That amounts to Monday Morning Quarterbacking and blaming the victim.
The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket. -- Andrew Carnegie
When it works, it works. When it doesn't, it doesn't.
Paul Graham has said that a successful startup "does everything right and also wins the proverbial lottery" (or something along those lines). In other words, you can do everything right and something can happen out of the blue that no one predicted and you are screwed. If you actually get rich, you did everything right and luck was with you instead of against you.
I do agree that a safety net is a useful thing to have.
But I disagree with the impression from your post that a safety net would have been the preferred solution to this merchant's woes. It would only keep him slightly afloat, compared to being careful about his business, where he could have kept a significant portion of it.
The line between being careless and blaming the victim is blurry, so I'm not going to discuss it.
However, building a successful startup is fundamentally different from running a sustainable business: in the former case, you deliberately make a high-risk, high-reward bet, while in the latter you want to take only enough risk to keep going. I had the impression that the story was about a business trying to be sustainable getting ruined.
There's a pandemic on. Up to a third of Americans can't pay their rent/mortgage this year.
Some people are taking risks because of the general climate around them. Living steeped in craziness can impair your judgment by making it genuinely difficult to figure out what strategy is actually sensible while the world is a case of "Please, stop this merry go round. I would like to get off now."
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.
Yes, it's a high risk strategy. Most people are more risk averse than that and don't follow this sort of strategy. Thus, they do not become bankrupt, or rich, in the same way as this man.
The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket. -- Andrew Carnegie
When it works, it works. When it doesn't, it doesn't.
Paul Graham has said that a successful startup "does everything right and also wins the proverbial lottery" (or something along those lines). In other words, you can do everything right and something can happen out of the blue that no one predicted and you are screwed. If you actually get rich, you did everything right and luck was with you instead of against you.