I guess I'm still not convinced the "reasoning" has anything to do with it.

If a company says the reason is inflation they can only maintain that pricing power if every other firm does the same thing. If no firm decides to keep prices the same, to steal more of the market, that suggests to me that either inflation is real (perhaps in a harder to quantify way than just supplies) or companies have much more consolidated competitors than they used to (perhaps start up costs are now high so new entrants become impossible).