>>55119877
Broadly speaking, the two main categories of goods sold in retail are food and durable consumer goods from East Asia. The low prices of both rely on idiosyncratic circumstances: Food prices were artificially suppressed by subsidies and unsustainable agricultural practices (i.e. dumping enough fertilizer on a 1000ha-field of grain to poison half the ocean with phosphate and sucking the underground aquifer dry for the next 250 years). Consumer goods from Asia were cheap because of the post-WW2 baby boom there, which suppressed the price of labor, coupled with free trade. In the case of both categories, these prices-suppressing factors are going away, rapidly increasing prices. Since such goods are generally sold to people without much discretionary spending power, there is a limited ability to pass on costs, thus profit margins get squeezed.
All that shoplifting also doesn't help either - and that phenomenon very much exhibits Zimbabwe-like mechanics, so we can hardly fault "those Zimbabweans" in the future.