Cracker Barrel

Larry Singleton acknowledges that he lives in the past.
He loves discovering caches of cranberry sorters, rusted ash sifters, cattle stanchions, rug beaters and tobacco setters. He enjoys hunting for dehorners, ox yokes and seed sowers. He bargains for butter churns, cream separators and lard presses. And if he finds some crockery jugs, curry flytraps or hoop cheese cutters along the way, he’ll take them, too.
But these antiques aren't just for Singleton's personal collection; they're also for his day job as decor manager at Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, a national chain of more than 500 home-style restaurants.
“It just kind of creates that bit of nostalgic grab for people,” Singleton said. “That comfortableness that I don’t know you can get any other way except using authentic items.”
Singleton, 49, may be the ultimate example of how some in the restaurant business have tried to generate a nostalgic atmosphere by filling the walls with antiques. Chain restaurants like TGI Friday’s, Houlihan’s, Ruby Tuesday and Applebee’s are but a few of the establishments trying to make old new again.
In 2003, executives at TGI Friday’s thought that by revamping their restaurants' decor they would be able to stanch a decline in business. In the redesign, they discarded antiques like farming tools and metal signs from the '30s, '40s and '50s in favor of more modern items, like disco balls, snowboards, Harley Davidson apparel and MTV's moon man.
The older antiques “were no longer recognizable by the guest and not relevant to our customer,” said Chris Devlin, senior vice president of development for Carlson Restaurants Worldwide, which operates TGI Friday’s. “We really brought the decor itself forward to the point where the items are more in the sort of 10- to 25-year range.”
Devlin says the company spends $15,000 to $20,000 on antiques for each location.
TGI Friday’s buys many of its antiques on eBay, but there is little variation in items from restaurant to restaurant. For example, Devlin said each location had a wall with similar music albums, but the arrangement might be slightly different in each outlet.
Cracker Barrel, on the other hand, designs each restaurant individually. In the Mount Laurel, N.J., restaurant, which was built on a cranberry bog, Singleton’s team put up old cranberry signs. In restaurants in Massachusetts, Singleton placed Boston shipping receipts and diplomas from local schools.
Where other restaurants focus on entertainment and pop culture, Cracker Barrel focuses on items that would have been sold in an old country store, like washboards and tea kettles.
“There are some areas of the store that are, you could say, generic,” said Jim Taylor, a spokesman for Cracker Barrel. “But then we’re going back through the catalog to really find hometown connections.”
That’s where Singleton steps in. Whether the items are “generic” or location specific, Singleton and his 12-member team select all of the nearly 1,000 antiques that decorate each Cracker Barrel restaurant. Their budget is roughly $25,000 for each store.
To keep up with the demand, Singleton manages a warehouse in Lebanon, Tenn., that holds more than 100,000 items. Singleton’s staff categorizes, refurbishes and cleans every item.
Singleton says many of Cracker Barrel’s antiques come from families who no longer have a need for old odds and ends. One of his favorite finds was the stash he discovered from a little old lady in Wayne, N.J.
“One of the best buys I ever found in my life,” Singleton said. “Her and her husband had traveled for 45 years in a Volkswagen all through New England and buying anything handmade.”
The antique collection included roughly 1,500 augers, 800 blacksmith tongs and 1,000 barn door hinges, among other artifacts dating from the late 1700s. The collection was so vast that Singleton made five trips in a 28-foot tractor trailer between New Jersey and Tennessee. “We had to limit the trailer because there was so much weight,” he said. “Boy, we hauled out of there for four or five years.”
Singleton said that today those antiques are spread out among hundreds of restaurants. And if they’re not hanging above plates of fried chicken and baskets of cornbread, they’re still waiting their turn in Cracker Barrel’s warehouse.
Each restaurant chain uses the antiquing method in a distinct way, some with a mix of authentic antiques and reproductions.
Chili’s and On the Border emphasize their Southwestern cuisine with sombreros and vintage pictures of Mexico. Applebee’s stresses its neighborhood image with artifacts of hometown heroes and trophies from local sports teams.
Outback Steakhouse uses Australian memorabilia, like surfboards, maps, flags and boomerangs, while Carrabba's Italian Grill displays ceramics, copper pots and framed black and white photos.
Hard Rock Cafe lists on its Web site what a diner can expect to see in each restaurant. In the Mumbai, India, location, there's a radio once owned by John Lennon, a set of maracas used by Jimi Hendrix and a coat worn by Prince in the film "Purple Rain." In the Key West, Fla., location, there is a Bob Dylan guitar, a biker jacket signed by The Ramones and a Hawaiian shirt worn by Jimmy Buffett.
Many of these restaurants have jumped on the retro bandwagon in the hope of attracting business through nostalgia.
But for Singleton, a collector himself, antiquing has always been less about the bottom line and more of a family affair: His parents were Cracker Barrel’s first designers in 1969. In fact, he lives in his parents’ old antique shop in Lebanon, Tenn., among countless doodads and thingamajigs.
“I accidentally just slipped into this growing up,” said Singleton, who was literally giddy over a recent acquisition of 938 paperweights. “I never thought it would be what I would end up doing.”
E-mail: jvs2107@columbia.edu

