Also the industrial revolution happened, which massively drove down the cost of things. Nothing comparable happened for experiences. A restaurant today needs a similar amount of labor to make your meal as a tavern did 400 years ago. Their ingredient costs went down, but waiters and cooks do about the same amount of work, and property values haven't gone down. Meanwhile the amount of work to make a knife has been drastically slashed through technological progress.
it kind of did. Fast food sacrificed the experience for the core consumption. Then you have chain restaurants like Denny's that exist to give the bare minimum "experience" without throwing it all away like modern drive-thrus.
Did they cut down enough to eliminate fine dining? Doesn't look like it. But I haven't done a deep dive into the ecnonomics of that. Just general wisdom that food as a business has always operated on razor thin margins.
The equivalent to the industrial revolution's impact on material goods pricing, in the domain of labor, did happen. It was slavery. Clearly, that did not persist.
