Haitian Fritay Vendors Hike Prices, Blame Global Memory Shortage

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Haitian fritay vendors nationwide have reportedly announced immediate price increases on griyo, bannann peze, akra, marinad, and complete fritay plates, citing the continuing global shortage of computer memory despite investigators being unable to identify a single semiconductor anywhere in the preparation process.

The Association Nationale des Marchands de Fritay defended the increases Tuesday, arguing that modern supply chains are deeply interconnected and consumers cannot reasonably expect vendors to remain unaffected by major movements in international technology markets.

One vendor adjusted a pot of frying oil.

“RAM chè.”

A customer stared at him.

“What the fuck does RAM have to do with my griyo?”

The vendor shrugged.

“Global economy.”

The plate increased by 150 gourdes.

CLASSIFICATION: CONSUMER PRICING — INPUT ATTRIBUTION AND REFERENCE PRICE ANALYSIS
DISTRIBUTION: Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Association Nationale des Marchands de Fritay, International Memory Manufacturers, U.S. Department of Enshittification Affairs, Anyone Currently Holding a Plate
PREPARED BY: The Externality Research Division
DATE: August 2026

Vendors Introduce Memory Surcharge

Receipts at participating fritay stands will now include a new line item:

Customers immediately demanded an explanation.

Vendors provided one.

“Memory shortage.”

Customers demanded a better explanation.

Vendors declined.

Our Research Division has examined the receipt architecture, which is the element of this matter that our analysts consider most instructive and which has received the least attention.

The two new lines are not a price increase in the ordinary sense. A price increase raises the number next to the food. These lines leave the number next to the food alone. Griyo remains 650 gourdes. Bannann remains 150. Pikliz remains included, and remains, our researchers confirm, the only item on the document that has kept its promise.

The additional 300 gourdes appear underneath, in the position where a customer expects to find tax.

This placement is not incidental. Our analysts note that the region of a receipt below the itemized goods is understood by consumers to be administered by someone other than the seller. It is where the state puts its levies, where the card network puts its fees, and where the customer’s attention has been trained, over a lifetime of transactions, not to go. A charge placed there does not read as a demand. It reads as weather.

The Association has been careful to preserve this reading. Neither line is described as a price. One is an adjustment, which is a word that implies a correction to a value determined elsewhere. The other is a recovery, which implies that a cost was incurred and is being made whole. Our researchers were unable to identify the cost, and note that the Association has never been asked to identify it either, because the word had already done the work.

The final line is the only fully honest entry on the receipt.

Investigation Finds No RAM in Fritay

A government investigation subsequently examined the entire fritay production process.

Officials documented:

pork,

plantains,

oil,

cabbage,

carrots,

peppers,

spices,

propane,

pots,

and several extremely hot pieces of metal.

Investigators found:

The Ministry of Commerce confronted vendors with the findings.

“There is literally no memory in this supply chain.”

The association president nodded.

“Exactly.”

Officials waited.

“Shortage.”

The meeting was adjourned.

Our Research Division has reviewed the audit methodology and considers it sound. Inspectors weighed the inputs, traced the propane, photographed the equipment, and interviewed the pig’s previous owner. The finding of zero was arrived at rigorously and is, our analysts note, almost certainly correct.

It is also the least useful document produced during this entire matter.

The Ministry entered the meeting believing it was conducting a factual dispute — that the vendors had made a claim about the world, that the claim was checkable, and that checking it would resolve the question. Under that assumption, the audit is decisive. Zero grams of DRAM is not a close call.

The Association was not making a claim about the world. It was making a claim about permission. The president’s response — exactly — was not evasion, and our analysts wish to be precise about this, because it has been widely reported as evasion. He agreed with the finding. He then repeated the operative word, which had never depended on the finding, and adjourned.

The Research Division notes that an audit can establish that a stated reason is false. It cannot establish that a price is wrong, because prices are not claims and cannot be false. This distinction is understood instinctively by every party to the transaction except the one that commissioned the audit.

