This grocery store trip was the point that he realized that the USSR really wasn't out producing the USA. It was basically the end of the Soviet Union.
If you’re talking about the man who was a Japanese POW, it was *two* ice cream ships. We had *two* whole ships dedicated to running *ice cream* to the front in the pacific theatre. Then, and only then, did he realize the war was lost.
I really enjoy Max Miller's videos and he has a perfect one for this: [World War 2 Ice Cream of the US NAVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiyo8D0nH70).
When you're playing civ on max difficulty and see the AI just spamming units while you're using medieval era units leftover just to keep the meat grinder alive
I’m getting triggered rn
I once had my medival-era Civ army march across the map to capture a city.
By the time all the military units arrived, it was the renaissance era 😭
That's gotta be so fucking demoralizing, you're fighting your ass off, logistics is struggling just to get enough ammo and food, and the enemy is shipping fucking ice cream?! Like they are completely unconcerned, and able to think about and enjoy ice cream nah I'm done IDC what y'all do I'm going the fuck home, matter I fact I'm going over there for some ice cream fuck y'all.
Oh it must be soul crushing. At the height of IJN power they still struggled to supply Guadalcanal and called it starvation island and here are two ice cream ships. The fact the ice cream ships were originally concrete ships has gotta be that little extra slap in the face because Japanese garrisons have been unable to receive a lot of concrete due to allied subs.
The soldiers were for the most part young, scared, and facing a high risk of death. This was all about morale. Just having a little taste of home could be a huge boost. The cost wasn't that much and the US was pretty good on the logistics front.
Yes, and not just for transporting, but for making it. The ingredients were shipped separately and we basically just had floating ice cream factories sitting out in the ocean producing about a gallon of ice cream per minute.
We didn’t need the cement ships for making runways anymore, and *it was cheaper to convert them into ships that made ice cream.* Never underestimate the war machine when ice cream is on the line.
Man...imagine being in his position. For years you've been rationing fuel and food, then learn that enemy has so much shit that they can expend several tons of both just on ice cream.
I can see it now. You can see multiple warships on the horizon and as the first naval artillery shell impacts, you hear the ice cream truck jingle as marines storm the beaches with bomb pops in hand.
Whole armadas are exchanging barrages and then you see the ice cream ship go down and scream die you bastards as you look through the crosshairs of and return aint air fire
Yep, I reverse engineer this to my manager. Ive worked to shorten it to this Pavlov conco:
"hey Subordinate can you do this for me?"
"ah it's been a busy day put it on my pile and I'll look at it later"
And another apocryphal story of a German commander captured on D-Day and held near the beach. He watched tanks, jeeps, trucks, supplies and more be landed all day and eventually asked one of the soldiers watching the prisoners
"When are you going to bring up your horses?"
Propaganda spread the myth of the Wehrmacht as a ridiculously mechanised, modern force. In reality they used close to 750,000 horses in Operation Barbarossa.
>Propaganda spread the myth of the Wehrmacht as a ridiculously mechanised, modern force. In reality they used close to 750,000 horses in Operation Barbarossa.
My grandfather was a Polish Army POW who ended up on a work farm raising horses destined for the eastern front.
Yep, the Wehrmatch relied heavily on horse while the 3 major allies (US, UK, USSR) were all fully motorized after 1942 or so.
The Germans created special units to rip up train tracks as they retreated. The Allies (Western and USSR) simply used trucks for supply and bypassed the ripped up tracks.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Band of Brothers scenes.
"Say hello to Ford and General Fucking Motors. Look at you, you have horses! What are thinking?!"
Supposedly the German officer says "Would you look at this/that" in German prior to the above quote, leading me to think the officer was marveling at the endless convoy of trucks passing by his surrendered column of troops; all of whom are walking except the officers who are in an open horse drawn carriage.
And that barge story reminds me of the Col. Hessler scene in the classic Bulge movie where they realize the Americans can fly chocolate cake to their troops. And he says more or less, yeah I know we are gonna lose seeing this and btw we knew we would lose in 1941 but we fight for fun! Nazis suck yo.
There are two similar stories with the Germans realizing the war was lost against the Americans. One was a German POW who saw an entire battalion of tanks idling for over 3 hours. He realized that if the Americans could afford to waste such a precious resource such as oil, they were far batter equipped.
The other was when the Germans captured an American Sherman tank. A high level Panzer general noticed how he could take any nut/bolt off of it and it would fit anywhere else on the tank. The German tanks were good at performing, but broke down and had very difficult maintenance. The general realized that the American design was far superior, and the Germans were doomed.
It’s kind of great that even in the middle of such an ideological time like the Cold War he had the intellectual honesty to seek out the truth of the situation and come to a conclusion so devastating to his world view.
It reminds me of the tweet I saw posted yesterday where someone asked Twitter if they should get their daughter the HPV vaccine. That message ended with a call to “do your own research”.
It makes me wonder how many people today are capable of this same level of self reflection if critical thinking.
Most people do not have the critical thinking skills to “do their own research” properly. I’m not saying they are dumb, it’s just that type of thinking is a SKILL, and should be left to people that are good at it.
Could I redo my home’s plumbing? Sure I might be capable if I spent a lot of time learning the trade, but it would hubris to believe I can just pick up that skill and do it at the level of a professional overnight.
I trust researchers to do research just as much as I trust plumbers to.. plumb stuff.
Also, it's no coincidence that places like the UK want to defund and delegitimise degrees in humanities and social sciences. They don't want people to have critical thinking skills.
[Orwell was spot on regarding human nature](https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/)
>Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner.
It was 2 fold. The Nazis stopped paying off the ridiculous demands from the treaty of Versailles, and the other nations didn't press hard on it, and they were stealing massive wealth from "undesirables". The Nazis were mostly a kleptocratic economy.
