While your pay raises have decreased and/or stalled, the minimum wage has increased therefore putting budgeted pressure on companies to find ways to keep themselves within budgeted amounts.
Yes, costs of raw materials have gone up, feed for farm animals has gone up and fuel has skyrocketed which are all factors in inflation.
However, inflation and pay decreases come down to one large factor and that is pure unadulterated, old fashioned greed. The easiest thing for CEO's, COO's, Presidents and all those who sit on that side of the building to control are people. They have a scale of what to pay who for what they do and if it so much as infringes on their corporate salaries and/or bonuses, well then, "times are tight and we all have to sacrifice a little and do what is best for the company." Boom, layoff's and cutback's begin so they can keep or inflate their checks. I've seen this in action. They treat people like pawns on a chessboard. I promise you, no matter what a company says about how much they love their people, if your president of your company had to choose between keeping employees and increasing pay or laying some off and keeping his salary, I guran-damn-tee you he/she is keeping their bank account afloat.
Prime example is the company I work for. I will not name them but in 2022, we were told that inflation is hitting, our operations costs have increased and so on, so they changed the salary structures midway through the year on all of us. Basically, they took money away from us. Control the people. That year, they had a net profit of a billion dollars............ I'll say that again. A BILLION DOLLARS! These corporate fat cats, on top of their overinflated salaries, walked out with eight figure bonus checks! And this is after they took money away from the employees, told us that times were tight and all the other corporate BS they spew to justify in their heads their money. As a result, 12 people in my department, roughly half, left. They quit and took other jobs because of this disrespect.
Bottom line, companies can tell you whatever they think you need to hear to justify prices but at the end of the day, it is greed that is the main driver of inflation.