kind of "sexy" brand that people like Felss Masino aspire to run. And you can see her disdain for Cracker Barrel and its customers in her indifference to what makes the brand work.
Deleting the details
Obviously she didn't set out to tank the brand. Cracker Barrel hasn't been doing great financially, so most likely she brought in a consultant — consultants being the main drivers of refinement culture — who pointed out how inefficient it was to maintain this complicated logo and interior design.
I imagine the pitch was something like: "Here's your line-item budget. If you can cut down your design costs by 10%, you'll save the company $25 million a year."
That's what consultants do, while at the same time justifying their own existence. They want to get you to take money that could go to building your business and spend it on their endless little pare-downs. Until you’re left with no details. And culture is details.
Which is why leaders with an actual vision don't use consultants. Apple founder Steve Jobs famously disdained them.
RELATED: Cracker Barrel’s $700 million recipe for disaster
Brand flakes
But very few leaders have vision. A while back I went to dinner with the CEO of a famous consumer packaged goods brand. She had all the right credentials: Ivy League education, high-profile experience in the industry.
It's what she didn't have that was notable: even the remotest interest in the product she oversaw. There was not one thing in her home — let alone in her conversation — to indicate her role.
And I realized it was because she is excelling at her job. Which is essentially to act as a bureaucrat maintaining the status quo. These aren't companies — they're bureaus. What's Cracker Barrel to them but the Bureau of Cheap White People Highway Rest-Stop Slop?
Look at Felss Masino's resume. She's been at Cracker Barrel for a little over two years. Before that, a five-year stint at Taco Bell, a couple of months at Mattel, three years at Sprinkles Cupcakes. Her longest job was one of her earliest: She spent 12 years rising in the ranks at Starbucks until she became a top marketing executive.
Camel by committee
It's at this point that the job changes become much more frequent, and that's no accident. Felss Masino no doubt had to live and breathe Starbucks during her long ascent there, but now that she's "made it," she can enjoy life as one of the many interchangeable female CEOs whose only job is take whatever brand she's in charge of, refine it down to its most efficient version, and maximize its value for the corporate regime.
Yes, sometimes that means pushing through "woke," LGBT nonsense, but ultimately that's just a means to an end. The most important qualification of kommissars like Felss Masino is their mastery of CYA.
CYA, short for cover your a**, is a time-honored philosophy of dysfunctional organizations, often associated with its corollary, s**t flows downhill. And marketing today is dominated by CYA culture. Every decision must be backed up by consultants, data firms, and PR agencies so that when things flop, no one at the top can be blamed. Or even in the middle, if you’re good enough at CYA.
That’s why Cracker Barrel didn’t hire one visionary agency. It hired three mediocre ones — Blue Engine, Prophet, and Viral Nation — each surely providing slides, jargon, and “proof” that the rebrand was genius. The result is exactly what you’d expect: a camel built by committee.
New and improved
It doesn't have to be this way. Back in the 1990s, when I grew up, brands took big marketing risks. They were willing to commit to a strong point of view.
It didn't always work, but when it did, it made everyday life a little more pleasant. Unless you want to live somewhere completely off the grid, you will be regularly exposed to advertising; it's indispensable to the innovation and consumer choice we all enjoy. What people in the ad business used to understand is that advertising doesn't have to be ugly or lowest-common-denominator. Look at old ads by Nike, or Apple, or even McDonald's — ads that dared to strive for beauty and inspiration.
What changed is the kind of people who go into advertising. What used to be a scrappy, male-dominated field, as in "Mad Men," is now dominated by overeducated women.
Women's work
Let me make the standard, tiresome disclaimer: I've worked with many talented and funny women marketers. The problem is how the inverted sex ratio changes the business as a whole. Women, generally speaking, just don't have the same competitive, ego-driven, risk-taking nature as men. And when you've spent $250,000 on your education, you're not about to jeopardize your investment by taking big swings.
This new ecosystem rewards traits that are more traditionally female: presentability, agreeableness, and keeping things tidy and organized. It requires leaders who are fluent in inoffensive, trying-to-please-everybody marketing gobbledygook. Like this quote from Cracker Barrel Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Moore:
We believe in the goodness of country hospitality, a spirit that has always defined us. Our story hasn't changed. Our values haven't changed. With "All the More," we're honoring our legacy while bringing fresh energy, thoughtful craftsmanship, and heartfelt hospitality to our guests this fall.
