Something I've observed while working, specifically at a grocery store, is that employers seem to intentionally keep themselves understaffed and its only partly to save money from hiring more people.
It's cheaper to pay someone more than it is to hire a new person. So they'll find out who the hard workers are, keep them at the top of the food chain, and then to make up the rest of the bare minimum workforce by hiring useless lazy pieces of shit who they know they'll never have to give raises to.
Secondly, the understaffing benefits employers by creating more comradery among the “workplace family” to put more pressure on employees to come to work. Ie: They try to ingrain the message that “it's not your boss you're letting down, it's your coworkers”.
To give you a taste if just one of the many amazing effects understaffment has:
I work in an understaffed grocery store and during our annual inventory count, the busiest (meaning work, not customers) time of year, and multiple people came to work sick. I know at least 3 including myself who called in but were asked to come in anyway. 6 people were coughing all day with most of us proximal to customers and other coworkers and it turns out the first person who we noticed coughing tested positive for covid.
So not only are there 6 people with covid in a populated workplace who were denied sick days, we've also been doing a few 12-13 hour shifts with so much work to do that some of us didn't even get breaks. A coworker in my department has been having health issues for the last few months and his blood pressure is crazy and this job is killing him. Understaffed, underpaid, overworked, and taken advantage of like drunk puppets. Don't ever work in a grocery store unless you undervalue yourself and want to work for “the man”.
It's important for people to observe this phenomena and be conscious of how it affects us all and perhaps people smarter than us grunts can tangibly study the effects on stress and therefore our health.