A neighbor in Buffalo had a relative visit from Latvia in the late 80's. She walked into a Wegman's, the huge produce section first. She stared for a minute, and asked, "Is it like this every day?"
Boris Yeltsin had a similar experience when he visited a Randalls grocery store near Houston, TX in 1989.
While on the way to the airport, Yeltsin decided to take an unannounced visit to a grocery store. Yeltsin said that he wanted to visit a typical store in order to see what the average American shopping experience was like. The group decided to visit Randalls.
During his visit, Yeltsin inspected the product selection in the store and tried free samples of cheese and produce. According to the manager on duty at the time, Yeltsin was very interested in the frozen food section, and a picture of Yeltsin looking at a selection of Pudding Pops was widely republished. He was astonished by the selection available in the store, which he was told offered about 30,000 unique products, and expressed disbelief that such a store was available to residents outside of major urban areas like New York City.
Following the grocery store visit, Yeltsin and his entourage flew to Miami, their final location before returning to the Soviet Union. During the flight, Yeltsin was in a state of shock regarding the grocery store and remained speechless for a long time.
Yeltsin commented that if people in the Soviet Union were aware of the quality of the average American grocery store, "there would be a revolution", further saying that "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev."
He later wrote in his autobiography, "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. 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."
Viktor Belenko, the MiG-25 pilot who defected to the west in 1976 had his eyes opened.
Belenko’s first stop was an aircraft carrier, where things looked suspicious to him. At dinner, the sailors were allowed to serve themselves as much as they wanted. That didn’t make any sense. To test the system, after filling his plate, he returned to the line and filled another plate. No one paid any attention to him, and now he had two meals in front of him.
Well, sure, maybe the military fed their men well… but surely all the other citizens were starving, as he’d been told was inevitable without communism? His first visit to a supermarket sought to answer that question. He was surprised by all the food but even more surprised by how the place was (from his perspective) basically empty of people. Why wasn’t the place crowded, like any Soviet store would when they had goods in stock? Maybe people couldn’t afford any of this food?
"Thirty or forty different varieties; milk, butter, eggs, more than he had ever seen in any one place; the meat counter, at least twenty meters long, with virtually every kind of meat in the world-wrapped so you could take it in your hand, examine, and choose or not; labeled and graded as to quality. A date stamped on the package to warn when it would begin to spoil!..."
“…Never had Belenko been in a closed market selling meat or produce that did not smell of spoilage, of unwashed bins and counters, of decaying, unswept remnants of food. Never had he been in a market offering anything desirable that was not crowded inside, with lines waiting outside. Always he had been told that the masses of exploited [U.S. citizens] lived in the shadow of hunger and that pockets of near starvation were widespread, and he had seen photographs that seemed to demonstrate that.”
“If this were a real store, a woman in less than an hour could buy enough food in just this one place to feed a whole family for two weeks. But where are the people, the crowds, the lines? Ah, that proves it. This is not a real store, The people can't afford it. If they could, everybody would be here. It's a showplace of the Dark Forces. But what do they do with all the meat, fruit and vegetables, milk, and everything else that they can't keep here all the time? They must take it away for themselves every few nights and replace it.”
My daughter had the same experience with a Russian exchange student. When she walked into her first Walmart she was stunned!