Vendors Cite “Indirect Exposure”

Industry representatives subsequently clarified that fritay is indirectly exposed to semiconductor markets.

The reasoning reportedly works as follows:

Therefore:

FRITAY HAS SEMICONDUCTOR EXPOSURE

An economist reviewing the model reportedly removed his glasses.

“By that logic everything on Earth has semiconductor exposure.”

The vendors became excited.

“Exactly.”

Prices increased another 50 gourdes.

Our economics desk has examined the transmission chain and reports that every individual link in it is true.

Memory prices did rise. Technology vendors did pass the increase through. Logistics firms do run on computers, and those computers are replaced on a schedule that a hardware cycle can move. Freight does reach Haitian ports. Haitians do eat fritay. There is no false statement anywhere in the model, which is what distinguishes it from an ordinary lie and what makes it considerably more durable than one.

What the model omits is magnitude. A chain of six true statements can carry any amount of causation from zero to everything, and the Association’s model specifies none. Our analysts attempted the estimate the model declines to make. Assuming the entire memory-driven increase in a logistics operator’s hardware budget were passed through in full to freight rates, and the entire freight increase were passed through in full to landed goods, and the vendor’s share of those goods were priced accordingly, the desk arrives at a per-plate effect that it has been unable to express in gourdes because the currency does not subdivide that far.

The economist’s objection was therefore correct and, our analysts note, strategically catastrophic. He argued that the model proves too much. The Association agreed that the model proves too much, accepted the amendment, and priced it.

This is the moment the Research Division regards as the turning point of the entire episode. Universality was offered as a reduction to absurdity and received as a licensing expansion. If everything on Earth has semiconductor exposure, then every seller on Earth has a defensible reason to raise prices, permanently, at any time, without further evidence. The economist had not refuted the framework. He had found its edge and reported that there wasn’t one.

NVIDIA Earnings Immediately Affect Griyo Futures

The situation deteriorated after several vendors began monitoring technology-sector news to determine daily pricing.

A strong semiconductor earnings report caused one Delmas fritay stand to immediately raise its complete plate from 850 to 975 gourdes.

A customer protested.

“The fucking pig was already dead before the earnings call.”

The vendor pointed toward his phone.

“Markets are forward-looking.”

Nobody could determine where he learned this phrase.

Our Research Division determined where he learned this phrase.

It took under an hour. The vendor’s telephone displays, on unlock, a financial news aggregator that arrived preinstalled and cannot be removed without an account he does not have. The aggregator’s headline module refreshes on the hour. Over the four days preceding the price change, the phrase markets are forward-looking or a close variant appeared in seven of the summaries he was shown, always in the same position, always as an explanation for something that had already happened.

The vendor was not persuaded of an economic theory. He was supplied with a sentence, repeatedly, at no cost, in a slot he could not turn off, and he deployed it correctly on the first attempt.

Our analysts wish to note that the customer’s objection is the technically sound position and lost anyway. The pig was dead. Its cost was fixed, historical, and already borne. Nothing that occurred in a Santa Clara conference room after the animal’s death could alter the resources consumed in producing the plate. This is the standard argument against forward pricing on existing inventory, and it is correct.

It is also, the desk observes, an argument that no securities market anywhere on Earth has ever accepted. Every commodity exchange in the world prices dead pigs on future expectations. The vendor was not misapplying the framework. He was applying it accurately in a setting where the customer could see the pig, which is the only reason it sounded absurd.

Street Vendors Discover Dynamic Pricing

Some fritay operators have reportedly begun displaying QR codes allowing customers to check current market prices before ordering.

Prices now fluctuate according to:

and:

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE ALREADY STANDING AROUND THE CART

A customer asked why six people waiting for food increased his price.

The vendor replied:

“Demand.”

The customer reluctantly admitted that this one actually made sense.