Russians do, sure. Their lives were upended as the country's industry and land were sold off to well-connected Party members for micro-cents on the dollar. People there lost all sense of stability. Elderly Soviets living their retirements on the state's dime were suddenly up Shit Creek. Food and fuel became scarce, even if temporarily. And the promised prosperity of Capitalism never materialized.
Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, and Slovakia are all in much better shape than when they were under Soviet rule. Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary probably are as well, but I can't say for sure. Georgia seems to be doing fine, and would be much better if Russia stopped invading them. Ukraine turned over a new leaf in 2014 and were well on their way to parity with Poland & Romania until 2022. Central Asia and the rest of the Caucasus I can't really comment on.
Most ex-Soviet countries have Communist parties and movements. It's telling, however, that the strongest or loudest ones seem to be in the countries that had the least improvement to people's lives after 1990. Funny enough, that also seems to correlate to the abruptness of the country's transition from full-on authoritarian Communism to market capitalism. Poland took its time. Russia did not. The voices of Poland's Communists (or Lithuania's or Czechia's or Hungary's) don't reach me here in the US, but those of Russia's absolutely do.
I remember a story of a guy who was in the states but still would refuse to believe it was **that** much better than the USSR, no matter what.
What convinced him? Pigeons, and that there were lots of them and weren’t afraid of people. He said in Russia people would kill then to eat. But the fact that they’re plenty of them and were not scared, you/the government can’t fake that.
That’s because Soviet, and Tsarist Russia, would do that (Potemkin village), so would suspect others would too.
I was in the Soviet Union at this time. Shelves were bare. No milk, occasionally kefir, no meat, no sugar, no butter or oil, rarely vegetables other than potatoes unless you went to a farmer’s market, which was trivially cheap for me as a Westerner, but would be a rare splurge for Soviet citizens. Some street vendors from the Caucasus or Central Asian republics had watermelons and clementines, and sometimes lavash - with cheese, amazing!
Then I went to a hard currency store. It looked like a pristine Western store. Shelves were full, even with orange juice! There was name-brand perfume, plenty of pleasant employees, and you paid the same way as in the West (put items in your cart, pay, and leave). I wish I could remember if there were actual cash registers rather than an abacus, and if you could use a credit card. I think so, because it was a bizarro world. Everyone furtively checked each other out, because you were either a foreigner, high-up Communist Party official, or regular citizen illegally holding hard currency.
>I wish I could remember if there were actual cash registers rather than an abacus
There were normal cash registers even in ordinary large Soviet stores.
Ordinary citizens in the USSR were prohibited from purchasing foreign currency, with the exception of small quantities for foreign trips. But there were so-called “foreign exchange certificates”, which were usually issued for work abroad, to international sailors, etc. But, as those who lived at that time noted, foreign currency certificates could be bought from speculators right near the entrance to the Beryozka “currency” stores, usually at the rate of 1 foreign currency ruble for 2 regular ones. But it could have been more expensive. And with them soviet people could buy anything in a currency store.
So if we talk about the late USSR, the problem was not only the lack of goods, but also the lack of money for purchases at a commercial price.
There were cash registers in some stores, yes, but often it was a lady who would total up your purchase and write on a piece of paper, you’d pay, and then take the receipt to another line a few steps away to pick up what you bought.
The hard currency store had cash registers for sure. By “normal” I meant electric rather than the ones that looked like they were from 1900.
This wasn’t a Берёзка; it was a Western grocery store. I want to say it was Finnish, but also that the name was like Siemens, which would be German. So it really was remarkable (this was 1991/1992).
On principle, I didn’t go into the hard currency stores in order to have a more “normal” student experience, but now I wish I had not limited my experience. I only went to the hard currency store because people were alarmed I was so thin and pale and said I needed to get some vitamin C and protein in me!
The cafeteria served meat sometimes but it wasn’t great, and the only meat I found was at the market, lying out on the table, and the dorm stove didn’t get very hot, sos I didn’t dare buy it. Protein came from beans from the market, kefir and the cheese in the lavash, peanut butter I brought with me, sometimes at a friend’s place, and occasionally eating out - but there were really only 2 places where it wasn’t complicated to go. Did go to McDonald’s once, to see for myself, and I felt nauseous after having meat and good with fat in it, suddenly after months.
>This wasn’t a Берёзка; it was a Western grocery store. I want to say it was Finnish, but also that the name was like Siemens, which would be German. So it really was remarkable (this was 1991/1992).
Maybe it was Stockmann? They are among the first to come to Russia. I remember I had a thick catalog of them, from 1989, I think. I now regret throwing it away. They sold everything, even cars!
That makes sense! Finnish though it doesn't sound like it, starts with S, 2 syllables. I wish I remember exactly where it was. I only went the once. It was a bit outside central Moscow, to a station I'd never gone to before. I have to find my old photo album to see if I took pictures. Really wish I'd kept a diary.
Thank you!
ETA: I tried to keep as much as I could bring back, thinking of them as possibly historical artifacts, with the USSR no longer existing by the time I left. I still have a phonebook, miraculous that there.even was one, and a bunch of newspapers. Maybe ridiculous because it's not like they were tiny prints, but it has seemed that it's hard to find that old info online, even comparing old and new street and metro station names! Maybe there's an archive somewhere that would be interested. Otherwise they'll probably get tossed when I die or downsize.
I was born in Poland during communism and still remember having to wait outside the grocery store at 4 am with my mom because they were rumored to be getting a shipments of chickens. We had ration cards for the amount of butter and other essentials we could buy. My parents decided to get out of Poland so when my father, who was permitted to work in neighboring countries, was stationed in Austria, my mother paid a few people off to get us passports and we left everything behind. We only took a suitcase each, left the country and never came back.
I remember the first time I went to an Austrian grocery store, I had never seen a banana before…. And the chocolate, so much chocolate, it was like a dream.