As someone with more than a decade of ad industry experience, I've been neck-deep in this kind of soul-killing gibberish for years. But there is a bright side.
You gotta believe
If you have the drive and the ambition, the CYA-ification of marketing represents a huge opportunity. Small, upstart brands are better positioned than ever to cut through the noise — provided they're not afraid to defy business as usual.
That's exactly why I founded my agency, WILL.
I suppose this is the point at which I'm supposed to issue some faux-humble disclaimer like "shameless self-promotion!" But screw that. Why would I feel any shame? I believe in WILL, and that's why I work so relentlessly to build it. And I believe just as wholeheartedly in the brands we help.
This says less about my virtue than it does about my sheer pragmatism. For anyone wanting to escape the system-wide managed decline afflicting Cracker Barrel and countless other organizations, sincere, deeply held belief in your mission isn't optional — it's the only way out.
Here's our recent ad for Michigan Enjoyer, a newsletter with an unapologetic bias for the specific people, places, and history that make the state unique:
— (@)
Trump fires Biden Fed governor for possible 'criminal conduct' — but Lisa Cook is desperate to cling to power
President Donald Trump informed Lisa Cook on Monday that her time on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has come to an end.
The Biden-nominated governor did not handle the news well, indicating that she will challenge the president's authority to remove executive branch employees, setting the stage for a legal battle that could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The president's recent successes in similar battles over removals of high-level bureaucrats and his ability to fire Federal Reserve board members "for cause" bodes poorly for Cook, who may soon also face criminal charges.
Quick background
Former President Joe Biden nominated Cook, a race-obsessed economist who served on Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, to join the Federal Reserve's board of governors in January 2021.
Critics largely opposed her nomination because of her leftist worldview and her relative lack of experience.
"There's very little on Dr. Cook’s CV to suggest she knows the ins and outs of monetary policy," economics professor Alexander William Salter noted ahead of Cook's confirmation in May 2022. "During her nomination hearing on February 3, she listed one promising qualification: election to the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. But this happened less than a month prior, on January 13 (effective January 1)! Nobody is this quick a study."
RELATED: Supreme Court sides with Trump on firing of officials from independent federal agencies
"Professor Cook has no proven expertise in monetary economics at all, much less fighting inflation," Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said prior to Cook's confirmation vote. "Professor Cook is a proven partisan who has promoted left-wing conspiracy theories and called for a fellow academic to be fired because that person did not support defunding the police."
Cook ultimately squeaked through the confirmation process with the help of a tie-breaking vote from then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Housing crisis
Earlier this month, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte sent a criminal referral for Cook to the Justice Department.
Pulte told Attorney General Pam Bondi in an Aug. 15 letter that mortgage documents appear to indicate that Cook "has falsified bank documents and property records to acquire more favorable loan terms, potentially committing mortgage fraud under the criminal statute."
'The American people must be able to have full confidence in the honesty of the members entrusted with setting policy and overseeing the Federal Reserve.'
"This has included falsifying residence statuses for an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based residence and an Atlanta, Georgia-based property in order to potentially secure lower interest rates and more favorable loan terms," continued Pulte.
Two weeks after taking out a 15-year mortgage agreement for $203,000 on the Michigan property, Cook purchased a condominium in Atlanta and entered into a 30-year mortgage agreement for $540,000. According to Pulte, Biden's Fed governor allegedly listed both residences as her primary.
A CNN review of the mortgage documents found that both properties were indeed listed as Cook's principal residence.
Eviction
President Trump evidently took the allegations very seriously, noting in an Aug. 25 letter to Cook that he shared on Truth Social that "it is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second. It is impossible that you intended to honor both."
"The Federal Reserve has tremendous responsibility for setting interest rates and regulating reserve and member banks," wrote Trump. "The American people must be able to have full confidence in the honesty of the members entrusted with setting policy and overseeing the Federal Reserve."
The president suggested that neither he nor the American people have confidence in Cook's integrity in light of her alleged "deceitful and potentially criminal conduct in a financial matter."
