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Choice is certainly under-rated and we take it for granted in the Western world. Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated.
by bko 11y ago
Choice is certainly under-rated and we take it for granted in the Western world.
Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated. Consumer choice may have even been a major driver in taking down centrally planned economies.
Boris Yeltsin while visiting a supermarket in Houston:
> Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.” [0]
[0] http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/ http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...
- cobweb 11y ago> Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated. And yet they were found to be price rigging in the UK.
- 13thLetter 11y agoDoes that therefore prove that having lots of choices in a supermarket is bad?
- cobweb 11y agoNo it doesn't prove it, it was just a remark.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated. Supermarket choice is often largely the illusion of choice -- the same product (substantively, and often literally, made in the same facility to the same specifications) in different packaging
- bko 11y agoPerception is reality. I'm not a psychologist but if someone is fooling themselves into thinking they're consuming a better product, so much so that they actually pay a premium for that product, who are you to say that it's not "substantially" better? The connection many people have in consumption is very personal. Imagine someone telling you their spouse is better than your own in all objective criteria. I've heard (although can't verify) that products were differentiated in the Soviet Union by where they were made. So essentially, the consumer would have a choice of "factory 1 shampoo", "factory 2 shampoo" and so on. Meaningful? Sure, but seems silly to me.
- aleh 11y agoAs for differentiation of goods in Soviet Union it went as: - made in USSR: hard to buy - made in USSR for export: takes a bribe to buy - made in Soviet block countries (DDR, Czechoslovakia): requires bribe and connections - made in Western countries: you better be high-profile member of a communist party
- amelius 11y agoIndeed. Try finding food containing little or no refined sugar in a regular supermarket. Good luck :)
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoWell, I can shop at Whole Foods instead of at Safeway. Choice isn't just what exists inside one store.
- tremendo 11y agoGo around the periphery, the "real-food", instead of all the fabricated food-like items in the aisles. ;)
- RodericDay 11y agoTo add a bit of a counter-point, seeing as I found this paragraph recently, here's a section from "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis. It's discussing the experience of Sergey Aleynikov, the Goldman Sachs hacker that later got sued, when coming to America: > He arrived in New York city in 1990 and moved into a dorm room at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, a sort of Jewish YMCA. Two things shocked him about his new home: the diversity of the people on the streets and the fantastic range of foods in the grocery stores. He took photographs of the rows and rows of sausages in Manhattan and mailed them to his mother in Moscow. "I'd never seen so many sausages," he says. But once he'd marveled at the American cornucopia, he stepped back from it all and wondered just how necessary all of this food was. > [...] > In the end he became a finicky vegetarian."
- talmand 11y agoI would say he was just a product of his environment and unconsciously defended the system he was raised in. Many people are blinded to the detriments of their surroundings because it's all they know.
- jarek 11y ago> Many people are blinded to the detriments of their surroundings because it's all they know. Exactly same argument can be used against Western-style cornucopia-of-false-choices stores, or anything else at all for that matter.