Let me rephrase: I got an impression from your post that you atribute no fault to the merchant: he did everything right and got the short end of the stick.
What I want to point out is that if he was careful about his business partners, he'd be much better off now. It's not relevant why he wasn't.
He had the agency to mitigate the problem, and didn't. What happened was not an unpreventable natural disaster. The lesson out of this shouldn't be "you don't have agency so we need a safety net", but rather "we often have agency to stay afloat". Perhaps also "we need a safety net for when our bets don't pay off or when we don't".
No one ever does everything right. But some people have enough money, enough smarts, enough social capital, etc. that it gets mitigated.
We should be seeking to make sure more people have access to mitigation rather than looking for the one mistake someone made that somehow makes it okay in our eyes that they have gone from having over a million dollars in inventory to couch surfing with friends and relatives as the only reason they aren't on the street. And if their social network runs out of forbearance, the street could be the next step.
I'm not arguing he's some paragon of virtue who got screwed. I'm arguing that no one should be expected to be a paragon of virtue to have any hope of making their life work.
Paragons of virtue should see terrific outcomes, not merely "Oh, you get to not be homeless today. Go, you!"
Anyway, it's 3am. I think I shall stop here as I'm not clear more words will make anything clearer beyond this.
> one mistake someone made that somehow makes it okay in our eyes that they have gone from having over a million dollars in inventory to couch surfing with friends and relatives
That's mischaracterizing my point. Should people feel consequences of their mistakes? Absolutely. Should people end up on the street for failing at business? Definitely not.
I think the standard consequence of total failure being "Now you have to look for a job while you're on unemployment" is good enough.
(Although it boggles me how someone with 1.5M in inventory didn't have enough savings to rent a room for a few months…)
I'm not going to speak for Doreen, but "he did everything right and got the short end of the stick" is exactly what happened here.
Small businesses don't have the scale to diversify. Having multiple sales channels doubles certain fixed costs. People just do not expect major global brands to commit multi-million-dollar destruction of property.
What I want to point out is that if he was careful about his business partners, he'd be much better off now. It's not relevant why he wasn't.
He had the agency to mitigate the problem, and didn't. What happened was not an unpreventable natural disaster. The lesson out of this shouldn't be "you don't have agency so we need a safety net", but rather "we often have agency to stay afloat". Perhaps also "we need a safety net for when our bets don't pay off or when we don't".