Our Research Division wishes to draw attention to the customer’s concession, which is the single most sophisticated act of economic reasoning documented in this report and was performed by a man who wanted to eat.

Of the seven inputs displayed at the cart, four are real costs the vendor bears, one is a real cost of doing business in gourdes, one is weather that determines whether anyone can stand outside, and one is DRAM. The customer objected to the queue and accepted the DRAM.

The desk notes that he had it exactly backwards, and that his error was reasonable. The queue is the only line on the board that describes something happening at that cart, in front of him, that he can verify. DRAM is the only line that describes nothing at all. He challenged the one he could see.

This is, our analysts observe, the general property of a disclosure list. A long list of inputs does not distribute scrutiny evenly across its items. It concentrates scrutiny on the items the reader is competent to evaluate and confers the credibility of that scrutiny on the rest. The unverifiable entries are not hidden among the verifiable ones. They are validated by them, which is a stronger position, and the reason the list contains rainfall.

Several operators have since added inputs to the board. The Research Division has confirmed the following entries at stands in Pétion-Ville and Delmas: shipping congestion, regional grid conditions, the price of a barrel of Brent, the Baltic Dry Index, and, at one location, a line reading simply geopolitics. None of the operators displaying these figures could explain any of them. All of them could explain pork.

Haitian Government Requests Evidence

The Ministry of Commerce demanded documentation demonstrating the relationship between memory prices and fried plantains.

The vendors submitted a 74-page report produced with artificial intelligence.

Page four contained the phrase:

“As a large language model…”

Government investigators stopped reading.

The association nevertheless invoiced the cost of generating the report back to customers as:

AI COMPLIANCE SURCHARGE — 25 HTG

Our Research Division obtained the full 74 pages, and reports that the investigators stopped at the correct moment for the wrong reason.

Pages one through three are competent. They describe the memory market accurately, cite real capacity constraints, and characterize the pass-through mechanism in language that would survive review at a central bank. Page four contains the disclosure, at which point the reading stopped. Pages five through seventy-four contain no argument connecting any of it to fried food. They contain the memory market, restated, at length, with charts.

The document never makes the claim it was commissioned to support. It does not need to. It was not written to persuade the Ministry that the connection exists; it was written to be seventy-four pages long, and it succeeded before anyone opened it.

Our analysts note that the Ministry’s request was for documentation, and that documentation was supplied. The request specified no standard of proof, no methodology, and no length, on the assumption that these were understood. The Association supplied the only variable that had been specified, which was existence.

The surcharge is the element the desk regards as structurally significant. The Ministry demanded evidence. Producing evidence cost money. The money was billed to the customers on whose behalf the Ministry had demanded it. The regulatory action did not reduce the price of a plate of griyo. It raised it by twenty-five gourdes and produced a line item that will outlive the investigation.

The Research Division has reviewed comparable proceedings in other sectors and finds this outcome to be the norm rather than an anomaly. Compliance is an input. Inputs are passed through. A regulator that increases a seller’s costs without constraining the seller’s prices has not disciplined the seller. It has commissioned a new surcharge and given it a respectable name.

RAM Manufacturers Deny Responsibility

International memory manufacturers reportedly learned that they were being blamed for Haitian fritay inflation and issued confused statements clarifying that their products are not generally used in fried pork.

Haitian vendors rejected the industry’s attempt to distance itself.

“Typical multinational behavior.”

One vendor said.

“Cause the griyo crisis and now suddenly nobody knows anything.”

Technology analysts stressed again that there is no griyo crisis attributable to semiconductor memory.

The vendor added another 25 gourdes.

Our Research Division has examined the manufacturers’ statements and finds them to be true, carefully worded, and useless.

The manufacturers denied that memory is used in fried pork. Nobody had alleged that memory is used in fried pork. The allegation was that memory prices had moved and that the movement had consequences, which is a claim the manufacturers cannot deny, because they have spent the entire shortage telling investors precisely that.

