How Dare a Mediocre Chain Restaurant I Forgot About Change Its Logo?
If a brand updates its logo and there isn't public outrage, did it even happen?
A struggling, mediocre chain restaurant that 75% of America forgot about, except when driving by too fast or on a ten-story-high billboard, has updated its logo for the first time in forty-eight years. Over the past forty-eight hours, this change has been one of the top trending topics in America. War in Ukraine? Soaring prices? Struggling economy? A depressed labor market? The truth about Jeffrey Epstein?
Absolutely not.
Sure, the mediocre chain restaurant (rhymes with Hacker Carol) has damn good mac and cheese, a cool little tourist trap shop, and an old country feel, but is a chain restaurant changing its logo really that important of a story? Reporters from different news verticals are trying to find ways to shoehorn the story into their beat. Stock tanking, the impact on the brand, social media’s reaction, hot takes from marketers trying to go viral, and interviews with customers and executives breaking down the move. Somehow, the logo change even got political. “Another company going Woke.” One side calls it a woke move; the other slams calling the move Woke. Someday America will get past our this or that, black and white thinking. Hopefully.
Weeks, months, and years after this, researchers and brand “experts” will cling onto this story to develop case studies and lessons learned from the Logo Incident of 2025. #LogoGate for short because America hasn’t thought of a good name for a scandal since the seventies.
Meanwhile, the mediocre chain restaurant is getting the most free publicity it ever has. Memes. Liberal content. Conservative content. And even non-political content. Attacks on the CEO. Defenses of the CEO. The new and old logos blasted everywhere. LinkedIn filled with business professionals’ “unique” takes on the logo change, with most being AI generated, of course.
Why are we turning another mediocre chain restaurant dying into another multiple-day story? Shit. I just recovered from a jeans ad being called Nazi propaganda. One has to wonder if going viral, even for the wrong reasons, is now the move by savvy or failing businesses. Think about it. Those who grew up with the brand will defend and spend at the mediocre chain restaurant until all are closed. If the business is somehow saved, it was their dollars that helped make it happen.
Those who but forgot about the mediocre chain restaurant may be reminded of the place from the brand invading every facet of our digital lives and check it out. Those who mock it or never been? Some may have been former fans, but most would’ve never dined at the establishment, anyway. No loss there.
The income of the mediocre chain restaurant has been falling since 2022. The stock plummeted in the last few years with a negative return of -18.36% in 2023 and -31.64% in 2024. Modernizing the mediocre chain restaurant’s logo sounds like a risky gamble by a desperate company.
There’s a chance the logo update is nothing but a mistake by a bad CEO. Maybe it’s a painful move that’ll pay off later by a brilliant CEO. Either way, attention is rarely a bad thing for business. For America? It’s another emotional reaction to something meaningless. A logo change can take over our national conversation. That’s where we are right now. Are we so afraid of getting older that we grip onto anything and everything from our past? Why do we care so much about a business’s logo?
The first web surfers are aging. The world around us? Changing. Whether we like it or not.