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To see the photo's with this story click this link
http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2007-02-27/soltes-restaurantdesign

Dear Cecil:

Where do chain restaurants get all the faux antiques for their decor? I have this disturbing vision of 12-year-olds in Thailand manufacturing farm implements and Nehi soda signs for Cracker Barrel and the like. --Mark Coen

Cecil replies:

You may imagine I spend all my time supping on sushi with Vaclav Havel and that lot, but the truth is I have sat in Cracker Barrels on occasion and wondered about this very thing. (Cracker Barrel, for the benefit of those who've never left the west coast or driven on an interstate, is a restaurant chain that employs "old country store" decor. I know the question was about chain restaurants in general, but one must focus one's investigative resources.) So I called the company's headquarters in Lebanon, Tennessee, and quizzed the folks there about the stuff hanging on their restaurants' walls: Is it legit? Where does it come from? Then I thought about it a bit, called them back, and quizzed them some more. Some may say this is a trivial matter to get so persnickety about, but my feeling is, that's probably the same thing they said over at Arthur Andersen.

I spoke with Cracker Barrel decor manager Larry Singleton, whose parents, the owners of a Lebanon antique shop, furnished the first Cracker Barrel in 1969. Cracker Barrel cofounder Dan Evins was so pleased with their work that he hired them to furnish all his subsequent restaurants. Larry accompanied his parents on antique-buying trips as a child, started working at the decor warehouse in 1980, and took over as manager in 1981.

Cracker Barrel was still a relatively small operation then, with around 30 outlets, but it has since embarked on an aggressive expansion program. As of the day I called, CBRL Group, Inc., owned 461 outlets in 41 states. Since each restaurant has roughly 1,000 items on its walls, the company has clearly amassed one prodigious heap of Americana, and part of Larry's task has been to put antiques acquisition on an industrial basis. Today the decor warehouse is a 26,000-square-foot facility with a staff of 11 and over 100,000 bar-coded items in inventory. Larry no longer needs to do much antiques hunting himself; a nationwide network of dealers knows what he wants and keeps him supplied. (Signs, kitchen tools, and farm implements are always big, but anything relatively old and picturesque that'll fit through the door has potential--shoe trees and bicycles, for example.) Items receive minimal restoration: cleaning, staining if necessary, and usually a coat of clear finish. For each new location, a design team arranges a load of rustic-looking stuff on mock store walls in the warehouse, a task greatly simplified by the fact that the layout of every Cracker Barrel is pretty much the same. Then they photograph the results, pack all the items on pallets, and ship them to the site.

Fascinating, you say. But let's get to the heart of the matter. Is all the stuff for real? I put the question to Larry Singleton thusly: "To the best of your knowledge, is every item hung on the walls in a Cracker Barrel restaurant authentic, that is, not a reproduction?"

"Yes," said Larry.

"Is any item of recent manufacture, meaning within the last ten years?"

"No," said Larry.

Of course, in this sinful age, one never knows. Cracker Barrel offered to let me tour the warehouse, but since I'd blown the Straight Dope travel budget on 40-weight for the Studebaker I wasn't able to visit Lebanon to take depositions or do carbon dating. The Cracker Barrel people sounded honest on the phone, but the guys from the brokerage houses who call trying to sell you the latest IPO sound honest . . . actually, no they don't. They sound like thieving hyenas. The Cracker Barrel people sound way better than that. So what can I tell you? That's their story, and they're sticking to it.

--CECIL ADAMS

http://lebanondemocrat.com/photos/Our_Home_2007.pdf?bcsi_scan_058FCEE7FAB850A1=0&bcsi_scan_filename=Our_Home_2007.pdf

Monday, February 3, 2003

Story last updated at 09:00 a.m. on Monday, February 3, 2003
Restaurant chain uses antiques, memorabilia to lure customers

The Associated Press

LEBANON, Tenn. - On the last sunny Friday in December, David Dearmon had a mission: fashion a turn-of-the century Cracker Barrel country store and restaurant from the bare interior of a just-constructed building behind Regency Square mall in Jacksonville.

