Not an economist, or using country level data.. but from limited looking around a medium city the past few months, there are many different things today as opposed to a year or more ago..

There are lots of other jobs, like warehouse, light manufacturing - that also lost a lot of employees to the whole 'stay at home, enjoy gov cheese'.. so there are more jobs available right now in more places, virtually all paying more, than there were before pandemic.

with the floods of cash in the market, there are orders for everything - so lots of places hiring, but not so many people eager to take the jobs that almost all pay less then a 'living wage' for the city.

So there are tons of jobs outside retail - which mostly pay more - and you get less rude people in your face with the need to smile and take it on the chin for the corporate overlords.

No need to take a lot of shit from the gen pop when you are doing warehouse work / driving a forklift / putting online orders into a box.

There are many other factors that will be hard to discern - many families or parts of families have been, and will continue to be uprooted because of the changing economic landscape -

One of the things I think we are seeing is many deciding it's not worth it to work 2 jobs to have your own place (apartment) when it's actually less stressful to live lots of roommates / multi-generation living (and that's saying something because usually those living situations are difficult mentally and not very comfortable physically either) - these things have been more common since 2008 - but more and more they are becoming the norm for most of the hourly employee class.

similar paradigm shifts are happening in the higher paying hourly jobs - the warehouse workers and such.

So better jobs are also struggling to get people and some retail people are going there instead.

the cost of housing going up and other changes are going to play into this as well.

semi-hidden factors are playing a part too - like, retail around here used to be courteous people taking their time, being and polite and getting that back. More and more over the recent years, and for I guess a third of the population, the pandemic has made many people more rude and perhaps the internet is helping them be more 'outspoken'

It's one thing to barely scrape by when you have a job you enjoy with lots of nice people - it's not even close to the same when the second part of that changes dramatically - and it is - everywhere from what I have seen.

I think there was a time when lgbt people could take refuge in retail jobs where they were (in many retail places) accepted/ celebrated.. and these days I think the amount of harassment working other jobs is less than say a decade ago - these subtle hard to quantify changes in society are certainly having effects.

It's going to be REALLY interesting the seismic effect of Amazon now taking employees that would fail a marijuana test.. the labor market in many places have large employers taking advantage of that issue to pay lots of people less money.. This is going to shake the foundations for the labor costs of restaurants and certain large grocery stores quickly if amazon can also change the reputation of being really hard physically and mentally / being bullied by bosses and robots to always perform extra hard..

So there are many factors at play, most of these things are very different today than they were a year ago or so, some are just a little different, but it's certainly not the same as it once was.