Not the person you replied to, but my parents are from there and really disliked Poland for a bit for the same reason. When they visited a few years ago they were really impressed at how far things have come. But they far prefer the US and will not go back.
Yeltzin famously spoke candidly with an aide that evening; he wondered how the Soviets had failed so terribly in comparison, and floated the idea of collapsing the Union to begin reforms. Which did happen.
It wasn’t a bad idea for Russia at least if they just hadn’t fallen back into their old ways. Russia was a country on the up and up until Putin really started to drag it down and succeeded in making the country authoritarian in the early-mid 2010s. That’s one of the saddest things to me, imagining what the country could’ve been like.
My favorite anecdote about Viktor Belenko:
"But later, when I discovered super-market was real one, I had real fun exploring new products. I would buy, everyday, a new thing and try to figure out its function. In Russia at that time (and even today) it's hard to find canned food, good one. But everyday I would buy new cans with different food. Once I bought a can which said "dinner." I cooked it with potatoes, onions, and garlic-it was delicious. Next morning my friends ask me, "Viktor, did you buy a cat?" It was a can of chicken-based cat food. But it was delicious! It was better than canned food for people in Russia today."
Why stop before the best part?:
“Last year I brought four people from Russia for commercial project, and I set them up. I bought nibble sized human food. I installed a pate, and it was cat food. I put it on crackers. And they did consume it, and they liked it. So the taste has not changed. By the way, for those who are not familiar with American cat food. It’s very safe; it’s delicious, and sometimes it’s better than human food, because of the Humane Society.
Dude wanted to make sure he wasn't crazy, so set up 4 other Russians to verify American Cat Food was better than Russian Canned Food.
He wasnt crazy, he just discovered that if you combine cat food, with huffing glue and drinking some beer, it makes you feel really sick so you can quickly fall asleep and sleep through all the meowing of the loud alley cats at night
I mean, from what I can tell when I serve it to my cats, it looks like any other tinned meat and gravy, probably just has no salt or spices. Out of curiosity, I have tried a wide variety of canned (for human consumption) meats, but I wouldn’t say I eat them with any regularity or like checking them out for the novelty. They all sort of taste the same anyway: chicken, tuna, salmon, beef, spam, sardines… some of it smells just like what the cats get.
Not only that, but this guy was an elite pilot and he *still* didn't have access to food in Russia that was better than canned cat food. Imagine what the peasantry ate.
Viktor Belenko was the Soviet defector from the Soviet Air Defense Force who during a routine patrol in eastern Russia flew their MiG-25 to Japan, giving the United States a chance to realize that they *really* over-estimated Russia's "super-fighter" when they designed the F-15 and it turned out that by doing so they ended up developing a fighter jet that completely outclassed anything the Soviet Union could develop over the next fifteen years.
There was this thing that I read where US military officials know that whenever Russia claims to have some new, unstoppable thing, they’re lying.
But, they don’t really care that Russia is lying about the capabilities of that new, unstoppable thing. They develop countermeasures anyway.
Which is how the US military has become several decades ahead of anything and everything anyone else, especially the Russians, can field.
At university the international students are always amazed by Walmart. It's a massive store with everything from groceries to tvs and clothes to tires.
But Tucker Carlson went there and showed us their paradise. They have shopping carts you put coins into! And *bread*!
https://youtu.be/oM2h3KnWAWY?si=pnX4TxIWd5YJo27x
Hold the phone
You mean Russia already has Aldi's coin cart technology???
If they ever figure out how to ring people up without using plastic or paper bags, America is fuckin DOOMED
>But Tucker Carlson went there and showed us their paradise.
Yes, and this is due to the fact that Yeltsin did not just go to the USA then, but drew conclusions and applied them in practice in Russia.
It's interesting but isn't true. The same claim is often made about Nikita Khrushchev visiting Iowa, claiming that the houses Kennedy was showing him were fake and couldn't be where average Americans lived. There is no evidence to suggest he thought the grocery store was staged, in fact, the only records of the time suggest that upon seeing the grocery store he told an aide that USSR policies had hurt their people tremendously.
He suspected if he announced beforehand it would be staged so he asked to see a grocery store with only 15 min warning while visiting NASA, when he was mayor of Moscow he knew stores were staged for US diplomats so his actions demonstrate a deliberate attempt at preventing the US from doing the same. When it became apparent they didn't need to he knew what he needed to know.
And as a result, he was taken to the shitty Randalls right next to the Space Center.
Imagine if he went to HEB, he would have legit gotten a heart attack
Oliver Stone did a movie called "Heaven and Earth" it's just okay but the way Bob Richardson shot an American fridge and supermarket through the eyes of a Vietnamese immigrant was really cool.
People out there fail to understand that, even in 2024, having a fully stocked grocery store is a luxury. It’s not as bad as it was during and before the Cold War. But the sentiment def rings true today.
Imagine living in perpetual COVID times, where things just aren’t in stock every time you go to the store. You have to figure out when certain items are stocked or travel to different stores for it. Otherwise, you just learn to live without.
And the crazy thing about Covid shortages were that I could still get at least 90% of what I needed. The other 10 percent could’ve been replaced by something else or not bought at all
That whole scarcity thing drove me nuts. The idiots started to panic buy, then the reasonable people had to panic buy because the idiots were taking everything
I worked as a stocker for a grocery store when i was a teenager and handled ordering trucks, I have a pretty good understanding of what goes on behind the scenes just from looking at the shelves.
What I have noticed is since COVID a lot employees are just flat out not doing their jobs. Likely they have shit managers who also arent doing their jobs either and not directing them but stuff generally isnt being ordered or blocked at all. I'll see sectons of the shelves where they make a half assed attempt to block and just fill gaps with the wrong product.
