The Min-Max Economy and Hollowing of America

The real reason the Cracker Barrel rebrand resonated.

An unacknowledged problem in America is our min-maxing economy. I suspect this mostly unrecognized phenomenon is the true cause of many of the problems we now blame on politics, culture, or new technology. It was recently put on display during our national debate over the disastrous rebranding at Cracker Barrel.

A few weeks ago, America engaged in great national discussion over Cracker Barrel’s clumsy effort to rebrand. The restaurant chain is facing hard times, with stagnant growth and declining profits. Bleeding traditional customers, Cracker Barrel desperately wanted to refresh its image to bring in younger patrons. As the corporate playbook dictates, executives decided to overhaul the brand with a new logo and “brighter” and “more modern” stores. It was a disaster.

Across social media, Americans were horrified at the new bland logo that erased Cracker Barrel’s iconic old man in a rocking chair, Uncle Herschel, and comfy sub-branding as an “Old Country Store.” People denounced the new interiors, which looked like every other boring suburban chain. Most troubling to Cracker Barrel, many people saw its $700 million refresh as an intentional abandonment of what Cracker Barrel stood for—Americana. It seemed to them political, an intentional erasure of something they believed meaningful.

Within a week and 11% stock drop, the restaurant chain frantically backtracked and canceled its ambitious plans. Uncle Herschel will stay.

On social media, people categorized this debacle as one of cultural politics, another episode of “Go Woke, Go Broke.” Even President Trump weighed in on a restaurant chain rebrand. I think this interpretation is wrong. Cracker Barrel’s executives didn’t make these foolish moves because they hated America or wanted to destroy their own company’s iconic image. They were incompetently trying to make money according to a clueless style of financial thinking now common across America, financial min-maxing that’s slowly undermining the foundation of the real economy.

The culprit isn’t culture. It’s managerialism.

Min-Maxing Destroys Value

Min-maxing means making decisions solely on the numbers, maximizing good ones while minimizing everything else as irrelevant. It’s a term that originally came from gaming to describe the kind of player who turns every game into a spreadsheet simulator. This is the kind of gamer who puts every single point in their warrior maximizing strength, and zero into intelligence, to create an unrealistic character that in reality could barely speak. It’s the kind of person who spends hours calculating how to most efficiently run through the game, and then only does those things over and over again as if it were the most terrible soul-sucking job. They maximize rewards in the most efficient fashion, while ignoring everything else.

In other words, a min-maxer obsesses over some narrow slice of metrics to suck all fun and purpose out of the game, turning it into a mechanical chore.

What makes min-maxers infuriating is they don’t just ruin their own fun. Their existence ruins everybody’s fun. Add a few min-maxers into a game, and soon everyone feels like they have to min-max, until the entire experience becomes a bore. Then the game slowly dies, because who wants to spend their free time in a second tedious job. In the name of increasing efficiency, they ignore the purpose and meaning of the experience.

This is what Cracker Barrel executives were doing with their brand-destroying strategy. They were trying to min-max corporate spreadsheets without any real understanding of what they were meant to be managing or creating. They weren’t waging culture war. They saw their company as a series of metrics, and the numbers were going down. They pulled the easy levers everyone else was following that they thought would make those metrics start going back up.

The problem for Cracker Barrel is the reason the company became successful is because it was a unique restaurant that didn’t follow the standard corporate playbook. It’s a weird idiosyncratic place with homey charm that serves catfish for breakfast. Its interior is authentic in a messy, haphazard way, not anything an interior designer from New York would do. You wait for a table inside a quirky store with old candies from the 1950s, Americana blankets, T-shirts, ceramic containers, and plastic toys. Outside is a massive porch with rows of wooden rocking chairs. Cracker Barrel wasn’t only selling breakfast food like Denny’s or IHOP do. It was selling comfort, nostalgia, charm, and Americana. It probably didn’t help that Cracker Barrel executives are mostly mercenaries who hop from business to business, and likely don’t truly love the brand or eat there themselves. Americana didn’t look economically efficient or on trend in anybody’s spreadsheets.

The experience at Cracker Barrel is hardly unique. Every major business in America eventually does this. Remember when McDonald’s was colorful and fun, with a ball pit in the play place and big friendly plastic tree man in the dining room? McDonald’s now has cold, white, sterile walls, big computer screens, and the look of a hospital lobby. Remember when Pizza Hut had iconic red roofs, checkered tablecloths, big red cups, and a jukebox? Now it looks like a food court restaurant. Remember when Starbucks had comfy couches, indie music, and a warm cozy vibe? Now it looks and feels like a bus terminal. When the founders who made these places unique left, the MBAs eventually took over and then min-maxed them into mediocrity.

I believe strongly in efficiency. We absolutely should run businesses, and every institution, efficiently and well. We should make wise decisions, study what we’re doing, and manage professionally in the name of chasing excellence. I also have no problem with capitalism or making money. Businesses want to maximize their profit. The problem isn’t efficiency as an idea, but the narrow band of metrics they now maximize in the name of efficiency to the exclusion of anything else. The goal of the economy isn’t to maximize some abstraction. It’s to build the real world in which we all must live. It’s to build places and things that delight us and make us happy. It’s to deliver excellence. If calibrated right, this also happens to make people a lot of money.

