The general store was often cramped, warm, and dirty. The floors were rarely cleaned and tended to get caked with boot mud, soap shavings, nut shells, and whatever else patrons might be buying or eating. Dried meat hung from the rafters, and colorful advertisements from merchants spruced up bare walls.

In the Northeast, most of the stores had fireplaces or pot-bellied stoves; when it got cold, there'd be a fire going. (Southern general stores often had porches in lieu of the stoves.) Some of the owners also served as town postmaster. Others hosted itinerant wholesalers called "drummers" who traveled the region asking store owners to buy an unusual fabric or new kind of broom. More often, they succeeded in drinking a lot of free whiskey and telling stories to the assembled residents about whatever big city they'd come from.

All these attractions basically guaranteed that everyone in town would pass through in a given week, from the local drunk to the elderly widow. Knowing this was good for business, owners tried to get them to stay. A lot of the stores had crackers for patrons to snack on while they were hanging out. They were served in a barrel, the same way they were shipped. (Most of the packaging we use today didn't exist then.)

Cracker Barrel picked up on this idea -- the stuffed store with a homey vibe -- and branded it. Every time the chain opens a new restaurant today, a few hundred old feed lot signs, wagon wheels, pitchforks, and so on ship from company headquarters to Florida or Maine or Massachusetts, where they are mounted on the wall alongside only tangentially rustic items like stuffed and mounted deer heads, abandoned family photographs, and motorboat motors.

The antiques, according to the company, are real ones. They come from across the U.S. to the Cracker Barrel Decor Warehouse in Lebanon, Tennessee. The company has a mock restaurant that it uses to plan the decor of every single location; designers arrange the elements for each new store in a way that looks right, make a plan (with photographs) for where the objects should go, and send it off with those objects to the new location.

The company competes with other restaurant chains, like Applebees and TGI Fridays, which also use real antiques in their restaurants. The New York Times reported in 2002 that the restaurants' demand for old objects had grown so much that American antique dealers were struggling to source them.

In the end these items add up to an approximation of the general store of 100 years ago. The elements don't really obey any kind of historical order, or any geographical one. The stores' peaked facade, reaching above the roof of the building, is a classic design element of Northern country stores. The front porch, with its rocking chairs, would more likely have been found in the South. Taken together, all these elements signal "general store" to the average American.