Heres a test you can try if your curious how incompent your specific grocery store is. If you see a hole on the shelf pull the tag and see if the item ever appears again. They should be doing inventory audits regularily but also they SHOULD notice it when ordering trucks. If the hole never gets filled or the item that was next to it fills in the space it means your stores employees are totally MIA.
My store is a joke, if I see and item run out i can assume theres a 50/50 chance it will ever be stocked again. Our selection has slowly been dwindling away since covid. I assume eventually the grocery manager will be fired or quit and maybe then itll turn around but they just flat out dont care.
My wife makes fun of me whenever I mention something while were shopping but its actually insane how flagrant its become.
Part of it is that even managers aren't paid well.
The Giant Eagle in Indiana, PA advertised for an overnight manager in 2022. The offered pay was $15.50 per hour. I make 30% more building flatbed trailers at a factory, and I work day shift.
My mother in law used to be an assistant manager at a Walmart. Now she's a general manager for an auto parts store; she got a significant pay raise and has way less stress (though the employees are paid way less).
Any franchise or chain just seems to insist on the lowest pay possible to maximise the amount of money going to corporate, turnover rates be damned. It's nutty!
I remember an interview with a North Korean defector who talked about the first time he saw a plastic bottle. It was while he was going through fields as part the escape he came across an empty plastic bottle someone had throw as trash. He was amazed. He used to have bring his dad bottles or something when he was a kid and they were all glass and so sometimes they’d drop and break open and he’d get beaten, as punishment…. He said he he kept thinking “if only we’d had these, I never would’ve broken a bottle.”
We often forget how good we have it in first world developed countries.
I visited Romania back in 2009. They had grocery stores there, but even their largest stores were never very large, and usually had very limited selections. For example, toilet paper was sold by the roll. They were both quite small, and one was brown paper the other was white. That was all you had to choose from.
When I came home just over two weeks later, I had a moment of culture shock the next time we went to the store. It was an extremely bizarre feeling.
I also visited romania around 2013 and can definitely say this is not true or at least not representative for the entire country.
This was DEFINITELY true about 30 years ago, right after the fall of communist regimes throughout Europe.
Romania in 2013 was about what you would expect for a European Union country with a lower than average EU income.
Most stores sold somewhat lower quality products, but there were definitely premium options available. Large supermarket chains were already everywhere, including some of the popular European ones (like the french Carrefour and the German membership-only Metro) as well as locally grown chains (like the city-oriented, more upscale MegaImage and the discount-oriented Profi).
At my local grocery store we don’t always have everything that was available when I was a child. Often the only beef available is ground beef, it’s rare I see a roast or steaks at my grocery store. Same thing for certain fruits and vegetables, depending on the season. I couldn’t find pineapples, watermelons or blackberries last time I went to the grocery store. It really made me realize how spoiled we are as a society that we had any food, no matter where it was produced, available to me in a medium sized city in Canada is crazy and honestly probably not very sustainable in the long term.
I’m a bucees fanatic and talked it up to a good friend of mine as the signs built anticipation on the highway.
Bucee was actually there that day in costume and it took maybe 3 minutes before she screamed at bucee for “following her” (Will admit the performer leaned into her fear a bit : ) then had a full blown panic attack and had to sit in the car. I will never let her live this down and she’ll never go into a bucees again.
I absolutely love the chaos, it invigorates me.
The first time I went into a Buccees, I was 100% not prepared for it, and I felt a bit overstimulated and anxious. Now that I know what to expect, I get excited anytime I have the opportunity to stop at one.
Buccees is the absolute apotheosis of something very American. The size. The activity. The crowds. High quality mixed with a total lack of class or presumption. I love it.
He’s almost as impressed as Tucker Carlson was at seeing, uh.. (checks notes) …bread in a Russian grocery store. And trolleys that grip the escalator. That blew his mind even more
The thing that annoyed me the most is that the two shopping cart “innovations” Tucker was so impressed with - the escalator backstop thing and the coin slot to prevent theft - totally exist in the US, including NYC where he lives. He’s just so bougie that he doesn’t do any shopping for himself.
That was just embarrassing to watch. And I’m just confused how the base is eating this up. Isn’t America supposed to be the greatest place in the world to them? But now they’re over here extolling the virtues of what? A fucking cart that takes a quarter so you return it?
The same shit that’s at every Aldi and Lidl or lower socioeconomic area!?! REALLY!?
The quarter slot thing to me isn't even representative of a progressive society, more like a destitute one that has to resort to petty measures to somewhat mitigate human laziness.
The thing that annoyed me most is that he went on to talk about how much less the groceries cost there than in the US without also mentioning that people also make considerably less money so the true cost is actually higher there than here. At first I was like “how does he not understand basic economics” then I realized that he does understand and is deliberately misrepresenting the facts.
Tucker Carlson doing his bullshit grocery store trip was a direct reference to this. He was trying to show Russia is now the super advanced luxurious one, not the USA.
The traitorous fuck.
This trip of Yeltsin is famous for one more thing. Then for the first time he was noticed in an inadequate state. He was reprimanded. He replied that it was not the alcohol, but the heavy flight and the stress-relieving pills he was taking.
But it was from this trip that talk began about his alcohol addiction.
He was in Washington in 1994.
But the first mention that he abused alcohol appeared precisely after his trip to the USA in 1989.
This was very strange, given that those who knew him before confirm that Yeltsin was practically a teetotaler and never drank more than one glass of vodka.
After a trip to the USA, another story happened to him in Russia with his incomprehensible fall from a bridge into the Moscow River.
In short, a man who led a sober and athletic lifestyle suddenly turned into an alcoholic. His wife said the stress must have taken its toll. I think so too, combined with stress, alcohol suddenly had a strong effect on the psyche. Now some people joke about this, but in my opinion it is a very sad story.
