"But I do think you might have noticed something about the price of food, gasoline, and so on"

Compared to now, it was minimal, at the time people whined about it, sure. But unemployment wasn't much affected (or it was absorbed in the black economy - now even that is dwindling), regressive taxes didn't shoot up the roof, rents were not much affected, streets were not emptied of shut down shops etc. Now we live, I repeat, through a disaster of a scale one usually associates with a war.

As for profits: take tourism. Salaries in tourism (not uncompetitive vis a vis the real competitors to begin with) have plummeted while the "opening" of professions has reduced what was once jobs you could make a living off to hobbies... At the same time the large units that work with foreign tourism, are not seeing any decrease in revenues (internal tourism is a different issue, it has been wiped out). So the big hotel owners are making money at the expense of their workers...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake