Were 1990s Russians dumbfounded when they first visited capitalist grocery stores?
100+ Answers
quora.com
Far too many to post but I'll pull out a few -
Ed Caruthers, Retired physicist and technology developer, age 70
Answered May 3, 2016
I heard a Russian Jewish couple, speaking at the Dayton, Ohio, Unitarian church, say they were almost reduced to tears by their first sight of an American grocery store. This was in 1992.
They had received sponsorship from a Jewish family in Dayton. When all the stars lined up right, they got on a plane in Russia, landed in New York City, got on another plane, and landed in Dayton. They were met at the Dayton airport by their sponsoring family who took them immediately to an apartment that had been prepared for them. This all took at least 24 hours. They were exhausted. So they went to bed and slept. When they woke up, they followed directions that had been left and went to a Meijer super store. Meijer was a northern mid-west chain. They had all the groceries you'd expect, plus clothes, furniture, pharmacy, hardware, ... Think Walmart but brighter.
The husband said he walked into the store completely unprepared for the wealth of food just sitting there, waiting for anyone who wanted to buy it. I think he said there were more lemons on one shelf than he'd seen in his whole previous life. He had to go outside and walk around for a few minutes to compose himself.
Zbigniew Lobocki, history geek
Answered Mar 22
Yes. My mother was a visiting scientist in the US National Institute of Health in the early 90’s, we lived in Bethesda for 6 years.
During that time, several scientists from Russia came with visits to her lab or for conferences, my mom would invite them to dinner at our house and also show them around - take them out shopping, stuff like that.
Dumbfounded is a good description of how they felt when they visited capitalist stores. In order to understand them better, you should know what a socialist store was like.
First of all - there were no true supermarkets. Just smaller stores, like a grocery store or a vegetable stand. The capitals had slighlty bigger general stores, but none really with the scope of a big supermarket.
Second - the stores constantly were understocked. It was not uncommon to come into a store only to see completely empty shelves, or shelves filled with just one product like vinegar which happened to be “in supply”
Because goods were in very short supply, people lined up in long queues hoping that they would get their share before stuff runs out:
Also, you couldn’t just buy how much you wanted - your purchases were limited to a certain amount, so if you were lucky and among the first in line you could get a bag of sugar, a bag of flour, bit of meat, etc. - but never in large quantities.
Third, the majority of products in stores were poor quality products of the socialist industry. Especially clothing, perfume, electronics, etc.
Fourth - the service was awful. The stores were state owned, people working there got salaries regardless of how much they sold. In addition, because of supply problems, they could play favorites and reward certain customers with access to goods, etc. Because of this, they often treated customers like dirt - I guess your worst service experiences at institutions such as the DMV might be somewhat comparable.
So imagine that your ENTIRE shopping experience (your whole life) is queing up for hours at small stores to hope for limited amounts of fairly basic foods or substandard indutrial products, while dealing with rude staff that look down on you, and constantly worrying that what you want to buy will run out before you get your share.
You are told by all media and the government that this is normal, your country is prosperous and people are better of than in the West (where the capitalists live off the misery and poverty of the working class).
Then you come to an American supermarket. Hard to reconcile, isn’t it?
------
Ed Post, former Sr. Software Engineer at Qualcomm (1998-2013)
Answered Nov 24, 2016
We vacationed in Russia in 1990, during the 23rd (and, it turned out, last) Communist Party Congress.
Our translator and guide in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was a fascinating person, totally devoted to learning as much about the English language as possible. So we invited her to come to the US for the summer.
As soon as she got here, we went on a road trip to Portland. We stopped in to a diner next to the interstate. It had one of those circular display cases full of pies. She stared at it for a while, then asked if she could just have pie for lunch. We said “sure, you’re in America, eat whatever you want”. So she had five slices of pie.
We got to Portland Oregon, settled in. We needed to get something at Sears, so we took Natasha along. We walked through the door that was right in front of a table piled to overflowing with Clearance Sale blue jeans. She just stood there for a while crying. Because, she managed to explain, If there were blue jeans for sale in Russia, a line around the block would immediately form and they’d be gone in a half an hour. You wouldn’t worry about whether you could get your own size, someone in the family could probably put them on or you could trade them for something else on the black market.