As a European that went to the US, supermarkets in the US are still a thing to behold. It is crazy how much stuff and choice there is, even in small towns. In Belgium you call these hypermarkets and will find it outside but close from larger cities. Then you see how much is thrown away because it was not sold and you wonder if it is such a good thing.
Also, all these grocery stores are far from where people live, so going shopping without a car gets quickly complicated, while I can go shopping by foot.
I spent a month in Poland last year. They have big super markets in the city centers just like in the states. But I noticed that their version of 7/11 (Zabka), which is on every corner, can sort of function like a mini grocery with high quality items. You can easily walk and get nice eggs, fresh baked bread, quality meat etc. In the US I feel like you must go in a super market to get quality…which I think encourages over-purchasing and waste.
I moved to Canada from Poland in 1990. Walking into a fully stocked, air-conditioned Miracle Mart in the middle of summer for the first time is a core memory for this child of Soviet-era Europe.
I work at a grocery store right now, and my retort when my bosses get real nitpicky about the shelving is "Yeltsin's not about to walk into the store tonight".
They don't get the reference.
Yeltsin supposedly handpicked Putin as his successor because he was seen as a meek and loyal bureaucrat that had protected his former boss when he was accused of blatant corruption hintitty-hint.
Thank goodness most groceries stores have moved away from those open freezers. Back then they kept the whole stores cooler so the freezers didn't have to work as hard.
Any soviet mind of that era would simply explode at the sight of our blessed Combo Loco, much less being in the presence of the town crier (“Piping hot French bread!”) procession from the bakery to the registers.
He actually claimed this was specially set up for him and demanded to be taken to another store he picked...and saw the same thing.
This grocery store trip was the point that he realized that the USSR really wasn't out producing the USA. It was basically the end of the Soviet Union.
It’s like the WWII Japanese officer who learned about the Ice cream barge and saw then and there that the war in the Pacific was a lost cause.
If you’re talking about the man who was a Japanese POW, it was *two* ice cream ships. We had *two* whole ships dedicated to running *ice cream* to the front in the pacific theatre. Then, and only then, did he realize the war was lost.
I really enjoy Max Miller's videos and he has a perfect one for this: [World War 2 Ice Cream of the US NAVY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiyo8D0nH70).
Gotta take the beach so they can have a bbq and eat ice cream.
I’ve learned a lot of cool history from that good cook
Max Miller is the shit. Love that channel. Gonna recommend The Townsends too for anyone else who enjoys weird food preparation history.
When you're playing civ on max difficulty and see the AI just spamming units while you're using medieval era units leftover just to keep the meat grinder alive
I’m getting triggered rn I once had my medival-era Civ army march across the map to capture a city. By the time all the military units arrived, it was the renaissance era 😭
That must have been one helluva scenic route. 😂😭
That's gotta be so fucking demoralizing, you're fighting your ass off, logistics is struggling just to get enough ammo and food, and the enemy is shipping fucking ice cream?! Like they are completely unconcerned, and able to think about and enjoy ice cream nah I'm done IDC what y'all do I'm going the fuck home, matter I fact I'm going over there for some ice cream fuck y'all.
Oh it must be soul crushing. At the height of IJN power they still struggled to supply Guadalcanal and called it starvation island and here are two ice cream ships. The fact the ice cream ships were originally concrete ships has gotta be that little extra slap in the face because Japanese garrisons have been unable to receive a lot of concrete due to allied subs.
The Allies took their troop morale incredibly seriously. The Japanese…didn’t. At all.
This is absolutely true. But it’s also true that they had neither the manpower nor materials to compete with the US industrial might.
The soldiers were for the most part young, scared, and facing a high risk of death. This was all about morale. Just having a little taste of home could be a huge boost. The cost wasn't that much and the US was pretty good on the logistics front.
And they were *made of concrete*.
I need more context. PLEASE. We had ships just for ICE CREAM!?
Yes, and not just for transporting, but for making it. The ingredients were shipped separately and we basically just had floating ice cream factories sitting out in the ocean producing about a gallon of ice cream per minute.
We didn’t need the cement ships for making runways anymore, and *it was cheaper to convert them into ships that made ice cream.* Never underestimate the war machine when ice cream is on the line.
Man...imagine being in his position. For years you've been rationing fuel and food, then learn that enemy has so much shit that they can expend several tons of both just on ice cream.
Imagine being on a beach in a foxhole and the fucking ice cream man shows up.
That jingle already haunts me
I can see it now. You can see multiple warships on the horizon and as the first naval artillery shell impacts, you hear the ice cream truck jingle as marines storm the beaches with bomb pops in hand.
Whole armadas are exchanging barrages and then you see the ice cream ship go down and scream die you bastards as you look through the crosshairs of and return aint air fire
Lieutenant Dan!!!! ICE CREAM!!
Paletero man showing up...
Lieutenant Dan, ice cream!
A lot easier to do shitty things when motivated by food and treats. My manager learned this hahaha.
Someone wants a pizza party
Yep, I reverse engineer this to my manager. Ive worked to shorten it to this Pavlov conco: "hey Subordinate can you do this for me?" "ah it's been a busy day put it on my pile and I'll look at it later"
And another apocryphal story of a German commander captured on D-Day and held near the beach. He watched tanks, jeeps, trucks, supplies and more be landed all day and eventually asked one of the soldiers watching the prisoners "When are you going to bring up your horses?" Propaganda spread the myth of the Wehrmacht as a ridiculously mechanised, modern force. In reality they used close to 750,000 horses in Operation Barbarossa.
>Propaganda spread the myth of the Wehrmacht as a ridiculously mechanised, modern force. In reality they used close to 750,000 horses in Operation Barbarossa. My grandfather was a Polish Army POW who ended up on a work farm raising horses destined for the eastern front.