The desk notes the structural difficulty facing the industry. The memory manufacturers have publicly attributed their own pricing to conditions beyond their control: capacity that takes years to build, demand they did not forecast, an allocation environment nobody chose. Every one of those explanations is at least partly true. All of them are also the Association’s argument, delivered at a higher production value, by parties with better counsel, about a product that costs more.

Having spent eighteen months explaining that a price increase can be the involuntary consequence of a distant condition, the industry is not well positioned to object when someone downstream says the same sentence about a plate of pork. The vendor’s accusation is nonsense on the facts and structurally identical to the industry’s own filings, which is why it could not be answered and was instead priced.

Customers Begin Bringing Their Own RAM

In an effort to circumvent the surcharge, several customers reportedly arrived at fritay stands carrying old computer memory.

One man placed two DDR4 sticks on the counter.

“There.”

The vendor looked down.

“What’s this?”

“Sixteen gigs.”

“Okay?”

“You said there’s a memory shortage.”

The vendor examined the modules.

“DDR4?”

“Yes.”

He pushed them back.

“We use DDR5.”

The customer reportedly had to be physically restrained.

Our Research Division regards this exchange as the most important thirty seconds in the entire matter, and wishes to slow it down.

The customer performed the correct experiment. He took the seller’s stated cause at face value and offered to supply it. This is the standard test for whether a surcharge describes a real input: if the input is provided, the surcharge should disappear. It is the same test as bringing your own bottle, your own bag, or your own equipment, and in every case where the cited cost is genuine, it works.

The vendor did not deny that memory was the input. He accepted the premise, inspected the goods, and rejected them on specification.

The desk notes that this response required the vendor to know, in the moment, that DDR4 and DDR5 are distinct standards and that one is current. He knew this. He had learned it from the same telephone that supplies the phrase about forward-looking markets. And he deployed it not as an explanation but as a rejection criterion, which is a considerably more advanced use of a technical fact than most of the industry that produces it manages in a quarter.

A cited input that cannot be satisfied by supplying the input is not an input. It is a condition of sale, and the specification is not a requirement but a door. Our analysts observe that the vendor could have said no. He instead said not that one, which preserves the story, defers the confrontation, and — critically — leaves the customer believing that a compatible module would have worked.

Two customers have since returned with DDR5.

Both were informed that the stand does not accept customer-supplied memory, for reasons of food safety.

Vendors Announce Premium High-Memory Fritay

Entrepreneurs have already begun exploiting the controversy by introducing:

FRITAY PRO MAX

The premium plate reportedly contains exactly the same food but includes:

and:

32GB UNIFIED FRITAY MEMORY

Nobody knows what the final feature means.

The premium plate costs twice as much.

It sold out immediately.

Our Research Division has audited the tier and reports the following.

Priority frying is real. Pro Max orders are cooked first. The desk notes that this is not a feature of the Pro Max plate but a property of the queue, and that its entire value is extracted from the standard customers now waiting longer. Nothing was added to the premium tier. Something was removed from the base one and sold back.

Enhanced pikliz allocation is also real, and is the only line in this report that our researchers were able to measure directly. Pro Max plates receive between forty and sixty percent more pikliz. Standard plates, prior to the tier’s introduction, received an amount that vendors described as as much as you want. Pikliz remains listed as included on the standard receipt. Our analysts note that it is still included. It is simply included less.

Future-ready plantains could not be evaluated. Our researchers examined the plantains, compared them to the standard plantains, and found them to be the same plantains. When asked what the term meant, one operator explained that the plantains would continue to be available in the future. The desk was unable to identify any sense in which this is false.

32GB Unified Fritay Memory is not a feature. It is not a claim. It does not describe any property of the food, and our analysts wish to record that the Association has never asserted that it does. It is a number, a unit, and two adjectives, arranged in the order in which a consumer has been trained to encounter them, and it is the reason the tier sold out.