RELATED: Sean Spicer tells Glenn Beck how Biden unwittingly helped Trump fire 'anyone he wants'
Trump stated, "Pursuant to my authority under Article II of the Constitution of the United States and the Federal Reserve Act of 1912, as amended, you are hereby removed from your position on the Board of the Governors of the Federal Reserve, effective immediately."
In response to the firing — reportedly the first time a president has canned or attempted to can a sitting Federal Reserve governor — Pulte thanked Trump for his "commitment to stopping mortgage fraud and following the law."
Blaze News has reached out to the White House for comment.
The Federal Reserve declined to comment on the development.
Clinging to power
Echoing other presidential appointees who are now out of work, Cook suggested President Trump lacked the authority to give her the boot.
"President Trump purported to fire me 'for cause' when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022," said Cook in a statement obtained by Politico.
The fired Fed governor's attorney Abbe Lowell — who has also served as an attorney for pardoned felon Hunter Biden and New York Attorney General Letitia James — stated, "President Trump has taken to social media to once again ‘fire by tweet’ and once again his reflex to bully is flawed and his demands lack any proper process, basis or legal authority," adding that "we will take whatever actions are needed to prevent his attempted illegal action."
The law firm Lex Politica indicated days ahead of Trump's announcement that "President Trump clearly has authority to remove Governor Cook 'for cause,' assuming the allegations of mortgage fraud or lying on federal ethics forms are confirmed."
The Federal Reserve Act states that each member of the Fed's Board of Governors "shall hold office for a term of fourteen years from the expiration of the term of his predecessor, unless sooner removed for cause by the President."
The firm noted further that while the DOJ's investigation of Cook's alleged conduct and any charges it might bring against her "further support removal for cause ... we do not believe that an indictment is necessary before the President may remove Governor Cook 'for cause' under the Federal Reserve Act."
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!Bed Bath & Beyond Joins Countless Other Companies Ditching Bad-For-Business California
Despite these troubling economic conditions and many businesses leaving, it seems unlikely that Gov. Newsom and the Democrat majority in the legislature will change their ineffective policies.Corporate America is eating its seed corn — and our future
“Don’t eat your seed corn.” Every farmer gets it. Every American with common sense gets it. The only people who don’t? The people who run corporate America.
A farmer keeps part of this year’s crop for planting next year. He could sell it now and pocket more cash — but then there’s nothing to plant, nothing to harvest, nothing to live on later. That’s obvious to anyone who works the land.
Capitalism creates wealth. But when wealth is extracted at the expense of the product, the people, and the future — that’s not capitalism. That’s predatory ransacking.
But in today’s boardrooms, the rule is reversed. Short-term profit is all that matters. Strip the future bare, cash out, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up.
The rewards for this corporate vandalism are massive: fat bonuses, stock windfalls, golden parachutes. The damage — lost jobs, gutted industries, shoddy products — is someone else’s problem.
And the fastest way to pull it off? Slash costs to the bone. Ship jobs overseas. Push out the people who know the business best. Wreck customer service. Kill innovation. Downgrade quality until the product barely passes as the same thing you used to make.
Private equity and corporate strategists have a new trick for squeezing customers dry: “revenue mining.” That means cross-selling, upselling, jacking up prices, and hiding the real costs in creative contracts.
At first, it works. Existing customers tend to stick around — inertia keeps them from bolting right away. But each gimmick drives off a slice of loyal business. Combine that with lower service quality and cheaper products, and the exodus accelerates. Before long, the company is stuck with an overpriced product, lousy service, and no easy way to attract new customers.
I’ve watched this play out in my own life. My exterminator. My alarm company. My HVAC service. All wrecked by the same formula. The local phone number? Redirected to a call center overseas — if I can navigate the phone tree. The people I used to know? Gone. The contract? Suddenly much more expensive.
The service I get for my trouble? Less than before. And when the tech finally arrives, all he says is, “Things are much different now.” They might wring one more payment out of me, but I’m already shopping for a local outfit that treats me like a customer instead of prey.
In short, they ate their seed corn. They got one fat harvest out of me, then pushed me straight into the arms of their competition — for good.
At least my dentist is still a one-man shop who owns his own business. But even dentistry is under siege. Private equity-backed dental chains are giving dentistry a bad name, pushing unnecessary procedures just to meet revenue targets.
