What causes the lag in prices falling back to normal?

There's a popular sentiment going around with respect to gas prices or RAM prices that it only took a very short time for prices to spike high after a market disruption, but it will take a long time to fall back down. It feels like prices for cars and goods after COVID times are similar. The price of milk jumped since 2020 and hasn't dropped yet.

I'm sure this has been studied; is this even a real affect, and if so, what causes it? I'm trying to think about it critically. The initial jump is likely due to increase in demand vs. supply. But if the supply returns or the demand drops, you'd expect that the company could make more money returning to a lower price. I'm wondering if there's some benefit to sitting on the product in a warehouse to maintain the illusion that the price still needs to be high. Does it begin to normalize that amount in people's minds? Do they want to pressure consumers into debt to continue purchasing at the higher price? Pressure other employers to start paying employees more to keep up? How does competition affect this? The less competition, the more you can play games like this, so maybe more competition => faster return to baseline?