The Research Division interviewed eleven Pro Max customers. Nine could not define the term. Seven said they had assumed it meant more food. All eleven said the plate was worth it. Four had eaten the standard plate the previous week and could identify no difference, and when this was put to them, three of the four revised their position to say that the Pro Max had been hotter.

A twelfth customer, approached at a stand in Delmas, declined to be interviewed on the grounds that he knew exactly what he had paid for and did not wish to discuss it.

Department of Enshittification Affairs Opens Investigation

The U.S. Department of Enshittification Affairs reportedly became involved after learning that a completely ordinary plate of fried food had somehow acquired technology-industry pricing practices.

An investigator traveled to Haiti and ordered griyo.

“How much?”

The vendor quoted the price.

“Why?”

“Memory shortage.”

The investigator looked at the charcoal stove.

Then at the plantains.

Then at the pig.

He quietly opened his federal notebook.

ENSHITTIFICATION HAS ESCAPED SOFTWARE

Washington was notified immediately.

Our Research Division has obtained the Department’s preliminary finding, which runs to two pages and contains one recommendation, which is that the Department does not know what to do.

The difficulty is jurisdictional in the technical sense and conceptual in the practical one. The Department’s enabling framework contemplates a platform: a party that acquires users, degrades the product once leaving becomes costly, and captures the difference. Every enforcement tool the Department holds is shaped around that sequence, and every one of them assumes a lock-in that can be identified and unwound.

The fritay stand has no platform. It has no users, no accounts, no terms of service, and no switching cost whatsoever. There is another stand four minutes away. The investigator confirmed this personally, walked to it, and was quoted a comparable figure with a comparable explanation, which is the finding that produced the notebook entry.

The desk notes that the Department’s model assumes degradation requires capture. What the investigator observed is degradation without capture: the pricing behavior arrived intact in a competitive market with no barrier to exit, carried not by an incumbent’s leverage but by the availability of the story. Nobody had to be locked in. The explanation propagated on its own, because it is free, it is portable, and it works.

The Department has classified the matter as Airborne.

No enforcement action has been proposed. A footnote to the preliminary finding notes that the Department’s own filing fees rose eleven percent during the reporting period and attributes the increase to conditions in the technology sector.

Haitian Vendors Defend Price Increase

At a press conference, reporters repeatedly demanded that the association identify one direct mechanism connecting DRAM availability to fritay production.

The association president eventually became frustrated.

“Look.”

He approached the microphone.

“When oil goes up, everybody raises prices.”

Reporters nodded.

“When dollar goes up, everybody raises prices.”

More nodding.

“When transportation goes up, everybody raises prices.”

Correct.

He spread his arms.

“Memory went up.”

Silence.

“So?”

A reporter shouted:

“YOU DON’T FUCKING USE MEMORY.”

The president looked offended.

“My phone does.”

The room erupted.

Our Research Division has transcribed the exchange and wishes to record that the room erupted at the correct sentence, for the wrong reason, and that the president had just won the argument.

The three examples he offered before the punchline are not rhetorical. Fuel, currency, and transport are the three cost shocks that Haitian sellers pass through as a matter of routine, that Haitian buyers accept as a matter of routine, and that no reporter in the room challenged, because challenging them would have been absurd. The nodding is in the transcript. Everything that follows depends on it.

What the president did was extend an accepted list by one item and wait. The reporters could not articulate the principle that admits the first three and excludes the fourth, because they had never had to. The principle is that the seller must actually consume the input. It had gone unstated for so long that when it was finally needed, nobody in the room could produce it under pressure, and the objection came out as volume.

The president then supplied the phone, which is the most examined sentence of the affair and the least understood. It is not a defense of the surcharge. Nobody, including the president, believes a telephone handset’s bill of materials justifies three hundred gourdes on a plate of pork.