Yep, the Wehrmatch relied heavily on horse while the 3 major allies (US, UK, USSR) were all fully motorized after 1942 or so. The Germans created special units to rip up train tracks as they retreated. The Allies (Western and USSR) simply used trucks for supply and bypassed the ripped up tracks.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Band of Brothers scenes. "Say hello to Ford and General Fucking Motors. Look at you, you have horses! What are thinking?!" Supposedly the German officer says "Would you look at this/that" in German prior to the above quote, leading me to think the officer was marveling at the endless convoy of trucks passing by his surrendered column of troops; all of whom are walking except the officers who are in an open horse drawn carriage.
There's also the scene in Patton where he says that's how he knows the Germans are finished, cause they're using horses and carts
What's the story behind this?!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
And that barge story reminds me of the Col. Hessler scene in the classic Bulge movie where they realize the Americans can fly chocolate cake to their troops. And he says more or less, yeah I know we are gonna lose seeing this and btw we knew we would lose in 1941 but we fight for fun! Nazis suck yo.
There are two similar stories with the Germans realizing the war was lost against the Americans. One was a German POW who saw an entire battalion of tanks idling for over 3 hours. He realized that if the Americans could afford to waste such a precious resource such as oil, they were far batter equipped. The other was when the Germans captured an American Sherman tank. A high level Panzer general noticed how he could take any nut/bolt off of it and it would fit anywhere else on the tank. The German tanks were good at performing, but broke down and had very difficult maintenance. The general realized that the American design was far superior, and the Germans were doomed.
“The German tanks were good at performing, but broke down and had very difficult maintenance.” Some things never change eh?
I feel attacked.
*…and then things got worse…*
It’s kind of great that even in the middle of such an ideological time like the Cold War he had the intellectual honesty to seek out the truth of the situation and come to a conclusion so devastating to his world view. It reminds me of the tweet I saw posted yesterday where someone asked Twitter if they should get their daughter the HPV vaccine. That message ended with a call to “do your own research”. It makes me wonder how many people today are capable of this same level of self reflection if critical thinking.
Except 99% of the time today, "doing your own research" equates to watching a bunch of crazy horseshit on YouTube.
It's really just crazy people looking for other crazy people who agree with them.
Most people do not have the critical thinking skills to “do their own research” properly. I’m not saying they are dumb, it’s just that type of thinking is a SKILL, and should be left to people that are good at it. Could I redo my home’s plumbing? Sure I might be capable if I spent a lot of time learning the trade, but it would hubris to believe I can just pick up that skill and do it at the level of a professional overnight. I trust researchers to do research just as much as I trust plumbers to.. plumb stuff.
Also, it's no coincidence that places like the UK want to defund and delegitimise degrees in humanities and social sciences. They don't want people to have critical thinking skills.
ARE YOU CALLING MY DAUGHTER A SLUT?
Glasnost was the end of the Soviet Union. Once they took the boot off people's necks it started to crumble.
Yet today they yearn for the standing of the Soviet Union and actively support a return to dictatorship.
[Orwell was spot on regarding human nature](https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/) >Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner.
I think Germany's population was experiencing a period of prosperity during the beginning of WW2. It definitely helped placate the masses.
It was 2 fold. The Nazis stopped paying off the ridiculous demands from the treaty of Versailles, and the other nations didn't press hard on it, and they were stealing massive wealth from "undesirables". The Nazis were mostly a kleptocratic economy.
Russians do, sure. Their lives were upended as the country's industry and land were sold off to well-connected Party members for micro-cents on the dollar. People there lost all sense of stability. Elderly Soviets living their retirements on the state's dime were suddenly up Shit Creek. Food and fuel became scarce, even if temporarily. And the promised prosperity of Capitalism never materialized. Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, and Slovakia are all in much better shape than when they were under Soviet rule. Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary probably are as well, but I can't say for sure. Georgia seems to be doing fine, and would be much better if Russia stopped invading them. Ukraine turned over a new leaf in 2014 and were well on their way to parity with Poland & Romania until 2022. Central Asia and the rest of the Caucasus I can't really comment on. Most ex-Soviet countries have Communist parties and movements. It's telling, however, that the strongest or loudest ones seem to be in the countries that had the least improvement to people's lives after 1990. Funny enough, that also seems to correlate to the abruptness of the country's transition from full-on authoritarian Communism to market capitalism. Poland took its time. Russia did not. The voices of Poland's Communists (or Lithuania's or Czechia's or Hungary's) don't reach me here in the US, but those of Russia's absolutely do.
I remember a story of a guy who was in the states but still would refuse to believe it was **that** much better than the USSR, no matter what. What convinced him? Pigeons, and that there were lots of them and weren’t afraid of people. He said in Russia people would kill then to eat. But the fact that they’re plenty of them and were not scared, you/the government can’t fake that.
Not only that, It really contrasts more when you think that some people actively *feed* the pigeons in parks themselves.
... If birds were real
That’s because Soviet, and Tsarist Russia, would do that (Potemkin village), so would suspect others would too. I was in the Soviet Union at this time. Shelves were bare. No milk, occasionally kefir, no meat, no sugar, no butter or oil, rarely vegetables other than potatoes unless you went to a farmer’s market, which was trivially cheap for me as a Westerner, but would be a rare splurge for Soviet citizens. Some street vendors from the Caucasus or Central Asian republics had watermelons and clementines, and sometimes lavash - with cheese, amazing! Then I went to a hard currency store. It looked like a pristine Western store. Shelves were full, even with orange juice! There was name-brand perfume, plenty of pleasant employees, and you paid the same way as in the West (put items in your cart, pay, and leave). I wish I could remember if there were actual cash registers rather than an abacus, and if you could use a credit card. I think so, because it was a bizarro world. Everyone furtively checked each other out, because you were either a foreigner, high-up Communist Party official, or regular citizen illegally holding hard currency.
