It's not just wages, it's every single avenue on which the government is forcing them to incur some cost and in every case it favors the big chain that has more locations, more meals, more everything to amortize the costs over. It was ignorable with some mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance when times were good but now that they aren't it's more obvious. Normally it's worth blaming rent to some extent but commercial RE is crap right now so that ain't it