It would only take a few of the 17 companies that own nearly everything to affect hundreds of millions of products worldwide.
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...
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.
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...
Which one is the most aligned with your interests is a difficult question, or at least not one I know the answer to, but it's probably not whichever one is the smallest business.