Short-term profit seeking behavior leads to companies raising prices far more than they should while keeping wages stagnant. So they raise the prices on food an

Short-term profit seeking behavior leads to companies raising prices far more than they should while keeping wages stagnant. So they raise the prices on food and other common goods, consumer buying power goes down while overall profitability goes up. Smaller businesses in the middle like restaurants fall apart because they don't have access to the benefits of economy at scale and they can't pay people enough nor can they raise prices (because they're servicing people that have smaller and smaller buying power). The solution to this problem should've been done decades ago and that's tying minimum wage to inflation. But now we're seeing the end result of what happens when you don't. A lot of restaurants skirted by on extremely low cost labor but in times when said labor market gets fed up, they move on to the larger chains that can afford to pay 15+ an hour and a large correction occurs which kills small town restaurants.