There are way more factors at play here rather than a simple wage hike. The war in Ukraine caused a global shortage of wheat and a few other staple crops and fertilizer. The oil embargo on Russia also caused gas prices to climb even further.

Climate change has also quietly eroded some of the world’s farmland causing a bit more food scarcity. Japan for instance recently couldn’t produce enough rice to feed everyone which caused it to import it for the first time in a long while. I got to see this first hand with some ramen shops no longer being seen as “affordable” due to their bowls climbing above 1000 yen.

In the US we had the bird flu wiping out a huge amount of eggs and chicken, there was even a time when I’d see a 1 dollar surcharge on my local restaurant for any dish that uses them. The consolidation of the restaurant wholesale food market by Sysco and US Foods is also creating a chokehold on their prices. Trump’s fiscal and international trade policies have wrecked a lot of the economy causing huge spikes in inflation too. Besides that we have plain old corporate greed with them taking advantage of all this as a smokescreen to crank up the cost of their food.