August 2, 2014 I cant believe it, the day has finally arrived, the milestone I hinted to you all early last month. On this day 2 decades ago in 1994, just 6 weeks before the priemer of an NBC sitcom you all may remember called Friends, a skinny 21 year old kid wearing nothing but a muscle shirt, shorts, sneakers and a baseball cap walked into an unknown restaurant that was 2 weeks away from opening to apply for a server job. This kid was very reluctant to applying for a new server job since he had a well established serving job at a nearby (now closed) Dennys restaurant just one exit up the interstate. But with advise from his 2 friends who just got hired as grill cooks (you know who you are ;-) ) he decided to do it and got hired on the spot and became the 159th person to get hired at the very first Cracker Barrel to open in Pennsylvania, store #199 :-) . Over the next 20 years this kid would go on to not just be a server but a lead trainer, grill cook, cashier, dish washer, host, prep cook and even made biscuits :-) in 1996 he would get employee of the year, go on the road for Cracker Barrel over the next 2 years doing new unit openings that included opening the first new Cracker Barrels in New Jersey and Connecticut along with Buffalo, NY Martinsburg, WV and Carlislse and Frackville, PA In 1997 he got hired on a team rolling out our first generation point of sales touch screen system to 2 dozen stores in Ohio, western PA, Buffalo, NY, southwestern VA, southern Michigan and east TN. In 1999, unsure of what direction to take and going through a dark period in his life, a new chapter would begin, he met his future wife Stephanie and would start school at York Technical Institute for information technology and transfered from the York store to the Harrisburg store (#374) where he made more friends and bigger tips :-) Then in 2003, after submitting a resume he forgot about 2 years prior, he got a call from Jason Stone then store support manager offering a job at corporate doing the job I still do to this day, after some hard thinking and talking it over with Steph, and wanting to get out of York County and Pennsylvania for a while, we made the move to Lebanon, TN in June 2003 and have been here since. What a crazy trip the past 20 years have been, I have worked in over 2 dozen stores around the country, met hundreds of people from around the country, made several good friends who I still keep in touch with to this day, grown from a rather passive and still a little timed kid like I was in school to more of an assertive, take charge man, travelled a big chunk of the United States between work and pleasure with living in 2 different regions of the country (Pennsylvania and Tennessee) and watched a restaurant chain grow from barely 200 stores mostley in the south and midwest to 631 stores in nearly every state except the west coast with a new store (Jasper, AL) opening on Monday and survive the great ressesion when other restaurant chains either closed or are on life support to this day. Whew!! Here is a collection of pics from those past 20 years, from my early days at store 199 to fun and crazy adventures on the road, I am sure a number of you will recognize some of these faces, enjoy and here is to another 2 decades!!! :-)
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 13:37:23 +0000
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