No, it isn't common sense. It's a wise decision to make under a certain set of socio-economic conditions, which may not apply uniformly to everyone that you encounter.
Your statement takes a lot of very complex issues and oversimplifies them. You don't need to walk a mile in another man's shoes to empathize with this story. Sometimes you just have to walk a mile in your own shoes, from the wrong bus stop, while you are already late for your job.
This woman's life sucks because a lot of different people made a lot of independent decisions to make her very slightly worse off so they could make their own situations slightly better. Someone decided to prevent the school nurse from distributing condoms at school to win a few votes. Someone decided to raise tuition again, and then hire more adjuncts and fewer associates. Someone decided to bribe dealers to destroy old cars instead of refurbishing and reselling them, to prop up the market for new cars. Someone decided that child care services would only be provided from 8 to 6 on weekdays, to people with a confirmed home address, because otherwise the revenues wouldn't cover the worker expenses. Someone decided to schedule a required course during peak busy hours at local restaurants.
Individually, those are minor inconveniences. All together, it looks like the whole world is conspiring to make your life a living hell, a nickel or dime at a time. Having all the common sense in the world cannot protect you from it. The scramble and the hustle of scraping together enough money to survive the next week exposes you to all kinds of petty hassles. And most of it happens just because people have no idea how their decisions of convenience can become inconvenient to other people. Other times, they know and don't care.
So it does actually require a lot of change. Much of it will be in predicting and recognizing the previously hidden effects of your own choices. When you purposefully understaff the checkout lanes at all of your retail outlets, and someone is sent home because they arrived to work with full-blown influenza because they have no sick leave, and the manager has to ask another worker to fill in, that person has to rearrange their life in order to make it to work, because they need the money just as much as the person who showed up half dead. Maybe as a society, we don't actually want to screw up thousands of other people's lives to save 2% on laundry detergent, but that's what we're doing now, and changing that is not quick or easy.