It is a demonstration that the excluding principle, once stated, does not exclude him either. He does use memory. He uses it to check the exchange rate, to receive orders, and to be told that markets are forward-looking. The reporters wanted a threshold — a level of exposure below which the pass-through is illegitimate. No such threshold exists in any accepted account of pricing, and the president had located the gap by standing in it.

What the Plate Actually Costs

Our Research Division commissioned an independent cost reconstruction for a standard plate of griyo, bannann peze, and pikliz at a Port-au-Prince stand, covering the twelve months preceding the memory surcharge. The purpose was to establish what had actually changed.

Something had. The desk wishes to state this plainly, because the comic structure of this affair has obscured it: the vendors’ costs rose substantially over the period, and none of the increase had anything to do with DRAM.

The desk draws attention to the second-to-last line, which is the only entry on the reconstruction that our researchers were unable to quantify and the only one that every vendor interviewed raised without being asked.

Vendors described, consistently and independently, a set of costs associated with getting pork, oil, and propane from where they arrive to where they are cooked. They described these costs as significant. Several described them as the largest single change in their operating position over the period. None would state a figure, none would permit a written record, and several asked our researchers to stop taking notes.

These amounts do not appear on any receipt. They cannot. There is no line item for them, no acceptable name for them, and no press conference at which a seller can announce that his prices have risen for that reason. A vendor who cited them by name would be describing, in public, an arrangement he has to live inside tomorrow morning.

Our Research Division notes the resulting position. The Association is in possession of a set of real, large, well-documented cost increases that it cannot state, and one imaginary cost increase that it can state freely, at length, on television, with a seventy-four-page report attached.

It stated the imaginary one.

Prices Expected to Remain Elevated After Shortage Ends

Perhaps most concerning, vendors have already warned customers that improvements in global memory supply should not be expected to reduce fritay prices.

The association explained that the increases will eventually become:

STRUCTURALLY EMBEDDED

A reporter asked what that meant.

“Price not going back down.”

“Then why blame the shortage?”

The president looked genuinely confused.

“Because we needed a reason to raise it.”

The Ministry of Commerce immediately opened another investigation.

Our Research Division regards the president’s confusion as sincere, and considers the sentence he produced to be the most complete account of the affair given by any participant, including this publication.

He was not confessing. He had been asked why the reason was cited if the reason would not govern the outcome, and the question struck him as strange because he had never held the view that the reason governed the outcome. Reasons are required. Reasons are supplied. The relationship between a reason and a price, in his understanding, is the relationship between a permit and a building: the permit is genuinely necessary, and it is not what holds the roof up.

The Ministry opened its second investigation into the honest answer. Our analysts note that the first investigation was opened into the dishonest one, that neither has produced a price reduction, and that the Association has already indicated it will document its cooperation with the second inquiry.

The documentation will be produced with artificial intelligence.

The Externality

Our economics desk has been asked to identify what, if anything, in this affair is transferable, and reports that the transferable part is nearly all of it.

A Reason Is an Input

The desk begins with the observation that organizes everything else. Across the entire episode, no participant behaved as though the stated reason had to be causally connected to the price. Not the vendors, who supplied a reason they knew to be unconnected. Not the customers, who paid. Not the Ministry, which audited the reason rather than the price. Not the reporters, who demanded a mechanism and accepted three that they had never examined either.

Every party acted as though a price increase requires a reason the way a shipment requires a manifest — as a document that must accompany the transaction and be plausible on its face, rather than as an account of why the transaction has the value it has.

Once a reason is understood as a required document rather than a causal claim, the market for reasons behaves like a market for any other input. Some reasons are cheap. Some are scarce. Some are unusable in public. And a seller facing an unusable reason and an available one will use the available one, which is what happened here and is not, our analysts note, a Haitian phenomenon.

The Properties of a Good Reason

The desk has reconstructed why DRAM in particular worked, and finds four properties, none of which involve being true.

It is distant. Nobody at the cart can check it, which means nobody at the cart can refute it, and the vendor is not required to know anything about it beyond the phrase.

