(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?