The Crawfish Chronicles: An NIH Fixed Cost Cap Parable
Published on June 6, 2025
T-Maître Pierre’s Family Restaurant was a Louisiana institution. The kind of place where generations gathered over steaming mountains of boiled crawfish, spicy corn, and seasoned potatoes. A place where Clifton Chenier’s Louisiana Blues & Zydeco played in the background and the waitstaff wore starched white shirts with bright-colored bow ties. The walls were plastered with faded photos of people smiling. Nobody knew who they were anymore, but they felt like family.
Pierre Thibodeaux, the founder, made sure every customer was treated as if they were indeed family. So it was a bit ironic that when he passed away, he had no heirs.
Within the week, the restaurant was acquired by multi-million-dollar developer O. B. Noxious, who addressed reporters beneath a banner that read:
MAKE CRAWFISH AMAZING AGAIN
“They call these little lobsters crawfish. Very smart. I like that. We’re keeping that name. Everything else? Outdated. Inefficient. Sad. We’re going to take this failing shack and turn it into the greatest restaurant the world has ever seen. People will come from everywhere and say, ‘Wow! I’ve never had crawfish this good. It’s the best anyone has ever tasted.’”
To oversee the transformation, Noxious brought in Otto Maladore, a consultant known for running billion-dollar companies and doing math in his head (where he also did all of his research).
Maladore spent thirty minutes walking the property, leaning over this, pressing on that, and stepping back from things while shaking his head. It wasn’t long before he issued his report to the press:
Excess Labor: “Wait staff, custodian, dishwasher? None of them cook so we’re wasting money on them. Eliminate all of those positions.”
Menu Simplification: “Boiled crawfish outsells everything. Eliminate everything else. Eliminate the menu itself. Menus are nothing more than administrative bloat.”
Décor: “We will have the best of everything. Those photos are faded and were low quality when they were new. Remove them.”
IT Modernization: “Found an IBM 5150 still running their books. This fascinates me-and concerns me-on so many different levels.”
Fixed Costs: “This place is hemorrhaging due to indirect costs. Forty percent of revenue on facilities and administration? That’s insane. Ten percent is more than enough for a place like this! But we’re far more generous and much more compassionate than people give us credit for. So we’re not going to cap it at 10%. We’re going to bump it all the way up to 15%!”
The changes happened quickly-literally overnight.
The next day when customers showed up, they found no music. No waiters. No ambiance. Just folding chairs, a beat-up old card table, and flickering fluorescent lights (they were told the remodeling would be done later).