[beebmam]

Plenty of goods with substitutes (ex: fast food items) have increased substantially in price since the pandemic. People are more than willing to pay historically higher prices for plenty of items that could be replaced with cheaper items.

If people are willing to pay these prices, why should companies not be raising their prices?

There has been an enormous increase in net worth of all age brackets in the US in the last few years (as of 2022 data[1]), all data points adjusted for inflation. I think this is enough to explain why consumers are paying for these items.

Feel free to experiment with this graph tool from the US Federal Reserve's website and please respond if you have any other explanations:

1. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...

[bcrosby95]

Net worth went up but pre-tax family income is pretty flat. This tells a story that I'm familiar with: those that can afford to invest made a lot of money, but everyday workers are no better off. You don't pay for food by selling property. So these graphs aren't convincing to me of the story you're trying to tell.

Food is an interesting one. In my experience the value of fast food is at an all time low. Before it would be half the price of a sit down place. Nowadays it's more like 80% of the price. I'm not sure what exactly happened there. I went to subway and my bill was $15. I went to a sitdown place and my bill was $19.

[jcparkyn]

> those that can afford to invest made a lot of money, but everyday workers are no better off

According to those graphs, even the bottom quartile saw a substantial increase in net worth during the pandemic [1]. Sure, this is much less in absolute terms than the higher quartiles, but as a percentage increase it's actually far higher (almost 1000% between 2019 and 2022).

This doesn't detract from your point that poorer people don't benefit much from capital gains, but I think it's still worth pointing out.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...