Out of short plastic tubs and tall wire racks emerged a bewildering array of artifacts, including a battered leather suitcase, a map of North Carolina, an ad for "Florida Sip Orange Juice," five volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, several bow saws and even an old blue Roadmaster bicycle that will be hung from the ceiling by delicate wires. Saddles, ladders, watering cans and old movie posters all sprung from the packages shipped from Cracker Barrel's Lebanon, Tenn., headquarters.

Creating the right atmosphere is almost as important as serving the right food for Cracker Barrel, as well as other chains like Ruby Tuesday, Hard Rock Cafe and T.G.I. Friday's that go to great lengths and costs to create themes for their restaurants. But where do these objects, all real antiques in Cracker Barrel's case, come from?

"That's the No. 1 question I get," said Dearmon, who roams the country installing antique displays for the eatery. He answers by pulling out of his wallet a crinkled picture. It showed an antique dealer pulling up to Cracker Barrel's "Decor Warehouse" in Tennessee, towing a trailer overloaded with wagon wheels and artifacts of all shapes and sizes.

For the antiques in Cracker Barrel's 466 eateries nationwide, that's where it all begins.

The mother lode of country antiques is a nondescript brick-faced facility set amid the campus of Cracker Barrel's corporate office. Here can be found a wall of deer heads, with nearly a dozen of them waiting for places above fireplace mantels. Rows upon rows of pictures arranged by categories like "Oval, men" and "Oval, children" (with oval denoting the shape of the frame) rest in heavy-duty metal shelves. Racks of old wooden skis stand riderless, a pile of about 15 outboard boat motors is silent, beat-up metal lanterns are dark, and a stack of banjos has played their last notes.

"When we're creating a store, we know that for a lot of people, that may be their only opportunity they'll get to see an old cheese cutter, or a blacksmith bellows or forge ... unless they go to a museum," said Larry Singleton, who heads Cracker Barrel's antique purchasing, restoration and installation department. "We take a lot of pride in being able to present things to people."

Antiques have adorned Cracker Barrels, a combination of a restaurant and gift store, since the first opened in 1969. Singleton's parents owned an antique shop by that first facility and Cracker Barrel's founder asked them to do the decorating. The Singleton family has been at it ever since, stuck in a time warp of sorts.

Neither Cracker Barrel nor its suppliers would say how much the chain spends yearly on antiques to outfit the roughly 20 stores it opens each year. But another family restaurant that uses antiques in its restaurants, Ruby Tuesday Inc. of Maryville, Tenn., spends "well in excess" of $1 million a year on antiques, according to Ruby Tuesday Senior Vice President Rick Johnson.

But no matter the figure, it is obvious that Cracker Barrel is a major player in the market for country store antiques. Its warehouse holds more than 100,000 of them.

Antiques arrive in vehicles ranging from pickup trucks to 18-wheel tractor trailers. Immediately, information on each piece such as whom it was purchased from, and how much it cost is entered into a computer, and a bar code slapped on.

Using a hand-held bar code scanner, the movement of each piece is tracked four times: when it enters the warehouse; after restoration, when it is put on a shelf ready to be selected for a restaurant; when the antique is pulled from the storage shelf and ready to be shipped; and when the antique is finally installed.

Problems can arise during cataloguing: "Sometimes you might have to gather the guys together and say, 'What do you all think this is?'" Singleton said, specifically mentioning the case of a recent artifact that arrived, a long wooden pole with a metal hook on top. It turned out to be for grabbing mailbags off train station platforms, back when most mail was still delivered by trains.

If the collective memory of the 10 Decor Warehouse employees fails, they have a 1903 catalogue from a New York hardware store that "has everything in the world in it" from back then, Singleton said. But that's their last resort.

Some of the items, which are mainly from the early 1900s, arrive in fine condition, needing only to get the dust wiped off with a wet rag. But about 70 percent of the goods need some type of restoration, whether it's just a clear-coat varnish to protect it, or a complete redoing and repainting, said Joe Stewart, Cracker Barrel's inventory control and restoration supervisor.

It can be tough to decide.

"A lot of the restoration process is, 'Do we really want to turn a $5 piece into a $100 piece by painting it and spending a lot of time on it," Stewart said. "A lot of things we want to keep as authentic as possible, but of course some things come in really bad, rusty, and then we do want to spend the time to fix them."

On a recent morning, workers were using Murphy Oil Soap to wipe off old baseball bats and croquet mallets that needed no further work, while a sandblaster hummed in a nearby room: A grimy part from a heater was being stripped back to its original shiny brass.

