Is it not rather that the inflation of the past 6-12 months has taken everyone by surprise, including employers, and the wages haven’t had time to adapt yet? What we don’t see in the article’s graph is that inflation used to be somewhat consistent but has risen sharply starting in March 2021: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
I have been traveling abroad in situations where the local currency devalued significantly overnight. It took a few days for shopkeepers to adjust. Nobody knows what the spot rate of inflation is; by definition you need historical data.
Pretty sure that's because it's yearly inflation and March 2021 on that graph means inflation between March 2020 and March 2021, and corona "started" then.
That’s an interesting point re/ yearly but on march 2020 yearly inflation dropped to 0% so I assume at the start of the pandemic many prices were down, not up