A USA Today investigation titled “Dentists under pressure to drill ‘healthy teeth’ for profit” uncovered one such example:
Dental Express was part of North American Dental Group, a chain backed by private-equity investors. At least a year earlier, the company had told dentists like Griesmer to meet aggressive revenue targets or risk being kicked out of the chain. Those targets ratcheted up pressure to find problems that might not even exist.
In my professional career, I have seen too many examples of the same pattern: private equity buying and destroying great businesses that had loyal customer bases. To be fair, I have also seen examples of private equity groups buying a business, embracing its product, and continuing to provide good service. I wish it weren’t the exception, though.
More often, private equity groups treat the acquisition as a mine: extract the capital through dividends and existing customers while accruing significant debt. In fact, the funds used to purchase the business are often borrowed and never even repaid.
Dig until empty, leave a crater, and move on.
An X user put it perfectly:
Some private equity is genuinely investing in the business to grow a solid business. This is good, full stop.
Some private equity buys up dying businesses, breaks them up, sells off the valuable bits and sometimes lets the worthless bits go through bankruptcy, taking advantage of bankruptcy laws to profit. This is good, actually, as it recycles the resources of dying businesses into good businesses.
The third type of private equity buys good businesses that are doing OK or even doing well. Then they sell off all the assets, load the company up on as much debt as they can, pay themselves giant dividends, and then take advantage of the same bankruptcy laws to discharge all the debt so they never have to pay it back. This is really bad.
This isn’t just happening to small companies. It’s hitting America’s industrial backbone.
I’ve written before about how Carlos Tavares, the former CEO of Stellantis (corporate parent of Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep), awarded himself a $39 million compensation package for making short-term decisions that briefly maximized profit before revenue and sales collapsed, leaving dealers with overpriced, outdated inventory. He made off with the profits, then left behind a hollow pipeline for the dealers truly committed to Stellantis.
RELATED: Private equity’s losing streak is coming for your 401(k)
I also covered Boeing’s disastrous $43 billion stock buyback binge. The short-term boost to its share price came at the expense of critical investment in its products — and has cost the aerospace giant $35 billion since 2019. To plug the hole, Boeing had to raise another $15 billion in capital and push back the already overdue launch of the 777, citing “negligent engineering.”
That phrase used to be unthinkable in the aerospace industry. Boeing made it possible by gutting its engineering and technical staff to feed Wall Street.
The consequences keep coming. This month, United Airlines grounded much of its fleet after a failure in its proprietary “Unimatic” flight system. The airline claims it doesn’t know what caused the failure.
But I have a strong suspicion.
In recent years, United has aggressively outsourced its technical operations to contractors using foreign labor — often H-1B visa workers — at lower cost. One subcontractor, Vista Applied Solutions Group, boasts that it helps clients “increase productivity” while achieving “considerable cost savings.”
That’s great — until the system fails and planes can’t fly. United may have saved on salaries. The short-term reduction in salary expense has eaten United’s seed corn, leaving the company with a technology system that can’t keep its planes in the air.
It is imperative for those of us who defend capitalism to also repudiate those engaged in practices that give it a bad name. Capitalism creates wealth. But when wealth is extracted at the expense of the product, the people, and the future — that’s not capitalism. That’s predatory ransacking.
And it deserves our scorn.
New York Times makes big admission about Trump's tariffs
President Donald Trump began in April to radically transform how trade is conducted internationally, announcing tariffs on friendly and adversarial nations alike in an effort to settle scores and to exact concessions favorable to the United States, such as those made by Japan and the European Union last month.
"Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but it is not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen," Trump said at the "Liberation Day" ceremony where he announced a sweeping list of tariffs. "This will be, indeed, the golden age of America. It's coming back. And we're going to come back very strongly."
This tariff-driven upheaval has rankled establishmentarians at home and abroad — some of whom have launched legal challenges, issued condemnations, and threatened retaliation. Of course, the media has also worked feverishly to paint the tariffs as reckless and as more grease down the slope to economic ruin.
'Revenue and reciprocity are the twin benefits of the Trump tariffs.'
