A & W in the little town I now live in is offering $18.25/ hour for new employees with ZERO experience.
Yet the health system I left expects qualified engineers with literally decades of experience to accept $35/ hour.
The employers had too much choice and power to artificially suppress wages (illegals etc) and forgot that skills and talent need to be compensated fairly.
Now the boomers are leaving, and nobody is willing to work for peanuts anymore.
True that.
One thing about a digitally connected world is that word spreads quickly. I suspect the $18.25 an hour is tied to unrealistic expectations. I witness companies hire entry-level staff and then expect them to do their bosses work. Their boss can't do their work because there is none; they left more than a year ago. It wasn't spelled out to the new hire in the interview. The new hire is thrown in the deep end to sink or swim and they're not getting compensated at the missing boss's rate. How long would they put up with that? Worse, how many of their social network are now forewarned?
Even pre-Scamdemic, an acquaintance who owns a small business would bitch and moan about how his staff couldn't run the business when he wasn't there; including ordering merchandise, coordinating repair of specialized equipment, making merchandising decisions, etc. I listened up to the point he let it slip he was paying them minimum wage. His staff wasn't incompetent slackers; it was work way beyond their capacity, and work he himself wasn't good at.
I repeatedly run into situations where clueless managers don't understand why rocket-scientist candidates aren't beating down the door to work for just above minimum wage. Right out of Dilbert, I run into ones who've set job requirements of more knowledge and experience than they themselves have yet it's for an underling's position, often two tiers below them.