It’s an old saw. If you watch that old Nostradamus movie, Orson Wells bemoans (or, more accurately, the writer bemoans) the number of toothpaste brands on the shelf and how modern life has given us too many choices. Pining for the good ol’ USSR.
In 1976, Viktor Ivanovich Belenko flew his MiG-25 Foxbat under the radar and out of the Soviet Far East to a US airbase in Japan, for which he was made a citizen by act of Congress. You can read an account of his first visit to a shopping center here.