Kirsh Guilory pumped out Cajun music, vendors hawked Creole crafts, but the crawfish delicacies dished out along food row at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival were not from the bayous and backwaters of Louisiana. The Chinese have taken over the crawfish pies, etoujfee, file gumbo and most other crawfish dishes served at the festival. Captured, cooked, peeled and processed with low-cost labor in China, the crawfish from overseas are too cheap to pass up, say the merchants who sell food at the fest.

“I had to go to the Chinese tails," said Clark Hoffpauer, whose festival specialty is crawfish etoujfee. “They're at least $2 a pound cheaper, and when you talk 1,700 pounds, that's quite a bit of change. I'd rather use Louisiana crawfish. After all, this is about Louisiana heritage, but business is business."

[SOURCE: Mary Foster, “China Syndrome,” (New Orleans) Times-Picayune (May 3, 1996), p. C-l.

© The Times-Picayune Publishing Corporation.]

a. Is “business is business” a true statement? Discuss the concept of this state¬ ment relative to costs, to employment, and to tradition.

b. Provide some examples in which you would believe that the quality of a product and/or the ethics of a company would be enhanced if management considered all of the stakeholders in an organization in addition to costs when making a “business is business” decision.