-----------
Tim Worstall, former Journalist
Answered Jul 4, 2016
Kevin Spinks refers to the bread manager incident in London. It was a little different. He asked who was the manager of bread supply for London. And was astonished to be told no one.
I lived and worked in Moscow from the end of Soviet times through most of the 90s. I recall the immense change that came when Yeltsin abolished food price controls. It took about 6 weeks. But food suddenly seemed to sprout from every corner of the economy. It wasn’t that more was being grown, but that now it had real value less of it was rotting and perishing before people could eat it.
And I do still remember a trip to the US. I’m English and American supermarkets, back then at least, were impressive even to us. But I’d lived in the US before so knew what to expect. But I’d been in Moscow a couple of years and acclimatised to the Russian (this would be just post-Soviet) ways.
Jet lag hit me and I ended up at 5 am or so wandering through a King Super (I think?) in Boulder CO. Astonished me all over again. Even now, 25 years later, I can see in my mind’s eye the serried ranks of potato chips stretching away to what seemed like the horizon.
And one more little story. Around the back of the Lubyanka was the special store for the KGB guys (this was common Soviet practice, special stores for certain groups of people). After the liberalisation this became a regular supermarket and they did a deal with Tesco for products. For the time they had an astonishing range of goods.
That range was about what you would find in a Tesco city centre shop now today. Not a supermarket, more a convenience store. And about the same size overall too. 100 metres square? 200 maybe, but no more than that.
Recall, this was the special store for the secret police before. And it was by our standards tiny and the stock of an average convenience store was a very large step up.
------------
Elaine Rockney, Living life
Answered Oct 17, 2016
My dad worked with a Russian gentleman - we’ll call him Joe. Joe’s father was allowed to visit Joe in the U.S. Joe’s mother had to stay in the USSR, reportedly so that her husband would not defect while in the U.S.
Joe took his father to a grocery store. His father insisted that the store was faked by the U.S. government, and that he had been warned that the U.S. would do this. They left and Joe brought his father to another store. The father still insisted it was fake, since Joe had driven there. So Joe told his father to point out any directions he liked and Joe would drive according to his father’s whim. Of course, they passed other grocery stores and finally stopped and went into another one. Joe’s father finally understood the abundance available to people in the U.S. and he cried.
It was powerful to hear this story when I was growing up - and to appreciate the abundance.
----------
Mike Farr, Owner at Think.build (2016-present)
Updated Jun 4
In the 1980’s I went to U.C. Berkeley where all my professors castigated the evils of capitalism and expounded the certainty that social and economic justice could only be achieved through some form of socialism. They were elite scholars. They knew.
In the early 2000’s I met a lawyer who represented several Russian space technology companies. I believe he was instrumental in the agreements that led to the use of Soyuz rockets to resupply the ISS after the Space Shuttle was retired. The shuttle was complicated but Soyuz was simple. Light it and it goes to space. An elegant design.
My friend told the story of bringing his secretary from Moscow to act as interpreter to a meeting in New York. On the way home from the airport he realized that they had nothing for breakfast so they stopped in at a supermarket. His secretary walked around as if in a daze and eventually broke down sobbing. I asked about that to be sure and he was not kidding, hysterical tears. They were all concerned. “What’s the matter? What can we do?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “Yesterday I stood in line for 4 hours in the snow for two apples for my boys and you have 27 kinds of food for cats.”
———
Clarification: I met my friend the lawyer in Russia in the 2000’s but the story he told was from the early 90s, right after the Soviet Union fell. His job was to represent/market Russian technology firms like Zvesda and NPO Machinistroyonia. By the time I got to visit Moscow in the 2000s the transformation had been underway for 10 years, and I was assured by residents that the Change was astounding. It was already looking very much like any European capital. I did come back the next year and traveled in the countryside where the changes were much slower to arrive and it was still possible to see how life had been before. I grew up during the Cold War era, then learned a different narrative in college. Then I went and saw for myself.
