(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

Under the cut is me asking for some advice re: the whole pandemic situation. (Advice on a low stakes thing, as much as anything is low stakes in the pandemic.)

So, there is a wool manufacturer in Australia who makes some pretty dang good yarn. I'd say it was a medium business, but I'm not confident that that phrase means what I think it means. It is not some person making wool out of their shed, they have multiple employees and a factory, but they aren't, like, a yarn megacorp. You get their stuff from trade shows or direct from them, not from craft stores.

They are open, and making wool and shipping orders. (This is totally legal in Australia: the current rules for Australian workplaces are more or less "Unless your business is on this banned list, provided your employees are following social distancing rules and you only have people you really actually need physically present to do their jobs, it's cool.")

1. I would like this business to continuing existing into the future, and more selfishly, I would like some more of their yarn.
2. Yarn is very much not an essential.
3. Australia is doing... okay? re: COVID. Like, it could definitely be better, but our number of new cases per day is dropping, the newer bits of the cumulative case curve do look fairly flat, but it's not clear if it'll stay that way.
4. The yarn company is currently Experiencing An Unusually High Volume of Orders

So I'm in a bit of a quandary. Because on the one hand: I could totally purchase yarn from them, and it would be totally legal to do and it would Help The Economy(TM). On the other hand: doing so would be exposing the yarn company's employees and the postal service to a certain level of risk (how much? no clue. and how would you take into account the affect or, like, a couple balls of wool when the yarn company's employees are already going in anyway) for something that couldn't be an essential even if you squint. And I have no clue how to weigh this up.

I can see three options:

1. Don't buy the yarn. It's not essential. Not worth the risk, however small.
2. Buy the yarn now, the risk is small and it'll help the yarn company stay in business.
3. But the yarn later. See if the curve is actually staying flat. Also, purchasing when there isn't a spike in orders would probably be more bang for my buck in the sense of 'making sure they can keep their lights and looms on', and also I won't be contributing to a stressful spike in orders. Cons: if this business closes, I will be (irrationally) kicking myself for not helping and also depriving myself of their nice yarn.

3# seems like the most sensible option? Like, 1# is what I want to do but I'm not confident it is a good idea. And there's also quite possibly something really big I am accidentally overlooking?

Comments

[yvannairie]

Hmm. I'm inclined to agree, since the only way to non-chemically disinfect stuff is by heating them to +30C, and that sounds like something that would be hard with wool.

Then again, if the wool would be sitting 3+ days in a hot truck on its way to you, that would probably get rid of the virus if it was in the wool. It really depends on what route the package would take and how good they are at watching for that sort of thing along the way. Postal workers need to wear gloves and wash their hands over here when handling materials that are suspected to be contaminated, but the temperatures are in the 0-10C range rn so that extends the lifetime of the virus on surfaces.

[wolffyluna]

I can wash the wool with soap, which should presumably do *something* towards disinfecting it? But I'm honestly less worried about myself getting infected than the postal workers and the yarn workers getting infected (and also the stress of 'aaaaaaaah, what if I get infected?').

[yvannairie]

Ohh yeah I was just thinking about how wool is a little cranky about being washed. Yeah, soaps kill the virus outright, so that is definitely an option.

And honestly, considering it's a product many people in the risk groups would want, the company is probably quite careful about infection risk, and you can decrease the risk of the postal worker simply by not having an in-person delivery :3c

[brin_bellway]

>>also I won't be contributing to a stressful spike in orders.<<

I feel like that alone would probably dissuade me from option #2.

Another thing to consider regarding #1: stimulating the economy is noble and all, but are you in a good position to be the one personally doing it? Are you financially stable enough to weather the oncoming recession, or is your future self going to need that money?

[wolffyluna]

Yeah, that makes sense. I should probably wait. (Flatten the yarn order curve, if you will)

The yarn will be coming out of my fun budget, which I'm relatively confident is reasonably sized. (Also, I'm in the very lucky position of having parents who are willing to support me while I'm bashing my head against the job market, and who's incomes aren't really tied to how well the economy is going (ie got grandfathered into the extra nice pension scheme and retired at the ideal time to get the extra niceness out of it.))