For Adonarm's owners, flowers are supposed to mean celebration—Valentine's Day, quinceañeras, weddings, funerals. Every major moment in a community's life passes through a flower shop. That's what made the last Valentine's Day so devastating: business was a fraction of what they saw every prior year. Not because people didn't want flowers. Because they were afraid to leave their homes.

The fear triggered by immigration enforcement raids collapsed the micro-economy Adonarm and other such businesses depend on. Street vendors, who are among the primary buyers from wholesale distributors, disappeared from public spaces. Without those vendors buying, wholesalers couldn't sell. Without sales, their stock of flowers—an expensive, highly perishable commodity—went to the dumpster. Thousands of dollars of fresh product, gone. The debt began piling up across the supply chain: wholesalers extending credit to shops to keep them alive, shops unable to pay it back because they weren't moving product.

The owners of Adonarm are now doing everything themselves, from cleaning to deliveries, because they can no longer offer their employees consistent hours. Staff who worked every day are now lucky to get a shift every two weeks. The owners have drained their personal savings just to keep the doors open.

"During the pandemic there were programs, there was support. We were all in it together. Now the streets are empty, my employees can't get hours, and we've used everything we saved just to keep the lights on. And there's no safety net."

They've faced hard times before. But they say what's happening now is worse than the pandemic. During COVID, there was a safety net, stimulus funding, a sense of collective burden. Now there's none of that. Just high rent, rising utility bills and a community too frightened to come outside.