It is externally validated. The shortage is real, extensively reported, and confirmed by the same telephone that carries the customer’s own news. The vendor is not asking to be believed. He is pointing at something the customer has already been told.

It is blameless. The reason attributes the increase to a party who is not present, cannot be reached, and has no standing at the transaction. It makes the vendor a fellow sufferer rather than a counterparty, which converts an adversarial moment into a shared one.

And it is unfalsifiable in the relevant direction. The customer cannot supply the input — this was tested, at the counter, with two DDR4 modules — and cannot observe its absence, because the exposure was never claimed to be direct.

Fuel and currency have three of these four properties. They fail the fourth, in that a fuel price is posted at every station in the country and a customer can look at it. Our analysts observe that DRAM strictly dominates them as a pricing narrative, which is the reason it displaced them, and the reason it will not be the last input to do so.

The Asymmetry

The desk notes that the president’s structurally embedded is a plain-language statement of a well-documented asymmetry: prices that rise with an input shock do not fall symmetrically when the shock reverses. The pattern is stable across fuel markets, food markets, and freight, and it has been measured for decades.

The mechanism is visible here in unusual clarity. A rise requires a reason and the reason was supplied. A fall requires nothing, and therefore nothing is what produces it. No customer will arrive at the cart with a printout showing that DRAM contract prices have normalized and demand a reduction, and if one did, he would be told that the effects work through with a lag, which is true, unfalsifiable, and free.

The shortage narrative, our analysts conclude, is not a description of the increase. It is the vehicle by which a temporary condition is converted into a permanent floor. The condition is temporary. The floor is not, and everyone involved has said so out loud.

What the Vendor Did Not Invent

The Research Division wishes to be explicit about attribution, because the comic surface of this affair assigns the innovation to a man standing over a pot of oil, and he did not innovate anything.

Every technique documented in this report was imported intact. The surcharge placed below the itemized goods is the airline model, the telecommunications model, and the ticketing model. The tier that adds a number, a unit, and two adjectives to an unchanged product is the consumer electronics model. The priority queue funded by degrading the standard queue is the platform model. Dynamic pricing keyed to observed demand is the ride-hailing model. The compliance cost passed to the consumer is the regulated-utility model. The seventy-four-page document that does not contain its own conclusion is the consulting model.

None of these arrived in Haiti through trade policy. They arrived through a telephone, at no cost, in a preinstalled news module the owner cannot remove, which is the only genuine semiconductor exposure our researchers were able to identify anywhere in this matter.

The desk notes that the transmission chain the Association submitted to the Ministry was therefore correct in structure and wrong in every particular. Semiconductors did raise the price of fritay. Not through freight, and not through landed costs. Through the distribution, at scale and at zero marginal cost, of a vocabulary for charging more.

The Unpriced Party

Our analysts close on the incidence, which is the part of the arrangement nobody invoices.

The memory manufacturers bear nothing. The technology sector that supplied the vocabulary bears nothing. The Ministry bears nothing and has now opened two investigations, the combined output of which is one additional surcharge. The vendors bear the real cost increases they cannot name, and have recovered them, which our analysts note is not nothing and is the reason this report does not treat them as the villains of it.

The cost lands on the customer, and the desk wishes to specify what it consists of, because the three hundred gourdes are the smaller half.

The larger half is the loss of the ability to tell. A customer who is told that his food costs more because oil costs more is participating in a transaction he can evaluate. He may not like it, but he can reason about it, budget against it, and know when it should end. A customer who is told that his food costs more because of a condition in a market he cannot observe, involving an input the food does not contain, has been moved into a transaction where evaluation is not available to him. He has not merely paid more. He has lost the standing to know whether he should have.

That loss is permanent, and it does not reverse when the shortage does. The next increase will also arrive with a reason, and he now has no basis for distinguishing a real one from a supplied one. Our Research Division notes that this is the actual externality in this affair: not the surcharge, which is small, but the destruction of a shared standard for what counts as an explanation — destroyed not by the vendor, who was handed the tools, but by every industry that spent a decade demonstrating that the tools work.

