In Norway a guy uniniozed a McDonalds in Stavanger, he got called in to the main office and accused of a whole bunch of nonsense so they could fire him, but he could document or refute all of it. Meanwhile the big shot from the union just sat there while he defended himself. Finally, the meeting over, the union guy got up and said: if you fire him, we will sue you until there’s not a fucking cheeseburger left in all of Norway. And the McDonald’s lawyers went pale, and that was the end of that.

Compensating for relative lower income with low cost of consumer products is a bit like pissing your pants to get warm. The underlying issue is declining wages, caused by the loss of labor power. If people had decent wages a rise in prices would not be a problem. But while scraping by a rise in prices is a huge problem.