HHH Show 072826 - Hour 1

Ah, here I am. I'm right over here. Good afternoon, everybody. Let me get these hands together. Three claps. God thank you. Greetings. And salutations. Welcome to this brand new afternoon. This afternoon has never been lived before. It's a blank canvas. If you will it so, it can be your masterpiece. Here's how you do the afternoon. Think of three things for which you're grateful. That's a big cheat code, by the way. And then do the afternoon with all the joy, wonder, enthusiasm. And gratitude, you can muster. Hashtag TYG, turn it up. Whoa. Oh, do. Manipur. Good afternoon. Welcome to the broadcast. We have a severe... thunderstorm warning in effect right now. Let me pull up just the latest information on this, and then we will follow up with information throughout the afternoon. We have a severe thunderstorm warning for Cock County is east in East Tennessee, southwestern Granger County in East Tennessee at 250 this afternoon. A severe thunderstorm was located near Newport, moving southeast at 20 miles an hour. 60 mile per hour wind gust, nickel-sized hail. It has been indicated on radar. You could have damage to roofs, siding, and trees. Here are some of the locations that are being impacted right now. Newport, Parrotsville, Caney Branch, Bybee. Del Rio, Cedar Creek, Round Mountain, and Max Patch. If you are listening in any of those areas, you are under a severe thunderstorm warning. That from the National Weather Service in Morristown. We will have a weather update, and we will have traffic coming up in just a couple of moments. So we start there. Welcome to the Triple H Radio Experience. My name is Halloran Hilton Hill, three names. The names are scraps from our family. I got the scraps. So here I am, and I'm scrappy. I'm scrappy. Good afternoon. I love you. I want the very best for you. After all, the politics are over, after all of the craziness is over when the dust settles. I want it to be well with you. I want the very best for you. And that is not conditioned upon you agreeing with me or liking me. I want the very best for you. So just know that going in today. And whatever you're dealing with, whatever you're going through, keep going. I'm rooting for you. If you're having a good day, have it. If you're having a tough day, learn from it.

There will be value then in all of your days. We'll have a candidate in the studio. Activism. I've got a couple of stories today. One story that it just really impacted me because I run into so many people who believe that they are helpless and voiceless. And my vote doesn't matter or this doesn't matter or that doesn't matter. And we'll. We'll jump into that story. I would love to engage you in conversation today. I am not so much. I believe in free speech. I really believe in it, which means as a true believer in free speech, I have given up any thought that I had that it was necessary for people to agree with me. Right. That is totally unnecessary now. I would love to find unity and I want to get along with people. I think there's a commission as far as possible to be at peace with all people. But in order for people to have the space to be or to become who they were designed to be, and I hope. Within every person listening to me, there is some desire within you to be the best version of yourself you can be. I hope the best of you makes it into the rest of you. But in order for you to be and to become, you have to have the space. And I don't want this to be a platform of constraint. You'll find plenty of that. You will find plenty of opportunities. You will find plenty of moments in your life where people will tell you specifically. If you don't think like me, you shouldn't exist. You're going to find a lot of that. Not here. You don't have to think like me. But I do ask you to think. Think for yourself, speak for yourself. So I would love to engage you. I like to ask people on a daily basis, what are you thinking? Why do you think it? And I want you to get a workout when you're hanging with me. I want you to strive. I want you to be better. I want you to think deeper. I want you to love harder. I want you to grow. So call me today. Engage in the conversation. Be part of it. Jump in with both feet. The number is 656-8255-1-8255-1-8-255-6-5-6-tall. Let me say good afternoon to my esteemed colleague, dear friend, producer of this broadcast, Christopher David, D. Wayne, aka Little Daddy, aka Chok 2, aka the prodigious producer of this broadcast. a.k.a. Sweet Mama Pearl's baby boy. Mary on. Mary on. Marion. Good afternoon. Christopher. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Halloran. Good afternoon. Thank you for passing your phone to me, by the way. That was, he called yesterday, and I forgot to call him back, but it was cool that he called back today. So it made me smile.

