This is not a cost of living crisis. It's a permanent adjustment.
*nods* This is true. The short version of why runs like this. The labor force contraction due to COVID pushed wages up a great deal at the bottom of the pay scale. Trouble is, most of the jobs associated with domestic shipping are at that end, and shipping is a very labor-intensive process. Globalization didn't just depend upon exploiting the wage differential between developed and underdeveloped countries. It also depended upon people in the shipping industry being paid poorly because the jobs are mostly unskilled physical labor, with a little semi-skilled labor involved.
We went from localized food production, domestic manufacturing along rail routes and bricks-and-mortar to far-flung supply chains, industrialized food production in the highest-yield regions on the globe for a given crop, truck transport and warehouses/manufacturing in the hinterlands. Companies took advantage of cheap rural real estate, cheap oil and wage disparities between urban and rural. Together, those yielded cheap domestic shipping costs. Companies' supply chains are now built dead wrong for a world where oil prices have increased sharply, the cost of unskilled labor doubled and hybrid work is a thing, which means our real estate is also now built dead wrong, meaning long-term price increases in both.
No one planned for this. Companies figured they could keep dumping on unskilled, rural domestic labor forever, in much the same way that football clubs thought revenue would keep going up, up, up until COVID happened.
This will take years, if not decades, to fix. If unskilled labor wages remain high in the West for a prolonged period, the biggest beneficiaries of globalization in the Far East are in for a real bad time as globalization unwinds. It would lead to mass unemployment and the associated domestic political insecurity. Add in the big male-female gender gaps in India and China, and that's the most toxic concoction possible when it comes to predicting the likelihood of interstate conflict.
It would be great for the environment, assuming we don't end up with mushroom clouds. One big reason we're up a creek without a paddle on greenhouse gases is all the CO2 those long supply chains pump into the atmosphere, and all the deforestation resulting from foreign logging and agriculture.