It’s mostly because of stock awards as part of compensation packages.

If you get $50,000 in equity each year and the shares are worth $20 when you were awarded them, then they balloon to $160, you just earned $400,000 for each year you held on to them. These numbers are all made up and just for reference, but this is what some of these hardware company employees experienced.

You seem to be mixing two topics. One appears to be a complaint about purchasing power between tourists and locals, and the other about US domestic purchasing power on minimum wage.

You’ve got lots of great answers by others on the latter and how it is unsustainable as a living wage. Why Americans (and likely other Western tourists in general) consider certain countries “cheaper” is because of exchange rates. That would be a whole post on it’s own.

A single US Dollar (USD) can be used to buy about 93 Indian Rupees (INR), as an example. The average monthly wage is something like 25,000 INR, so even minimum US federal wage would be 5x more monthly buying power (but as explained by others, minimum wage earners are not the ones traveling). “Cheap” is used to compare against a similar purchase in their home country and what it would have cost there. It is not an insult but a way to describe the difference in cost relative to income.

It must be 1926. We have a prosperous decade leading up to a market inflated by stock market speculation, stock prices that are unlikely to match anticipated future earnings, the fed increasing interest rates to curb spending which is impacting construction investment, the overproduction of certain commodities, reduction in foreign trade and lending, and retaliatory tariffs and protectionist policies going into effect.

Oh wait, it’s 100 years later and it just rhymes with the lead up to the Great Depression? Cool.