-------------
Kasia Ser, Entrepreneur
Updated Aug 4
My experience isn't from Russia but from Poland during the 80s. I grew up in a city and there was this store called Pewex where you could buy American products like food, alcohol and toys with US dollars. Very few had access to dollars, only the very rich or connected, so the store was very small, usually empty and had a security guard at the entrance. I passed it on my way to the city center few times per week and would always linger in front of the window for few minutes, oftentimes with other people doing the same.
What I remember the most were the colors! They were so beautiful and exotic. In Poland at that time everything was bland. There was no competition so there was no need for marketing. Hence the packaging and the product, when available, didn't need to woo anybody, just simply serve its purpose.
But not in Pewex. The colors were so rich…otherworldly. I remember seeing neon pink for the first time, I didn't even think such thing could exist! Even the packaging was luxurious. The boxes were solid with crisp edges and sometimes cellophane windows that revealed what's inside and sooo beautifuly colored. Such stark contrast to the bleak shapeless sensory deprivation that was everyday life at the time.
When I was 7, my mom somehow got me a juice box, just one small one, for my birthday. It was from the US and she got it from a friend of a friend. I treasured it! It was few months before I dared to drink it. And even after, I kept the box and the straw and kept refilling it with tea and drinking from it until eventually disintegrated. To this day I remember how that juice tasted and exactly how that box looked.
It's hard to explain how I could be so fired up about quality packaging but if you ever went through a period of deprivation and know how amazing something looks/tastes/feels once you have it, you understand. Seeing those products and those colors in that store kept me believing that there was an amazing world out there somewhere and I couldn't wait to get there.
Typical scene in Poland during my childhood, people lining up to purchase something. There would usually be only one delivery every few days and only a small quantity of one item would be delivered. For example 200 units of butter, that's it. People would start the que in the middle of night so that they could get their ration of butter before the store ran out. You might not be able to get your ration of bread for few more days.
Shelves of a Polish meat store during communism. The sign on the wall says “the government cares for the people.” ...
-----------------
Alexey Tereshchenko, a Russian
Answered May 26
Once, when I was 5 or 6 years old (so it was in 1984 or 1985), we were walking with my mother, when suddenly she saw a long queue for bananas. She did not like to make her son stand in queues, but she wanted to let me taste bananas. We stood for two hours in the queue (I was a very patient and obedient child), and she told me how tasty this fruit is. The man who stood in the queue right before us bought the last bunch of bananas. There were no more.
Since that day, I became very interested in bananas. One could see them in some Soviet cartoons. They were so beautiful, long and yellow. I tried to imagine their taste. I thought it would be similar to how oranges tasted, just sweeter perhaps. When I finally tasted them, I was shocked how different they were from what I’d fancied. But I loved them. In general, since my early days I loved fruit.
My first taste of bananas was in 1988, when I was aged 9. My father, who became a businessman, approached somebody in the collapsing Soviet trade system and brought home a whole box of bananas. So suddenly there were a lot.
And when I was 10, my father took me on trip to England. And fruit stands became the greatest cultural shock in my whole life.
I just could not imagine how it was possible. You could just casually, walking on the street, actually buy bananas! and oranges! and grapefruits! and even a thing unheard of, the divine fruit called pineapple! Father took a photo of me with such a fruit stand so that people back home would believe us it was real.
And grocery stores, of course. I was never a fan of sausages but hey, fifty different kinds of cheese? In Moscow in the late Gorbachev years, cheese was impossible to buy at all. I hadn’t seen cheese in Moscow for three years. Here, it was a different world.
In February 1989, the whole USSR went crazy about Escrava Isaura (Isaura the Slave), a very beautiful Brazilian TV series about 19th-century Brazil. For a month, nothing else was discussed in the whole country. My mother’s friend used this possibility to show her 8-year-old daughter things she was never able to show her in real life: You see, Anya, this is a banana. And this is a pineapple. Her daughter answered with contempt: Of course they are not real! They are stuffed! The child could not imagine that there was a place in the world, even Brazil, where they do have real fruit.
EDIT: I just understood I should add one more story.
As a child, I loved to read O. Henry. In one of his novellas, two people travel illegally from Latin America to the United States on a cargo ship belonging to the United Fruit Company and feed on bananas during their trip. It was my dream. I was obsessed with that cargo ship.
quora.com |