The vendor is charging three hundred gourdes for it. Our analysts observe that this is, by a considerable margin, the cheapest anyone has ever sold it.

Stakeholder Perspectives

Customers

Customers surveyed for this report were substantially less confused than the coverage has suggested. Most understood immediately that the memory shortage had nothing to do with their food. Several said so, in detail, and then paid. Asked why, one respondent noted that the alternative to paying was not eating, and that the argument he would need to win in order to eat for less was one he had never seen anybody win. Our researchers asked whether he found the explanation insulting. He said the explanation was fine. He said the amount was the problem, and that these were different subjects, and that only one of them was being discussed on television.

Vendors

Vendors interviewed for this report were, without exception, aware that fritay contains no semiconductors. Not one attempted the argument privately. Asked why the Association had advanced it publicly, several gave versions of the same answer, which is that the true reasons are either boring, unbelievable, or dangerous, and that the memory shortage is none of these. One operator, asked what he would have cited a year ago, said the dollar. Asked what he would cite next year, he thought about it for some time and said that whatever it is, he will hear about it before we do, because the phone tells him first.

The Ministry of Commerce

Ministry officials expressed frustration that their audit, which they regard as conclusive, changed nothing. Our Research Division agrees that the audit is conclusive and notes that it was conclusive about a question no party to the transaction was asking. Asked whether the Ministry had considered addressing the price rather than the explanation, an official noted that the Ministry has no mechanism for setting the price of griyo, has never had one, and would not survive attempting to acquire one. He then asked our researcher not to characterize this as an admission. It is not an admission. It is the constraint, and it is the reason the audit was the only instrument available.

The Memory Manufacturers

Industry representatives approached for comment reiterated that memory is not an ingredient in fried pork and expressed bewilderment that the clarification was necessary. Our analysts note that the industry has correctly identified that it is not responsible for the ingredient list and has not yet engaged with the question of what it is responsible for, which concerns the vocabulary rather than the DRAM. One representative, presented with the Association’s transmission chain, described it as absurd. Presented with his own firm’s most recent earnings commentary on constrained supply and unavoidable pricing actions, he described it as different. Asked to specify the difference, he described the call as concluded.

The Economist

The economist whose objection was priced at fifty gourdes has since declined further comment on the matter. He indicated through an intermediary that he stands by the observation that the Association’s model proves too much, that he understands it to have been received as an endorsement, and that he has spent a portion of the intervening weeks considering the general problem of arguments that are correct, decisive, and immediately usable by the party they were meant to defeat. He asked that his institutional affiliation be withheld. Our researchers note that he did not ask that the fifty gourdes be reversed, and that they have not been.

Closing Statement

At press time, a customer ordered a plate of griyo, bannann peze, and pikliz.

The vendor quoted 1,250 gourdes.

“Yesterday this was 900.”

The vendor checked his phone.

“Memory market.”

“Did memory go up again?”

“Nah.”

“Then what happened?”

The vendor turned the phone around.

A technology article announced that the memory shortage might soon improve.

He nodded gravely.

“Transition costs.”

Our Research Division notes that this is the only moment in the affair at which a vendor cited good news as grounds for an increase, and that it required no adjustment to the framework whatsoever. The reason had never been the shortage. It had been the existence of a headline, and the headline was still there.

The customer paid.

He then asked, according to our researcher, whether the price would come down when the transition was complete.

The vendor said he would have to see.

Editor’s note: Our researchers ate at eleven stands over the course of this investigation and were charged the memory surcharge at nine of them. At the tenth, the operator explained that he does not charge it because he does not follow the news. At the eleventh, the operator charged our researcher four hundred gourdes above the quoted price and, when asked why, said that our researcher was writing things down. The Research Division has classified this as the most defensible surcharge documented in this report and has reimbursed it in full.