Truly great business people, of course, fully understand this. On paper, it seems ridiculous that Costco sells a hot dog and a soda for only $1.50. Any corporate min-maxer would tell you that’s inefficient and, in fact, bean counters inside Costco have railed against the policy for years. Costco’s wiser leadership understands a $1.50 hot dog gives people joy and makes them love Costco, creating far more business than it costs. Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple min-maxing spreadsheets and focus groups but by creating truly transcendent products. Walt Disney didn’t revolutionize entertainment and build cherished childhoods through a theme park wonderland by following someone’s playbook of best practices. Howard Schultz didn’t build the Starbucks empire selling coffee for dollars that previously cost cents by copying existing models. Google in its heyday, when it was rolling out one after another innovative product built on free time it gave its employees to explore, wasn’t min-maxing the value of its labor. These people all realized the true goal of a great business isn’t to maximize some spreadsheet but to create excellence, and that excellence in turn would create staggering profits because it actually delighted people and improved the world.

Min-maxing is for corporate bureaucrats and operators who don’t understand what excellence is or where it comes from. It’s a mode of thinking not of entrepreneurs and leaders, but managers selected for following rules and pleasing superiors. These corporate bureaucrats lack the vision to imagine. They don’t know what’s a worthy risk. They have no idea what makes something special. They’re hired guns who don’t even truly love the things they’re entrusted to create. A bureaucrat lacks vision or imagination, wanting someone to hold their hand and give them a clean and easy formula for success. They want someone to tell them what success is, what milestones to reach, and what steps to follow. They know how to execute and copy, so they execute efficiently, maximize metrics, and copy what other successful firms have done.

There’s a place for this kind of box-checking bureaucrat in any organization. It isn’t supposed to be leading.

The Min-Maxing Economy

We now live in a min-maxing economy. Everything we encounter is run by people who are min-maxing metrics.

One min-maxed business is frustrating. A country where every institution does it is a nightmare. Business bureaucrats who run things around these principles aren’t trying to surprise us, delight us, or provide us excellence. They reduce everything to abstractions they can maximize. They mistake process for excellence, don’t value creativity, innovation, risk, or whimsy, and lack a sense of wonder or possibility. They cut corners and make everything cheap. They make their products and services boring, tedious to use, and frustrating on purpose. It’s why so many iconic brands have dulled. It’s why so many experiences that people remember as being special now are not. It’s why few in our everyday lives are still surprising, meaningful, or fun. An entire nation doing this all the time sucks the life from everything.

It’s not just about restaurant businesses, of course. The same managers trained to advance this principle run every institution, and so every institution is run with the same managerial bureaucracy. It’s our media companies. It’s the film industry. It’s book publishing. It’s popular music. It’s universities. It’s non-profits. Of course, it’s also government. The same people and thinking are everywhere, and so everywhere is the same. These people aren’t actively trying to destroy things we believe are valuable out of malevolence. They’re doing it because their metrics, which do not measure them, tell them so. In practice, does it make a difference?

What’s most frustrating about these institutional min-maxers is think they’re doing a bang-up job. They think of success not in terms of excellence, but metrics, so when they destroy valuable things, they believe that’s doing well. When inevitably there’s backlash, they’re baffled. They always feel the criticism is crazy and unfair. They call it ignorance about how the world actually works, without realizing the ignorance about the world is theirs entirely.

A lot of what gets blamed on culture or politics is this kind of managerial min-maxing run amok. I suspect it’s why so many Americans are currently angry, although they can’t put their fingers on the reason. Everywhere they turn, their lives are made intentionally frustrating, and things they loved are hollowed out on purpose. They feel a national leadership culture comprehensively working to transform America from a wonderland of innovation into the national equivalent of a Soviet apartment block. Not knowing the source of the problem, they channel their fury and frustration into politics. This is why I think the Cracker Barrel controversy resonated.

We must remember, the purpose of an economy isn’t to generate spreadsheet abstractions. It’s to build a world of real things. What matters isn’t what the metrics say, but what you build, whether you delight people, and whether you provide them things they love. It’s whether you fulfill their needs, offering extraordinary experiences at fair prices. It’s whether you make the world around us better, and provide the people who work for you a good life. It’s whether you create not just prosperity, but also charm, joy, and meaning. When you do this, as Apple and Disney in their heydays knew, you also make a lot of money. This is how capitalism is meant to work. Min-maxing metrics isn’t even good business strategy. Yes, your spreadsheets look pristine, but you deliver mediocrity and leave most of the wealth you should have generated on the table.

Min-maxing is mediocrity, and America is not a mediocre nation. To thrive, we need leaders who build real things and maximize them for wonder, serendipity, meaning, and joy, not just abstract metrics. We must live in the world we create, and so prosperity means creating a world we actually want to live in. An America that valued excellence again wouldn’t strip color and play places from McDonald’s, but add a little more magic to every street corner, school, and civic building. It’s long past time we clawed back control of our nation from this small-minded mentality and once again began rebuilding a wondrous America.

What do you think about the min-max economy? Join the discussion in the comments.