Prices increase when costs go up. If you’re selling widgets and your wholesale price goes up, you have to increase the retail price or your margins drop.
but if that was true, why did it happen only during the pandemic and not before?
At any point in time, if a business felt like their customer could've paid more, the business should be increasing that price. So the recent price rises cannot be explained with this train of argument.
Unless, of course, the pandemic somehow made it so that people could pay more.
I'd contend that costs going up is _a_ cause of price increases.
The reason a soda costs more from a movie theater than a supermarket is not because a soda costs more to make in the movie theater, for instance.