Outside the metal shop, a handful of electric fans sat on the floor. With their bright red and green finishes, they could have passed for brand new. They weren't they were from the 1920s or '30s. About five hand pumps were beside them, their fresh paint gleaming, too.

Nearby is a wood shop equipped to make new legs for a wooden washing machine from the 1800s, for example, and a second-floor picture framing shop.

Besides preservation, there's another reason for making the antiques look good.

"It's kind of like an eye candy thing," Stewart said. "You don't want to put something up ... that's not very good to look at."

Cracker Barrel typically assembles antique packages for eight restaurants at a time, to make the process of restoring, designing and installing them most efficient. But each bundle requires its own research.

The chain tries to put antiques in its restaurants that relate to their surroundings. So to make that match, designers typically use the Internet to investigate the communities' histories.

Some locations have obvious ties: Cordele, Ga. is the watermelon capital of the world, and another town is the global sock capital. The antiques for Jensen Beach, Fla., the self-proclaimed pineapple capital, were being designed on a recent visit.

The themes were more subtle when the antiques were designed for the new Regency Cracker Barrel set to open this month in Jacksonville. Designers found that the city had once been the silent movie capital of the world, and had once been a leading source of timber. And then there were the influences of sailing and shipping, military and the beach.

Once the themes are determined, designers choose the antiques. They are then mounted on a mock-up wall to work out any kinks, photographed so carpenters in the field can use the image as a blueprint, and then taken down to be packed and sent off to the new restaurants, a process that takes about a week per store (final installation in the restaurant takes another three days).

Cracker Barrel does not buy antiques from the towns it is moving into. Instead, its designers have to make antiques that might have been bought at an auction in New England where several major country store antique auctions are held.

This meant the pineapple theme for the Jensen Beach location got watered down to a more general fruit and agriculture appearance, because there was hardly any pineapple memorabilia on hand.

Dressed in a blue Nike sweatshirt and sweatpants, Wade Winfree, a design and installation crew leader, was setting up the Jensen Beach display on a recent visit. He scooted back and forth between the lattice mock-up panels and the warehouse shelves behind him that were laden with antiques. For a panel with an automotive theme, he contemplated grabbing either a wrench or an oil can. He opted for an old Buick sign instead.

He used one hand to prop the sign against the wall, and, with a whir, drilled a long black screw in just far enough to hold it in place.

"When we set up the display, we set it up in a way so people say, 'Ah, I see why this was used for that,'" Winfree said.

Our Décor Hits the Big Screen!

The decorative fixtures in our stores have always been “hits” with our guests. Now Hollywood is taking notice.

About 3,000 Cracker Barrel Old Country Store® decorative artifacts were used in creating the full length feature film “Charlie’s War” starring Olympia Dukakis, Lynn Redgrave and Dianne Ladd.

This modern-day film includes flashback scenes set in a small farming town during the war. Creating the look and feel of a 1940s town square presented quite a challenge for the movie’s set designers. But as they began visualizing country stores of yesteryear, Cracker Barrel somehow came to mind. That’s when they turned to us for help.

At first, they were hoping to find a few items to decorate a store front. But what they saw as they entered our Decorative Fixtures Warehouse in Lebanon, TN astonished them.

They found rows of history, shelves full of more than 100,000 authentic artifacts we will use to decorate our stores. Ironically, they were filming this movie only about ten miles away in the small town of Watertown, TN.

“We will search all over the country for antiques like this,” says Barbara Peterson, one of the set designers. “So often you get a piece here and there, and many times those items are showing their age because they’ve been used in films before. But this place is a designer’s dream.”

Tony Grazio, the film’s producer says, “Cracker Barrel brought us into their warehouse and it was like preserving a piece of history. It was just incredible to see.”

The dry goods store is the backdrop of a poignant scene in the movie and was almost entirely decorated with Cracker Barrel artifacts. Director David Abbot says actors who actually lived in the 1940s were “instantly taken back to their childhoods” when they entered.

Larry Singleton, Manager of the Décor Warehouse, is responsible for finding the items we use to decorate our stores. “I still find antiques at estate sales, flea markets and those small-town stores that are cleaning out their storage closets,” he says.

Larry explains that we have also established relationships with antique dealers across the country who will call us when they find something we’d like. “We even have people drive over here to the warehouse to show us stuff. They have antiques in their homes and think it would look good in a Cracker Barrel.”

Film executives are hoping to release “Charlie’s War” later this year.

Decorative fixtures are an important part of who we are. And whether or not our decorative findings had made it to the big screen, preserving our country’s historical relics is something we’re proud of here at Cracker Barrel.

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