If companies can't afford higher wages because it would make their products so expensive that they couldn't find enough customers for them, then you can hardly call that "artificial".
Because they are competing with other companies.
>They are perfectly willing to spend on other things.
No companies generally try to lower costs anywhere it makes sense, in order to compete with other companies that will also do so to compete.
If companies could simply pay magic wages, out of the tens of thousands in the US, don't you think one would buck the trend and suddenly pay awesome wages and attract the best talent and win all the markets?
Either all 10,000 companies are in cahoots, or there are market forces causing a lot of the wages to be similar. Which is more likely? That Apple and Walmart and Rural King are agreeing on wages? Or that each competes against similar companies for workers and sales?
I guess you know more about Apple's more competent co-conspirators than I do:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449737
But there's no need to do anything technically illegal companies discuss how to screw employees and customers as industry groups all the time. They reach agreements not to do various things and to co-ordinate spending on political lobbying. They will for example try to share your salary data using an intermediary to avoid one of them giving you a larger raise. That helps both companies that might lose you and companies that are trying to hire you for bellow what free market wages would settle on if we all had the same information.
I'm saying I don't think we've reached that point yet. In other words, I think prices are often as low as they are not because people won't pay more, but because companies have exploited the labor market to lower prices creating a race to the bottom.
There are very few products where a price increase won't result in less sales. Economists even have a term for it: elasticity. And they also estimate it across a massive range of goods, finding the opposite of what you think.
Look at how much trouble a inflation is causing people to see quite clearly that small price increases on goods causes significant problems for consumers.
>creating a race to the bottom
So far this "race to the bottom" has resulted in just about the richest, best paid people on the planet. Even our poverty line is about the top 15% of global income, and that's pre-tax transfer. Post-tax transfer poverty line people make significantly more.
So I don't think there's really much evidence of your claimed "race to the bottom," unless we're spectacularly bad at racing.