[throwaway9870]

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.