It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

If you’d made a list, ten years ago, of the brick-and-mortar businesses least likely to survive the internet, the comic book shop likely would have been on it — if for no other reason than every kind of mass market retail has suffered in that age.  And yet. Comic shops in North America rang up close to a billion dollars in sales in 2025. That’s up nearly thirty percent in a...

Some days, you just don't feel like yourself. Maybe your back is hurting. Maybe you’re not having a good hair day. Either way, you want help feeling like yourself again. Pain is common. According to a 2019 CDC survey, about four in 10 adults have back pain. Michelle Carr learned this from the patient's side of the table. She grew up in Crowley and came to Lafayette for UL, where she worked a...

Some places you can't get to with a map. You need a guide. Someone who's been down the road before, who knows where it gets rough, and who'll walk it with you. Sara Sullivan learned her route the hard way. Sara grew up in Ohio in a musical family and picked up the violin at age five. Some of her first gigs were playing hymns with her family at senior homes. She trained classically through college,...

You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Beauty is skin deep.” It’s meant to be a cautionary warning not to read too much into a person’s looks. And while that’s generally good advice, it’s good to be aware the saying dates back to the 1600’s. Today we know that a healthy complexion can indeed be an indicator of a healthy body. And, conversely, not...

If you’re going to get anywhere in business, you’ll need have some idea of how you’re going to get there. You might call that a strategic plan, maybe a business model. Whatever you call it, it’s basically a map: a sketch of the possible paths from A to B.  Maps are pretty useful. The business of making them — cartography — has gotten pretty sophisticated. W...

Everything around us is built for speed. Faster shipping. Faster answers. Business itself is a speed game. Time is money is a cliche for a reason. So it might seem counterintuitive to build a business around slowing down. But plenty of people are looking for opportunities to connect. They want personal experiences. They want someone to care what they think. They want space to have a conversation.&...

"Your body is a temple." It’s a scriptural metaphor we hear so often we almost stop listening to it. But think about what that actually means: maintenance. Upkeep. Care. It’s hard work. Not everyone wants to do it, even if everyone ought to.  And that’s because it can be really inconvenient. You work an eight-hour shift that starts after you get the kids to school. And if yo...

We all know business, at least at the point of sale, has gotten pretty impersonal. Even at the grocery store, you can avoid other people altogether. Just pop in your earbuds and use the self-checkout line. The name of the game here is efficiency. Retailers and service companies are betting that most customers prefer speed and convenience at the cost of human contact and oversight.  An age-old...

Even in the Zoom meetings, it’s helpful to have a place to go and do your work. Mind you, today’s employees want more than a cubicle, a desk and a red stapler. They want an environment they can thrive in. It’s why some companies invest lots of money in designing welcoming, energetic spaces for their workforce.  A good office space can help you build more than a book of busin...

A fast car and pressed shirt are two things that probably won't ever go out of style. Considering we live in an age of rapid economic disruption, those two facts present a potentially endless business opportunity. Everything breaks. It’s a natural law. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong is how Murphy put it. Scientists call it entropy. In business terms, you’d call it a blue o...

People are looking for healing in places they didn't used to look. Acupuncture, sound baths, energy work — once dismissed as fringe, are now very much moving into the mainstream. That shift shows up in the numbers. Wellness is a trillion dollar industry in the U.S. Americans spend more than $6,000 per person each year on it. That's the broader current carrying a lot of what used to be consid...

Most of us spend a good portion of our lives looking for the right words. The ones that explain who we are. What we believe. What we're here for. Some people find them early. Others take a longer route — through careers that almost fit, through places that challenge everything they thought they knew, through questions that don't resolve so much as deepen. My guests today have both built busi...

So, your family has a business. You grow up around it. You love it. It’s the center of gravity for your family life. But…you swear you'll never do it. You leave. You build something of your own. And then one day you look up and… Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in.  That’s one version of the story anyway.  There's another where you just nev...

Megan Constantin sits in for Christiaan Mader on this edition of Out to Lunch Acadiana. When I say the name "Jourdan Thibodeaux…" You’re thinking of a musician. He’s hard to miss on stage at a festival as a fiddler and frontman for Jourdan Thibodeaux et les Rôdailleurs .  But Jourdan is also a business owner. In Henderson Swamp outside Breaux Bridge, Jourdan and his p...

There's a version of life in Acadiana that most of us only see from a car window. We live in something of a paradise, it’s just sort of removed from your day-to-day reality. That’s in part because Louisiana’s natural beauty isn’t always so easy to see. Louisiana is flat. Famously so. We don’t have mountain vistas to behold.  So, if you want to really drink in Aca...

The advent of AI is either exhilarating or terrifying, depending on the day and maybe your last interaction with Siri. That’s because the stakes of the technology, at least as it’s promoted by its developers, is really really high. If what they say about it is true, it could upend human work as we know it. No wonder, then, that a crisis of trust has accompanied its rapid rise.  Wh...

Here's something most of us won't admit: we have too much stuff.  It’s human nature in the consumer age. You can’t throw a rock in Lafayette without hitting a storage unit. And that’s the stuff that doesn’t fit in our homes. Clutter is the order of the day. In the business world, that translates into noise. We pile on messaging, saying too much when getting straight to...

Maybe when you're in trouble, you have someone to call. A family member. A friend. Someone who knows the system, or knows someone who does. But a lot of people don't have that. They're navigating institutions — legal, civic, governmental — that weren't really built with them in mind. And when no one's paying attention, things get lost. They need an advocate. Someone to speak for them.&...

There's a kind of person you've probably met before. Someone who, no matter what their job title says, is really just taking care of people.  That's what they do. That's what they've always done. That’s who they are. The title just took a while to catch up. Susan Titus is a Lafayette-area entertainer, nonprofit founder, and — by her own description — a woman whose life has h...

Here's a question every small business owner loses sleep over: how do people find out you exist? Word of mouth still works. Always will. But today you need more than that. The challenge is that most small business owners are already doing three jobs at once. Marketing is the thing that slides. The thing you mean to get to.  You need a presence — online, in print, somewhere people are ac...

Hi, it's Christiaan Mader, host of Out to Lunch Acadiana. I love a dive bar.  And I know I’m not alone. They attract a certain cult-like following among people looking for an unpretentious place to share a reasonably priced drink with an old friend or a new one. The appeal is fundamentally American.  The drinks are cold, the music is loud, the bathrooms might be suspect — but...

Some businesses don’t just sell a product — they sell a feeling. They create an experience you can’t fully describe on a website, because the magic is sensory. It’s atmosphere. It’s memory. It’s the thing that makes you walk into a space and instantly feel like you belong there — or like you’ve been there before. From a business standpoint, that&rsqu...

There’s an old saying you’ve probably heard before: Those who can’t do, teach. Well, that’s total BS. If you’ve ever tried to teach someone anything — how to play a guitar chord, how to dance a two-step, how to do just about anything — you know that saying has it exactly backwards. Teaching is hard. Being good at something and being able to teach it are tw...

Hi, Christiaan here, host of Out to Lunch Acadiana. Everyone’s got a story. It’s why I got into journalism. People are just interesting. But having a story doesn’t mean you’re any good at telling it. That part takes skill. And a lot of discipline — Even if you’re using a large language model to help.  Everyone needs an editor. It’s our motto at The Cu...

When we talk about running a business, we usually talk about revenue models, staffing, square footage, and growth plans. We talk about work. What we don’t always talk about is emotional work. The phone calls you don’t charge for. The time spent listening instead of billing. The moments when you’re not really running a business so much as helping someone through a rough chapter. R...