If all the cooks, servers, cosmetologists, janitors, lawn care / landscaping, delivery drivers, warehouse workers and so forth stopped doing their jobs... everything would suck real quickly. But somehow we're not willing to pay them a living wage.
I think you're mixing jobs together that really aren't of similar importance. If all the restaurants shut down, nothing much happens. People buy food at the super market for lunch and dinner. If all the landscaping crews stop working, you'll get more natural growth and some trees will at some point reach into the street / path and become annoying. If the cosmetologists go on strike, you get some annoyed women who need to fill their afternoon time with another activity.
If ware house workers, delivery drivers or garbage collectors strike, shit goes south pretty quickly. I've lived in a major Northern European city during a garbage collector strike, and it was silly to look at because it was pretty obvious who'd win when the trash bags started spilling into the road after people kept piling them up.
That’s the idea behind a general strike I believe, but coordination is hard (and figuring out a set of demands that is effective long term may be harder).
/me once stayed in Athens during a garbage collectors’ strike; didn’t suck as much as you’d think, but was undeniably spectacular
It's a denial/delayed acceptance of inflation/cost-of-living increases.
These people are struggling to accept that money is worth sufficiently less than it was before to make the status quo untenable.
Or if they have accepted it, they're determined to make the underlings eat the loss.
But a reluctance to change prices at an existing business does not mean we won't get changed prices.
So it's not even an economic argument, "If I pay that I'll go out of business"? It's just a moral one, "They don't deserve that amount of money"?
I can't say I'm surprised, TBH.