A lot of food places, particularly eat-in restaurants, are just perpetually struggling. Half the staff are on minimal pay, or the owner’s friends and family helping out. They struggle and lose money for a few years before finally folding. A regular who has no idea about the industry buys the place and keeps much of it the same because they always loved it. The process repeats.
If prices go up, and stay up, eventually things like salaries have to go up too, at least a bit. If you need a certain amount per month to live when last year you could get by on less, you’ll need a job that pays you enough to live. In theory if the price of goods has gone up then the value of whatever you’re producing for your company has gone up so they can afford to give you the extra (in practice they take a lot of the extra as profit and pass on just enough to retain employees and no more). Of course, it’s the same physical item, so eventually it all sort of balanced out.
You can see this if you look at it in the long term. In 1970 the average salary in the UK was something like £1200 per year, and a house cost £4500 or something. Today the average UK salary is over £27,000 and a house is around £285,000. The houses haven’t got 61 times larger or anything, that’s just inflation. So, yeah, you kind of are just stuck with it.
A lot of the punchlines are “ha ha, aren’t they weird?”, which hits totally different if you’re the sort of person who the character is an obvious caricature of. Doubly so if the weirdness in question is associated with some form of neurodivergence. For some people - myself included - a lot of the laughs in that show feel very much like they’re laughing at you, not with you. It’s only funny if you identify more with the people on the other side of the joke.
Very much an industry of two halves. Some companies absolutely do not care about you and will drive you to do more with less and for longer hours until you burn out, and then replace you with the next poor sucker. Offers will bend over backwards to look after their people and maintain a working environment where everyone gets a say and is happy and able to be at their best. Which one you get can be a total coin flip, and even sat talking to them in a job interview it’s sometimes easy to mistake one for the other.
Stoicism says something similar, although it gets there via a very different route.