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Cracker Barrel posted lower-than-expected sales in its fiscal first quarter and trimmed its revenue forecast for the year as it continued to feel the fallout from a botched plan to revamp its logo and restaurants.The Lebanon, Tennessee-based restaurant chain said Tuesday its revenue fell 5.7% to $797.2 million in the three months ending Oct. 31. That was lower than the $800 million Wall Street anticipated, according to analysts polled by FactSet.Cracker Barrel said its same-store restaurant sales dropped 4.7% while sales in its retail shops dropped 8.5%. Those declines were also slightly higher than analysts forecast.Cracker Barrel said it now expects total revenue of $3.2 billion to $3.3 billion in its 2026 fiscal year. That’s down from $3.35 billion to $3.45 billion previously. The company also said it expects adjusted pre-tax earnings of $70 million to $110 million, down from $150 million to $190 million previously.Cracker Barrel shares fell more than 10% in after-hours trading Tuesday.Cracker Barrel announced in August that it was simplifying the chain’s logo as part of a larger plan to modernize the chain’s dark, antique-filled restaurants.But the move had disastrous consequences. Fans didn’t like that the new logo didn’t include Cracker Barrel’s longtime mascot, an overall-clad man leaning on a barrel, or the words “Old Country Store.” They also rebelled against the store redesigns.Cracker Barrel backtracked a week later, saying it would keep the logo. In September, the company also suspended its plans to remodel stores. The chain operates around 650 restaurants nationwide, with many in Texas, Florida and Tennessee.Cracker Barrel shareholders voted late last month to keep company CEO Julie Felss Masino in place despite the logo debacle.But one of the company’s directors, Gilbert Davila, resigned from Cracker Barrel’s board Thursday after preliminary results indicated that shareholders rejected his reelection. Davila, who joined Cracker Barrel’s board in 2020, is the president and CEO of DMI Consulting, a multicultural marketing firm. He reviewed Cracker Barrel’s advertising as part of his role on the board. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP Business Writer
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up. Since the national Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country that shift has varied. Generally speaking, local housing markets where active inventory has jumped above pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced softer home price growth (or outright price declines) over the past 36 months. Conversely, local housing markets where active inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 36 months. Where is national active inventory headed? National active listings are on the rise on a year-over-year basis (+13% between November 2024 and November 2025). This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. Some sellers markets have turned into balanced markets, and more balanced markets have turned into buyers markets. Nationally, were still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels (-6% below November 2019) and some resale markets, in particular chunks of the Midwest and Northeast, still remain tight-ish. While national active inventory is still up year-over-year, the pace of growth has slowed in recent monthsmore than typical seasonality would suggestas some sellers have thrown in the towel and delisted in weak/soft markets. Here are the November inventory/active listings totals, according to Realtor.com: November 2017 -> 1,228,077 November 2018 -> 1,273,047 November 2019 -> 1,143,332 November 2020 -> 683,822 November 2021 -> 512,241 November 2022 -> 750,200 November 2023 -> 755,489 November 2024 -> 953,452 November 2025 -> 1,072,417 If we maintain the current year-over-year pace of inventory growth (+118,965 homes for sale), we’d have 1,191,382 active inventory come November 2026. Below is the year-over-year active inventory percentage change by state: window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); While active housing inventory is rising in most markets on a year-over-year basis, some markets still remain tight-ish (although it’s loosening in those places too). As ResiClub has been documenting, both active resale and new homes for sale remain the most limited across huge swaths of the Midwest and Northeast. Thats where home sellers next spring are likely, relatively speaking, to have more power than their peers in many Southern markets. In contrast, active housing inventory for sale has neared or surpassed pre-pandemic 2019 levels in many parts of the Sun Belt and Mountain West, including metro area housing markets such as Punta Gorda and Austin. Many of these areas saw major price surges during the Pandemic Housing Boom, with home prices getting stretched compared to local incomes. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose, markets like Tampa and Austin faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices. This softening trend was accelerated further by an abundance of new home supply in the Sun Belt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives (if they have the margins to do so) to maintain sales in a shifted market, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market: Some buyers, who would have previously considered existing homes, are now opting for new homes with more favorable deals. That puts additional upward pressure on resale inventory. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); At the end of November 2025, 18 states were above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Washington. (The District of Columbiawhich we left out of this analysisis also back above pre-pandemic 2019 active inventory levels too. Softness in D.C. propers predates the current admins job cuts.) window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Big picture: Over the past few years, weve observed a softening across many housing markets as strained affordability tempers the fervor of a market that was unsustainably hot during the Pandemic Housing Boom. While home prices are falling some in pockets of the Sun Belt, a big chunk of Northeast and Midwest markets still eked out a little price appreciation this year. Nationally aggregated home prices have been pretty close to flat in 2025. Below is another version of the table abovebut this one includes every month since January 2017: window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});
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Researchers on the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) and leaders of many of the major platformsfrom Jeffrey Hinton to Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Muskhave voiced concerns that AI could lead to the destruction of humanity itself. Even the stated odds from some of these AI experts, with an end-days scenario as high as 25%, are still wildly optimistic, according to Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and coauthor of the recent best-selling book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Thats because, as he argues in the book, the track we’re on with AI is headed for disasterunless something radically changes. The book, cowritten with researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, explores potential threats posed by “superintelligence,” or theoretical AI systems that are smarter than humans. We’re sort of growing these AIs that act in ways nobody asked for, that have these drives and emergent behaviors nobody intended, Soares said at last months World Changing Ideas Summit, cohosted by Fast Company and Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. If we get superhumanly intelligent AIs that are pursuing ends nobody wanted, I think the default outcome is that literally everybody on earth dies,” he added. A reckoning for the world Likening the work of some AI leaders to building an airplane while flying with no landing gear, Soares said that not enough attention is being paid to the technologys potentially negative outcomes. The amount of global investment being poured into AI shows that people are betting it wont be a total dud, he said, but there are two other crazy options: AI radically automates all human labor, so the economy is captured by a very small group, or it becomes super intelligent and kills everyone. The world hasn’t really quite come to understand just how crazy this AI stuff is, Soares said. But there is some reason for optimism, Soares said, as a lot of people are worried about the future of AI, which makes for a brittle situation if more peopleall of us includedvoice their concerns. Maybe if enough people are like, Wait, we’re doing what now? What the heck? Soares said. Maybe that will shake the whole world into saying, Holy crap, let’s change course.
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