Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
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it would be or any specifics. It won't be called Cracker Barrel." (The company's fiscal year ends July 31.) Coy as the company is being about those particular details, Escobar does hint that the new concept is designed with decidedly nontraditional areas in mind. "This will allow us to be in loca- tions where we cannot put a Cracker Barrel," she said. To be sure, urban locales may well be in view here; the brand has no presence in dense cities like Chicago or New York. But there is another reason. As Escobar points out, the company estimates that only about 150 additional units can be in- troduced in the continental U.S. with- out risk of cannibalization, and this is a tough restriction. Cracker Barrel's founder is Dan Evins, a Shell oil jobber who believed that travelers would appreciate a double- purpose place to buy a good meal and a tank of gas at one and the same time. Thus, the original Cracker Barrel units were both a restaurant and a filling sta- tion. After the oil embargo of the mid- 1970s, the new ones were built without gas pumps, and then the existing restau- rants eventually eliminated them too. The company is now public; the stock trades today at about $140, bet- ter than three times what it was in September 2011. Results for the fis- cal second quarter of 2015 show that the company continues to hum right along. Year-on-year comparable-store traffic during the quarter increased by nearly 5 percent; comparable-store restaurant sales rose by 7.9 percent, and comp retail sales grew by 3.2 per- cent. The typical Cracker Barrel res- taurant receives about 6,700 guests per week. Yearly, the restaurants sell roughly 200 million biscuits, 151 mil- lion eggs, 121 million slices of bacon and 56 million pancakes. This could make one believe that Cracker Bar- rel is a breakfast eatery, but in fact, breakfast accounts for only about 25 percent of the chain's total restaurant sales — it is the lunches and dinners that bring in the lion's share of sales. And most important, and in case anyone was wondering: Every year Cracker Barrel stores sell roughly 4 mil- lion MoonPies. S C T A Cracker Barrel serves about 6,700 guests per week. Yearly, it sells about 200 million biscuits, 151 million eggs, and 56 million pancakes. C r a C B a r r e l n o w h a s a B o u t 6 0 0 r e s t a u r a n t s a C r o s s 4 2 s t a t e s . r e T a i l i n g T o d a y J u l y 2 0 1 5 / S C T 21