Wages have stagnated, but rent and energy has gone up. It's mostly the rent that you are paying for when you eat out.

Specifically in HCOL coastal cities, we've seen increases to minimum wage, adjustments to the "tipped minimum wage" laws that mean business needs to cover more of the wage, and finally.. labor shortages causing restaurants to pay over even those increased minimums.

It wasn't long ago NYC minimum wage was under $10/hr, with "tipped minimum" being $7/hr. Now you have some restaurants paying $20/hr to get staff.

I don’t think the original comment depended on this being a good benchmark for food prices. Paying more for labor is also part of inflation.

Inflation has been retconned (i.e “Burgers were always $15, what are you talking about?”) They don’t want you to notice as your wealth is slowly stolen through the loss of purchasing power.

Wages have gone up in real terms (how the fed measures inflation). Food, energy, & transport have slightly under-performed inflation.

i.e. there's no way to slice it - the average laborer can afford more food & labor now than in the past.

The linked site differs from Case Shiller - saying that housing has also under-performed inflation. I'm interested how they arrived at that.

Housing is the real problem - and the vast, vast majority of housing in the US is owned by individuals and mom-and-pop investors, not corporations & billionaires.

The idle rich cannot be blamed for our problems in housing - though they can be blamed for other things. On housing, we can only blame ourselves, voting aggressively to curtail development at every opportunity.

Energy is cheaper, but we need more of it with years of back to back escalating extremes for both heating and cooling. Moving somewhere that isn't an impact gets into the housing issue.

And then medical and education are out of control.