From first principles, why should the small furniture business be worried about collapse? Little work is getting done, so no employees need to get paid. They don't need to be purchasing more inventory. The remaining true expenses are insurance (catastrophes can still occur), heating, maintenance of the building structure, and the portion of the property tax that goes to infrastructure maintenance.

But under our current system, they've been incentivized to rent the business space from either a landlord or a bank for a hefty payment every month. When cash flows are predictable, this is merely extractive. But now that cash flows have slowed down, it's catastrophic.

The appropriate short-term policy answer is bail outs for small businesses (as well as individuals, as the employees out of work are in the same boat). But the government is outright corrupt, so big businesses received immediate bailouts while small businesses are left scraping for peanuts from a funding structure that was also designed to benefit banks.

The long term policy answer is to raise interest rates to discourage frivolous use of debt. This ranges from merely politically unpalatable (eg when Bush was trying to sell two wars), to downright painful (the payments on existing debt go up). Which then makes for a debt spiral.