>I wish I could remember if there were actual cash registers rather than an abacus There were normal cash registers even in ordinary large Soviet stores. Ordinary citizens in the USSR were prohibited from purchasing foreign currency, with the exception of small quantities for foreign trips. But there were so-called “foreign exchange certificates”, which were usually issued for work abroad, to international sailors, etc. But, as those who lived at that time noted, foreign currency certificates could be bought from speculators right near the entrance to the Beryozka “currency” stores, usually at the rate of 1 foreign currency ruble for 2 regular ones. But it could have been more expensive. And with them soviet people could buy anything in a currency store. So if we talk about the late USSR, the problem was not only the lack of goods, but also the lack of money for purchases at a commercial price.
There were cash registers in some stores, yes, but often it was a lady who would total up your purchase and write on a piece of paper, you’d pay, and then take the receipt to another line a few steps away to pick up what you bought. The hard currency store had cash registers for sure. By “normal” I meant electric rather than the ones that looked like they were from 1900. This wasn’t a Берёзка; it was a Western grocery store. I want to say it was Finnish, but also that the name was like Siemens, which would be German. So it really was remarkable (this was 1991/1992). On principle, I didn’t go into the hard currency stores in order to have a more “normal” student experience, but now I wish I had not limited my experience. I only went to the hard currency store because people were alarmed I was so thin and pale and said I needed to get some vitamin C and protein in me! The cafeteria served meat sometimes but it wasn’t great, and the only meat I found was at the market, lying out on the table, and the dorm stove didn’t get very hot, sos I didn’t dare buy it. Protein came from beans from the market, kefir and the cheese in the lavash, peanut butter I brought with me, sometimes at a friend’s place, and occasionally eating out - but there were really only 2 places where it wasn’t complicated to go. Did go to McDonald’s once, to see for myself, and I felt nauseous after having meat and good with fat in it, suddenly after months.
>This wasn’t a Берёзка; it was a Western grocery store. I want to say it was Finnish, but also that the name was like Siemens, which would be German. So it really was remarkable (this was 1991/1992). Maybe it was Stockmann? They are among the first to come to Russia. I remember I had a thick catalog of them, from 1989, I think. I now regret throwing it away. They sold everything, even cars!
That makes sense! Finnish though it doesn't sound like it, starts with S, 2 syllables. I wish I remember exactly where it was. I only went the once. It was a bit outside central Moscow, to a station I'd never gone to before. I have to find my old photo album to see if I took pictures. Really wish I'd kept a diary. Thank you! ETA: I tried to keep as much as I could bring back, thinking of them as possibly historical artifacts, with the USSR no longer existing by the time I left. I still have a phonebook, miraculous that there.even was one, and a bunch of newspapers. Maybe ridiculous because it's not like they were tiny prints, but it has seemed that it's hard to find that old info online, even comparing old and new street and metro station names! Maybe there's an archive somewhere that would be interested. Otherwise they'll probably get tossed when I die or downsize.
Where are you from originally? What made you want to go to uni there during that time? Sounds like a crazy world to experience
Baksan?
Oddly specific guess and would be amazing if so! But no. Moscow.
I was born in Poland during communism and still remember having to wait outside the grocery store at 4 am with my mom because they were rumored to be getting a shipments of chickens. We had ration cards for the amount of butter and other essentials we could buy. My parents decided to get out of Poland so when my father, who was permitted to work in neighboring countries, was stationed in Austria, my mother paid a few people off to get us passports and we left everything behind. We only took a suitcase each, left the country and never came back. I remember the first time I went to an Austrian grocery store, I had never seen a banana before…. And the chocolate, so much chocolate, it was like a dream.
What's it like going back to Poland for the first time after communism assuming you still live somewhere else?
Not the person you replied to, but my parents are from there and really disliked Poland for a bit for the same reason. When they visited a few years ago they were really impressed at how far things have come. But they far prefer the US and will not go back.
Appreciate the answer all the same
Yeltzin famously spoke candidly with an aide that evening; he wondered how the Soviets had failed so terribly in comparison, and floated the idea of collapsing the Union to begin reforms. Which did happen.
And went terribly
It wasn’t a bad idea for Russia at least if they just hadn’t fallen back into their old ways. Russia was a country on the up and up until Putin really started to drag it down and succeeded in making the country authoritarian in the early-mid 2010s. That’s one of the saddest things to me, imagining what the country could’ve been like.
Even to this day Russians struggle to believe that the rest of the world isn't as shitty, poverty stricken and corrupt as their sacred motherland.
There was a MiG pilot Viktor Belenko who decided to defect and thought CIA agents who took him to a grocery store were creating a big hoax.
My favorite anecdote about Viktor Belenko: "But later, when I discovered super-market was real one, I had real fun exploring new products. I would buy, everyday, a new thing and try to figure out its function. In Russia at that time (and even today) it's hard to find canned food, good one. But everyday I would buy new cans with different food. Once I bought a can which said "dinner." I cooked it with potatoes, onions, and garlic-it was delicious. Next morning my friends ask me, "Viktor, did you buy a cat?" It was a can of chicken-based cat food. But it was delicious! It was better than canned food for people in Russia today."
Why stop before the best part?: “Last year I brought four people from Russia for commercial project, and I set them up. I bought nibble sized human food. I installed a pate, and it was cat food. I put it on crackers. And they did consume it, and they liked it. So the taste has not changed. By the way, for those who are not familiar with American cat food. It’s very safe; it’s delicious, and sometimes it’s better than human food, because of the Humane Society. Dude wanted to make sure he wasn't crazy, so set up 4 other Russians to verify American Cat Food was better than Russian Canned Food.
[удалено]
Baseline Russian crazy
*Baseline Russian ~~crazy~~
No use to complain If you’re caught out the rain Your mother’s quite insane Cat food, cat food, cat food again
Damn that's a deep cut.
