It's been going on for years. About 15 years ago, we had a bit of a surprise in our workshop. Being a Signal Regiment, we used quite a few co-ax connectors. Common or Garden BNC connectors. Granted they were Mil Spec to Defstan whatever, but Amphenol sold these by the thousand to the MOD. A year or two before, the stores system started price marking the stores. The connectors were labelled at GBP 10.50 or so. Not terribly unreasonable, given they were Mil Spec. We were getting low, so we demanded another 20 or so.
When the new batch came in, they were price marked at over 50 pounds!! Same item, same packaging, same NSN, same DofQ. We raised it with the RLC head Norman (there is one of these per R SIGNALS regiment) and he just shrugged his shoulders.
Another one. On an RAF station, we Army types needed some nuts & bolts for our radio masts. We ordered 50 or so through RAF Supply. Back came the response "None of these have ever been ordered in the RAF, would require external contract to be let, suggest demand is excessive, demand cancelled". Yet had we ordered them through the Army system, we'd have got as many as we liked. The nuts & bolts were always falling off the masts or going rusty, no big deal at all to replace them. I wonder how many other items the RAF did actually let a contract for, that were available in the system?