I was asked to pass along greetings to you from the one and only Christy Bruce. Well, hey, Christy. How are you doing, sunshine? She said, how's Chris? Miss Christy. Sweet, sweet ladies, what she is. She's so nice. So nice. Those nice ladies that had a floral company in Mayberry. Yep, the Morrison twins, Morrison sisters, I think it was. They were like young Miami. Spin that. But they were just doing it for, you know, like, like, special occasions. Yeah. Arbor Day. Sweet, like Potato Day. That premise is so funny, man. Potato Day. They were selling Riefer. They were selling that moonshine. That was the reefer of their time. That was the crack of their time. That was the cocaine of their time. Oh, okay. So you get a snoop fool. Yes. Oh, got it. You see, do you realize that Otis was an addict? There was addiction in the streets of Mayberry. Otis was an artist. Did you remember the episode? It was a color episode, so it wasn't like one of the best. But when he went sang with the choir. No, when he, when he, uh, when he did a mosaic of a cow and, uh, People accepted it, you know, just because, you know, hey, we're trying to help him get past this. Yeah. But he got drunk again and he made something beautiful. We said, I find I deal my breath's work when I'm a little gas. I said, okay, Otis, go on, boss. That's what Snoop Dogg said. I do my best work. Wow, wow, yippio, yippe. That's what I'm saying. Triple H Radio Experience, News Talk 987WOKI. I want to talk a little bit about Julie Messino. Julie Messino. It is so true. First of all, let me say this, and let me say this to all of... the small and medium-sized business owners that are listening to me this afternoon. There is a proverb, and I think it's Proverbs 22, verse 1, that says a good name is better than gold. A good name is better than gold. If you have a great name,

It's fantastic. Those of you young people that are listening this afternoon, the way you go about your life, the reputation you carry in the work that you do and the way you treat people will go a long way in your life. So work hard to make a good name for yourself. work harder on keeping that good name intact. And when or if you goof up in life, dust yourself off and get back to being the person that you were supposed to be, that you are supposed to be. Have a great comeback story. Finish strong. To those of you that are in business, having a... If you have been in this community for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years, and you have a brand identity such that when people see the name of your company, they think a good thought, they have a good feeling, they remember a great experience. There is something. connected to your branding your logo that makes people remember you and want to engage you. If you've been able to establish that, that is tremendous. And it takes a lot to build it. It takes a lot of consistency. It takes a lot of... focusing relentlessly on customer value and customer service. There are not a lot of companies that are committed to that. But the ones that are, ooh, man, they're great. So I applaud you if you have built a significant brand in your industry. It takes a lot. It doesn't take a whole lot to lose a brand.

You can get sideways with your customer base, and it can all just kind of get off the rails. Which brings us to Julie Messina. Young rock star businesswoman, she's brought in to be the CEO of Cracker Barrel, and Cracker Barrel. was and is dealing with the reality of a mature brand. The reality of a mature brand. COVID really affected the restaurant industry in a profound way. One of the ways that it affected the restaurant industry profoundly is Seated dining experiences or seated experiences in a restaurant. Huge. People started ordering carryout and they stopped going to restaurants because we had a two-year period of time roughly where you couldn't go to a restaurant or you didn't want to. We were in our mask. We were standing six feet apart if we did go out. Nobody was sitting down in restaurants in the restaurant industry had to pivot in a big way. Huge. I mean huge. One of the most successful pivots I saw was with the local Chick-fil-A owner Eddie Halliday. He has the one here in Hamburg, West Hills, at the mall as well. What an operator, by the way. But they made the pivot to drive through and delivery. And it was, I mean, they went through a major transformation in order to keep up with the times. In order to keep up with the times. And he did so very successfully. I interviewed him for a project I was working on about that transformation. Absolutely fantastic. Very fascinating. But across the board, restaurants had to reconfigure themselves. I'm fascinated by restaurants, the restaurant industry. I know a few restaurant owners. One of my mentors and friends was Bill Regis. God rest his soul. One of my great friends is Grady Regis. And so I was around their restaurant business for a while and got to see some of the operations meet a lot of the people, meet a lot of their managers. I know Mike Connor and his brother, Bo and Connors and Chop House and that portfolio of restaurants. I know Mike Chase. I've met a number of other restaurant owners that have given me like a peek-a-boo into operations of a restaurant and kind of feel that energy, that vibe. And the restaurant business is tough. So restaurants have been trying to play catch-up from COVID.

