So you think it's justified to have a petulant attitude when you're expected to follow employment, fire safety, and environmental regulations?
If he was happy to drop his prices to dump his product to force out competitors, than he should have been happy to accept the additional costs of complying with workplace, fire safety, and environmental regulations everyone else has to comply with. Oh wait...he wasn'.
Or he could have raised his prices. But then, he would have actually had to compete on product quality, and it's clear the only thing he really had going for him was that shapers were used to his product and it was cheap.
Since he's closed up, the market has undergone substantial innovation and improvement, including
Literally nothing stopped him from pursuing partnerships to develop and produce more environmentally friendly products, but that's a lot less fun than simply being yet another whiny, entitled boomer.