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...