And they're dealing with how do we adapt to a new generation? And depending on the restaurant category that you're in, how do you deal with affordability? So on the one hand, restaurants have had to address the notion of people wanting carry out, people wanting to use DoorDash, people wanting to use Uber Eats. So how do we configure our restaurant so that people can do delivery, takeout, or we can be delivery friendly and takeout friendly? How do we set it up so that we have that? But then at the same time, how do we get people to come into the restaurant? continue the traffic in our restaurants and create a great eating experience for the restaurant. I mean, it's a big and significant challenge, and it's one that's hard to get right. Enter Julie Messino at Cracker Barrow. More of the story in just a moment. Hats off to everybody in the restaurant business. That is a tough business. But if you delight your customers, if your food quality is great, if you can retain really great employees and partners, I guess associates that really care about taking care of your customers, if the people that manage and run your operations, your kitchen, your prep lines, your cook lines, if you're able to stay on top of food cost. and maintain great food quality. If you're able to adjust your menu in such a way that it gives people something to be curious about, but it keeps your regular customers coming back if you can develop an identity, a soul, an energy for the brand. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. And for you to jump out there and try to do it. And I'm talking about everybody from a food truck. to a three Michelin Star restaurant, I commend you for jumping into the fray because its consistency, though, is the thing. Anyway, Julie Messino has brought in at Cracker Barrel, headquartered in Lebanon, Tennessee, and they decide that they have to modernize Cracker Barrel because of demographics. It is the same thing that, for instance, Fox News will face in the next decade. All brands are thinking about this. The average Fox News viewer is 70 plus. That's their core demo. And I'm saying this because... As people who cover the media industry, you can talk to any of the media analyst and any of the big Wall Street firms, Fox, when they make their presentations, talk about their demographic, which is why you're seeing them make the push into streaming. Because they're trying to move the demographic down to catch younger viewers.

And they're trying to retain the viewers that they have. They're the most popular, most powerful cable news, what network? But the point here is people will try to make adjustments. As their populations, if the average age of your customer at a cracker barrel is somebody over 50 or 60, if the average ticket price is $19, And those people are aging out. They're becoming less mobile. How do you retain them? But then the 35-year-old that has three kids and mother-in-law and they want to go out to eat together, how do you appeal to that next generation and the generation coming after them? So Cracker Barrel wanted to modernize. The amount of investment that they were making in the modernization to upgrade restaurants, upgrade menus, the number was staggering. $700 million. Almost a billion dollars to try to modernize the brand so they could reset it for another generation. And reading their presentation on their new identity and their new idea, I read through the presentation, and I was fascinated by what they were attempting to do. In their documentation, they said, you have more people that want to have carry out or use a delivery service for their meals. This younger generation, they like to order food on a nap. They wear out DoorDash and Uber Eats. They wear it out. So to get them to come out, go to a restaurant, have an experience. The feedback they were getting from some of their younger customers was that the restaurants looked old. And they had this old feeling and they didn't look youthful and well lit and blah. So they decided to try to modernize. You saw. You saw McDonald's go through a major sweep in this regard. You've seen a number of chains tried to refresh and reinvent themselves, which you have to do perpetually in that business. So they were willing to put down $700 million to try to modernize the brand, modernize their kitchens, modernize the menus. And that's when they ran into trouble. They decided they wanted to give it a clean, modern look that would play across all demographics, that wouldn't look old and stodgy, that wouldn't look particularly southern. The whole thing. They're at quarter in the Lebanon. You can read their plans yourself. You can look at all of this yourself. And then they decided to mess with the old man. in the logo. They took that man off that logo. They took Papa off the logo. And customer sentiment, customers were mad as how was when he was 17.

