The wages are low and stores are deliberately understaffed to make sure the shareholders get their cut.
Screw the employees. These employees were "heroes" and "essential" during the pandemic but if they complain about the post pandemic world brought on by the corporate profiteering, they are "lazy" and "don't want to work."
During Covid, the elites and the millionaire and billionaire shareholders got a taste of profiteering and unearned profits. Do you really think they are going to give that up?
Any group that has political clout is going to protect themselves from inflation at the expense of everybody else.
Large corporations will screw their employees and their customers and smaller business because they can.
Union employees will screw their employers because they can. (Note: at some point, they cannot, because the business closes)
Government employees will screw taxpayers because they can. There does not seem to be any upper limit on that trend.
Politicians will screw taxpayers because they can. There does not seem to be any upper limit on that trend either.
And so on, and so on. The original Democrat plan to "tax and spend and elect and elect" has passed workable limits. We will end with a much smaller government that can spend only what it collects in taxes and does not collect all that much in taxes.
That will not be achieved by voting in "elections". It will be achieved by hyper-inflation, economic collapse and a breakdown of government with a tyrannical leader finally taking charge. Really stupid, with much unnecessary collateral injury. But that is how we are going to do things. It has all been done before. We are in the process of doing it again.