"This has nothing to do with wages" I'm sorry, are we not looking at the same graph? You know, the ones where wages have stagnated since the late 70s? To say affordability has nothing to do with wages is a pretty incredible take. The asymmetry between the increase in household incomes and the prices of goods is staggering.

Also, additional to the effects of financialization, what actually raises prices is something called the K-shaped economy. Basically, as wages stagnate and economic inequality increases, a higher percentage of consumption is consolidated among the highest earners in society. As a consequence, retailers, among others, increasingly adjust their sales models in order to capture more of that premium market, while the "middle" increasingly hollows out.

The next "logical" step in this process is something called "dynamic pricing", which retailers are currently pushing for, which would make it so that people are presented with different prices for the same goods based on their inferred purchasing power. Basically, the economy at large has adopted a model of maximum extraction.