To be fair, the minimum wage was criticised quite harshly when it started for being set too low. There was a "Campaign for a Living Wage" that started soon after it introduced to increase it to £5, there were a bunch of entertainers who jumped on the bandwagon for it (I remember it being an early cause championed by Coldplay).

It is bonkers how much cheaper some things were, like a night out. In the mid-1990s you could go out and have a reasonable night on the town for maybe £30 (not in top clubs in London, obviously, but certainly for a few rounds in a half-decent local), tickets for gigs for big bands were frequently in the £15-£20 range. I remember getting weekend tickets for the V Festival in 1998 and they were like £45 for two full days. The cinema was dirt cheap. You could get a used second car (not necessarily a deathtrap) for prices bordering on the stupidly low. Bus fares were quite low, train fares were much lower than now, but still expensive compared to what it felt they should have been.

Against that, some things were quite expensive. VHS tapes were ludicrous, if you wanted to watch a full season of say Star Trek: The Next Generation, you had to buy 13 tapes at £9.99 a pop. Now you can get a free trial for Paramount+ and that a monthly sub for the price of 1-and-a-bit VHS tapes and watch the entire Star Trek franchise in a few months. CDs were £12-14 and you had to go on blind faith and magazine reviews to avoid the "this album has 3 great singles and 9 filler tracks," syndrome, rather than being able to listen to the whole album on YouTube or Spotify before deciding to buy a physical version (if you even want to do that). You also had to rely on local shops having stock in or having to order and maybe waiting several weeks for them to come in. Video games were also quite expensive, PC games were £30 from the start of the 1990s (though, to be fair, they also stayed that price more or less until the mid-2010s) and console games cost twice as much, which is why everyone pirated everything.

So in terms of home entertainment, things were actually far more expensive (relatively and with inflation counted) then they are now, but going out was usually much cheaper than now. The most important thing was the supermarket shop, which was almost comically lower than it was now. I had a budget crisis one month around 2001 and I had only £10 to spend for a full weekly shop (lunches, breakfasts and dinners) and I just about managed it, which obviously would be impossible today.