Nearly four months after the New York Times characterized Trump's approach as a "burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later recklessness," the paper admitted on Sunday that the tariffs are already netting a great deal of money for the government.
The Times' Washington, D.C., tax policy reporter Andrew Duehren confirmed on Sunday that Trump's recent assertion that "Tariffs are bringing Billions of Dollars into the USA!" was correct.
RELATED: Main Street's silent plea: Exempt us from the next tariffs
"Even before the latest tariffs kick in, revenue from taxes collected on imported goods has grown dramatically so far this year," Duehren wrote. "Customs duties, along with some excise taxes, generated $152 billion through July, roughly double the $78 billion netted over the same time period last fiscal year, according to Treasury data."
Citing data from the U.S. Treasury Department, the Times indicated that tariffs brought in over $29 billion in the month of July alone.
Analysts reportedly estimated that the tariffs could be worth well over $2 trillion in additional revenue if left untouched over the next 10 years.
"Tariffs are not going to be a huge source of revenue, couple trillion over a decade, but not trivial at all," Christopher Whalen, chairman of Whalen Global Advisors, told Blaze News in a statement. "But the tariffs are appropriate and are a way to get the world to give at least equal treatment to American goods. Revenue and reciprocity are the twin benefits of the Trump tariffs."
'I do not think this is a true source of revenue, only a substitution and reordering of taxes.'
While the tariffs are bringing in boatloads of cash, some critics have noted that Americans are the ones ultimately paying the price — something that might be more tolerable if Trump's idea to scrap American income tax and lean instead on tariffs as the main source of federal revenue were implemented.
Economic expert and Blaze Media contributor Carol Roth said in a statement to Blaze News, "When you think of the word 'revenue' when it comes to the federal government, you should think taxes because that's the primary source of government revenue. When it comes to revenue from tariffs, it is no different."
"The majority of the tariff burden is coming not from foreign exporters, but rather from U.S. consumers and U.S. businesses," Roth said, alluding to a Goldman Sachs analysis that estimated foreign exporters were only absorbing 20% of the higher costs from tariffs.
RELATED: Tariffs vs. free trade: Which is BETTER for the American auto industry?
Goldman Sachs economists reportedly indicated that eventually, 70% of the direct cost of tariffs would be kicked to consumers through higher prices.
"This means tariffs are mostly revenue that is moving from one pocket to the other, so to speak, as businesses and consumers that pay tariffs then have less money to contribute otherwise to the economy, impacting other tax or government 'revenue' collection," Roth continued. "Unless we fundamentally reorder how taxes are paid (as well as spending) to something that is focused on a consumption tax (which I personally do not think is a good idea given how our economy functions today), I do not think this is a true source of revenue, only a substitution and reordering of taxes."
'I think this is addictive.'
"We all know that making the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017] tax cuts permanent through the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act] was important to the economy, so why would anyone think that adding in the equivalent of more taxes through tariffs is a good idea?" Roth added. "Also, given that cost of living remains a top issue for Americans, adding costs — even if it is only in certain areas of the economy — is in conflict with the administration's agenda."
Regardless of where the money is coming from, there are concerns that the U.S. government might become overly reliant on tariffs as a revenue stream.
"I think this is addictive," Joao Gomes, a finance and economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told the Times. "I think a source of revenue is very hard to turn away from when the debt and deficit are what they are."
The national deficit is presently $1.33 trillion, and the national debt is $36.91 trillion.
Despite Democratic complaints over the tariffs, Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab, suggested that there may be hesitance among both Republicans and Democrats to roll back the tariffs if that would mean a greater federal debt load.
"Congress may not be excited about taking such a politically risky vote when they didn't have to vote on tariffs in the first place," Tedeschi told the Times.
Rather than scrap the tariffs, Democrats are apparently thinking about ways in which they can blow the money.
Democratic strategist Tyson Brody noted, "The way that Democrats are starting to think about it is not that 'these will be impossible to withdraw.' It's: 'Oh look, there's now going to be a large pot of money to use and reprogram.'"
Some Republicans also have a mind to redistribute the funds.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced legislation last week that would send tariff rebate checks to Americans. The amount of the rebate would be at least $600 per adult and dependent child, or more if tariff revenue exceeds current projections for 2025.
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