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But if the "miners" arent profitable they have no money to give to the merchants.
In our industry, what is the benefit for an IMO to sell a bill of goods and not deliver? I know that is at times the case. But, it just doesn't make sense unless they charge for training, etc.
For an IMO that only makes money on overrides it makes sense to help the agents be successful. It's better for the IMO to spend more money on training, etc and less on recruiting. If a system works, agents will find them.
They would have to spend a tremendous amount of time training every agent who contracted to find the one agent out of who knows how many that will actually produce for them.
Merchants didn't sell supplies just to successful miners. Just like insurance agents looking to make a lot of money buying leads there were a steady stream of miners heading for the gold fields with high hopes and very little if any success.
New miners who knew nothing about finding gold were the ones merchants got rich off of.
If they only sold supplies to successful miners they would have starved to death.