Restaurants that are not franchises have a 50% failure rate. Margins are intensely tight and the largest cost is labor, not food, spoilage, advertising, interior design, or whatever else.

The central government and state government take limited to no responsibility for healthcare, child care, retirement, sick leave, pto etc.

The central justice system has agreed that corporations have a duty to their stakeholders above their business and so growth is paramount.

As a result, restaurants, esp independent ones, struggle to find ways to make ends meet and corporations (aka McDonalds) see no incentive to raise wages. The easiest and most obvious example of this playing out is imo that McDonalds pays labor more elsewhere than in the US.