Now, if you ask a person, if your congressman or your senator isn't doing a good job, and they're not representing the brand, they're not being what you expected them to be, when I ask people, you'd think you could do anything about that? A vote doesn't matter. They won't make a video. They won't let them know and withdraw their support. What was the last time you saw a congressman or a senator resign because the people in their district were like, you're not living up to the brand? I saw this happen, though, one time when I used to cover county politics here. I was a reporter. I'll tell you that story in just a moment. County Commission meeting. And county commission was planning to do something. And the whole strategy of the people who didn't want it done in this community was this. There are 150 seats or 200 seats in the main assembly room at the city county building. And the whole thing was if we get 200 people to show up, they won't do it. And just 200 citizens showing up. in mass, at a county commission meeting, shut down what was on the agenda. It was 200 people. Think about how many people live in Knox County. It only took 200. If customers being displeased with what a brand is doing leads to the resignation of a CEO,

What would happen if people really did believe that their voice made a difference? People believed that their voice made a difference with Cracker Barrel, and they took their voice to Facebook and wherever else. But I run into a lot of people who don't believe that their voice makes a difference. It does. It does. And I just wanted you to know that. Cracker Barrel CEO is stepping down. They'll give her a big payout. Bringing in somebody else, they're bringing in the former CEO of Outback. CEO of the company that has Outback and has Carrabahs. He was a big executive with Young Brands. And so they're bringing in a new CEO over in Lebanon and they're trying to write the ship and this CEO is out. But the customers were like, we're not having it. You better put Uncle Herschel or whoever he's back, put him back on that logo, and you better make sure that that, that, oh, that, that gum hash brown casserole. Ooh. Lord save me from that. Oh, I just got hungry. You like Cracker Barrel, Christopher? David D. Wayne? That would be a yes. What do you get when you go to the barrel? All of it. No. You write about any of the breakfast items. But I like the salty ham, the bacon. What is, oh man, what do you call it? Yeah. The bacon, the ham or the bacon, whichever one it is, that's like super salty. What is it called? High blood pressure. Yeah, all that. But any of the breakfast items. And for dinner. I love to get their chicken and dumplings. I love the dumplings. My, my, my, my. I can do them dumplings all day. My, my, my, my, my, my day. My, my, my, my. But any of the breakfast and the dumplings in the evening. Matter of fact, Robin and Manny, I think, had Cracker Barrel last night. I got Cracker Barrel at home right now. Really? In the refrigerator. Yeah, I think it's a grilled chicken and green beans. And I think there's some taters in there, too. Y'all going to eat good. But yeah, it's in there. Man, what is the sugar curate? What is the salty? Wow. Somebody's calling anybody knows an answer. I'm going to hang up a little. Because I don't eat pork. I can't assist you with any pork related. I don't eat pork. I don't eat pork. I know some people look at me and like, you don't eat pork. Nope. I don't. You want some of this bacon? I don't. I don't. I don't. Oh, yeah. This is why the CEO is stepping down. Yeah, Mike, I did see these charts. I saw the stock price was sliding, but the Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday that you might want to check out because the journal article said the stock price was starting to trend back up. Things were correcting.

But this all came about because of people's dissatisfaction with the brand reset that she tried to pull off. Yeah. I wonder if Cracker Barrel would be a buy. I wonder if it would be. Does somebody tell you? Let me get Dave in here. Dave, welcome to the AAA Radio Experience. Hey, like I tell him Chris, what he's thinking about is the country ham. That stuff is delicious. But what I'm telling him now, if he wants to cook some real good country ham at home, go down to Vaughnor, Tennessee, down to Benton's Country ham. Yes. They've been smoking that stuff for years. Bentons, they are legendary. Yeah, go down and get you a ham hawk and make you some beans. Throwing the crock pot overnight. Take that country ham hawk. Let it cook all day while you're at work. You talk about some good eating. You say that like, you say it like your mouth is watering right now. Oh, yeah. I need to go get one. I've been meaning to go grab one. I'm mixing beans. Mixing beans. Hey, thanks for the call. I love it. Blue, welcome to the Triple H radio experience. Well, hello, Triple H. Hey, sir. Chris was talking about the country ham. Yep. And it is phenomenal. A bunch of us retirees go to Cracker Barrow, the first Wednesday of every month, and that's part of the menu. And that hash brown casserole is out of this world. Yes. And I called when they started all this mess, and I told you then, and I'll tell you now, ain't none of us got the Bari Weiss salad.

Thanks for the call. Have a fantastic day.