With as large of economic disturbance we have seen in the last 3 years, you will find examples of almost anything. However, I can assure you as some who was in manufacturing during this period, it was not just price gouging. There were true shortages up and down the supply chain, supplier quotes that used to be good for 30 days were good for 24hrs, and distributors that thought they had plenty of stock found themselves cleaned out by companies panic buying. It was incredibly hard to run a supply chain and for smaller companies, almost impossible to predict the cost of good sold (COGS). If you can't predict the cost to make something, you better raise the price enough to be sure you don't lose money. Many companies had to hire extra people just to track price changes and manage the supply chains. Building anything efficiently was crazy hard. On top of that, in certain markets, people were spending like crazy which made it very hard to stay stocked.

This whole idea of "simply price gouging" is completely inaccurate for many industries.

Given that the purchasing power of money is constantly decreasing, why would you not expect to see record profits, especially after the most annual inflation in decades?

Changes in profit margin would be the relevant metric to see if a business has gained or lost pricing power.

Correction. oil and gas. Solar and wind aren't seeing record profits - though they are seeing record installa.

Back when the inflation hoopla started I watched the newshour desk (Amna, looking at you) very poorly hype it up. They had economists on to talk about it and they shrugged it off as corporate profiteering. You can always tell when they don't want to hear the truth. I yelled out the answer a few minutes before the economist did.

They didn't invite her on to talk again. For some reason they just froth at the mouth at the prospect of systemic inflation. They will grab the reigns of the culture war and flog it mercilessly to the finish line but will never call out corporate collusion against workers nor the abuse of consumers lest Facebook or Walmart ease up on the "donations."