Prices will continue to climb and U.S. officials are finally admitting it, saying this week that inflation can no longer be categorized as short-term.

Both Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in interviews this week that it’s time to retire the term “transitory” when discussing the current U.S. inflation trends.

“We tend to use [transitory] to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation,” Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said during a congressional hearing on Tuesday. “I think it’s probably a good time to retire that word and try to explain more clearly what we mean.”

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Labor is a “very sticky” cost factor, says Michael Swanson, chief agricultural economist at Wells Fargo. “It's really hard to tell somebody, ‘Hey, I'm going to bump your paycheck up to $18 an hour, and then when things kind of settle down, you're like, I'm gonna kick you back to $15,” he recently told Fortune.

“Higher wages are something that once it gets built in, it's kind of permanent,” Swanson says.

U.S. wage increases may slow in the future, but once employers start paying a lot more for labor, it's gonna take a while to normalize. To keep pace, companies either have to automate more of the process or pay for the labor and pass along the cost to consumers.

Overall, Faucher predicts inflation will be lower in 2022 as reopening-specific inflation fade, but expects it to also be more broad-based, affecting a wider variety of goods and especially services.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com