Wages are extremely sticky. Consumer prices are not. You’re looking at older people running a business who has a perspective that paying someone $18 an hour is a big cost for a base level position in their business. I remember being stoked about getting $11 an hour when went full time with a photography company. Literally only ~10 years ago. I fought hard at my internet technician job to learn everything I could whenever they had internal courses, which almost always were followed by a 0.20-.0.25 wage boost if you stacked enough “proof of knowledge.” I spent years acing test on how signals and internet shit worked for that $17 per hour.

Now though, many of the same people are running those companies, and have no idea that the person they are hiring can’t do shit with $18/hour. $18 is the new $9 per hour. Literally

This is exactly why inflation is so horribly destructive. It takes YEARS for wages to adjust, and in those years inflation is still churning. In a broad sense, and worse as you get into the lowest wages, you literally NEVER catch up to getting paid what you are earning and what the cost of living is. 

 Yeap! You are right! Wages are shitcoins!  
So, just you know in 2018 i started working for $15 per hour and since then almost nothing has changed but the inflation hit everyone hard. People should be paid in bitcoin 😉