Why small-town committees spend more time debating muffins than actually helping the people who bake them?

In small towns, the people in charge constantly talk about “supporting small business,” “celebrating entrepreneurship,”

 and “growing local talent.”

But when an actual local business owner - say, a baker making muffins - needs support, the system doesn’t help them.

Instead, the system:

• Forms a subcommittee
• Schedules three meetings
• Cancels two
• Argues over policy wording
• Sends emails about bylaws
• Talks about “stakeholders”
• Worries about optics
• Invites an ACOA rep to give a 12-minute update on nothing
• Controls the conversation
• Silences the people who actually know the work
• And in the end… the baker is left starving.
  
  

The Paradox:

They claim to help, but their help is the very thing that kills the thing they claim to help.

By the time they finish arguing about the muffins…the muffins are stale, the baker is broke, and the shop is closed.

All while the committee says, with straight faces:

“We’re committed to fostering local small business.”

Sure you are.

You just debated muffins to death.

Because most small-town committees aren’t about productivity - they’re about power, ego, and optics.

People like controlling the conversation more than solving the problem.

People want to be in the room, not in the work.

Meetings = the performance of progress, not progress itself.

They fear making a decision more than they fear a business failing.

Talking about muffins is safer than actually doing something.

The baker, the artist, the musician, the guy opening a small shop, the young woman trying to run an Airbnb, the person bringing energy to a dead mall - these people get dragged into an endless vortex of:

• delays
• bureaucracy
• bad leadership
• performative “support”
• and committees who love to “consult” but never actually act
  
  

These people do real work.

Committees talk about real work.

And the talkers drown out the doers.

That’s the paradox.

The system wants the appearance of progress, not progress.

Because real progress requires responsibility, risk, and saying yes.

Saying yes means being accountable.

Committees hate accountability.

So instead, they weaponize process.

Process becomes delay.

Delay becomes paralysis.

Paralysis becomes death.

And they call that death “due diligence.”

The tragedy (and the comedy)

A baker could save the entire town by making a killer product that draws people in.

A committee could ruin that baker by arguing for months about whether muffins count as “artisan goods” or “baked goods.”

In a small town, the most dangerous thing is not failure.

It’s success.

Because success threatens the people who sit in the chairs but don’t actually do anything.

So the system smothers it.

That is the Muffin Paradox.

MORE COMING SPRING 2026

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