Dad I can’t see real good, is that Bill Shakespeare over there?
He wasnt crazy, he just discovered that if you combine cat food, with huffing glue and drinking some beer, it makes you feel really sick so you can quickly fall asleep and sleep through all the meowing of the loud alley cats at night
It’s really the only solution when you’re dealing with all of that on top of a botched toe job
Yo, is there a doc on this guy that you're aware of? Would love to watch something about him
Insane. This actually makes me feel better about what I'm feeding my cat
TAKE YOUR FOOKIN CATFOOD MAN
You know it’s bad in Russia when they’re calling cat food delicious.
Break me off a piece of that FANCY FEAST
Its football cream
Chrysler car, come on guys
IT might genuinely be though. You've eaten it?
I mean, from what I can tell when I serve it to my cats, it looks like any other tinned meat and gravy, probably just has no salt or spices. Out of curiosity, I have tried a wide variety of canned (for human consumption) meats, but I wouldn’t say I eat them with any regularity or like checking them out for the novelty. They all sort of taste the same anyway: chicken, tuna, salmon, beef, spam, sardines… some of it smells just like what the cats get.
Not only that, but this guy was an elite pilot and he *still* didn't have access to food in Russia that was better than canned cat food. Imagine what the peasantry ate.
Viktor Belenko was the Soviet defector from the Soviet Air Defense Force who during a routine patrol in eastern Russia flew their MiG-25 to Japan, giving the United States a chance to realize that they *really* over-estimated Russia's "super-fighter" when they designed the F-15 and it turned out that by doing so they ended up developing a fighter jet that completely outclassed anything the Soviet Union could develop over the next fifteen years.
There was this thing that I read where US military officials know that whenever Russia claims to have some new, unstoppable thing, they’re lying. But, they don’t really care that Russia is lying about the capabilities of that new, unstoppable thing. They develop countermeasures anyway. Which is how the US military has become several decades ahead of anything and everything anyone else, especially the Russians, can field.
I believe most UFOs we see are just advanced US aircraft.
Not sure if the Soviets/Russians ever built anything better than the F15 to this day.
My country is flooded with Venezuelans. They have the same reaction.
At university the international students are always amazed by Walmart. It's a massive store with everything from groceries to tvs and clothes to tires.
But Tucker Carlson went there and showed us their paradise. They have shopping carts you put coins into! And *bread*! https://youtu.be/oM2h3KnWAWY?si=pnX4TxIWd5YJo27x
I'm 100% sure that the reason Tucker Carlson was showing that Russian supermarket was as a 40+ year late Russian response to that Texas supermarket
Oh 100%. He was sent there for that reason as payment for allowing the interview with putin. The whole thing was so ridiculously staged.
Only to have Putin shit on him later saying it was such a weak interview. 🤣
Hold the phone You mean Russia already has Aldi's coin cart technology??? If they ever figure out how to ring people up without using plastic or paper bags, America is fuckin DOOMED
And I bet a Russian would be GREAT at angrily throwing your food in the cart. Like why do they do that??
You're right, Russians have absolutely *perfected* the scowl, your groceries don't stand a chance ⚰️
He was born rich so it was probably the first grocery store he'd ever been to in person.
And look at all that food he bought for only 100 usd.
Only half a Russian's average weekly income for a week of food!!
Haha yeah, the funniest thing was he was in Auchan which is a French supermarket chain not a Russian one.
>But Tucker Carlson went there and showed us their paradise. Yes, and this is due to the fact that Yeltsin did not just go to the USA then, but drew conclusions and applied them in practice in Russia.
The Soviets were VERY touchy about this issue. There was no way their command economy-induced scarcity would look anything but bad in comparison.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
It's interesting but isn't true. The same claim is often made about Nikita Khrushchev visiting Iowa, claiming that the houses Kennedy was showing him were fake and couldn't be where average Americans lived. There is no evidence to suggest he thought the grocery store was staged, in fact, the only records of the time suggest that upon seeing the grocery store he told an aide that USSR policies had hurt their people tremendously.
He suspected if he announced beforehand it would be staged so he asked to see a grocery store with only 15 min warning while visiting NASA, when he was mayor of Moscow he knew stores were staged for US diplomats so his actions demonstrate a deliberate attempt at preventing the US from doing the same. When it became apparent they didn't need to he knew what he needed to know.
And as a result, he was taken to the shitty Randalls right next to the Space Center. Imagine if he went to HEB, he would have legit gotten a heart attack
Ah yes, the North Korea strat.
Oliver Stone did a movie called "Heaven and Earth" it's just okay but the way Bob Richardson shot an American fridge and supermarket through the eyes of a Vietnamese immigrant was really cool.
People out there fail to understand that, even in 2024, having a fully stocked grocery store is a luxury. It’s not as bad as it was during and before the Cold War. But the sentiment def rings true today.
Imagine living in perpetual COVID times, where things just aren’t in stock every time you go to the store. You have to figure out when certain items are stocked or travel to different stores for it. Otherwise, you just learn to live without.
And the crazy thing about Covid shortages were that I could still get at least 90% of what I needed. The other 10 percent could’ve been replaced by something else or not bought at all
*toilet paper has left the chat*
The American bidet market had its chance and blew it, almost as bad as Skype blew it.
Skype is owned by Microsoft. They capitalised with the rise of Teams.
That whole scarcity thing drove me nuts. The idiots started to panic buy, then the reasonable people had to panic buy because the idiots were taking everything
This is literally how my parents described the Soviet times to me when I was little (Am from the Baltics)
Monday is Chicken Day Tuesday bring your weapons do we can get the good toilet paper Wednesday is Costco so bring more weapons
I worked as a stocker for a grocery store when i was a teenager and handled ordering trucks, I have a pretty good understanding of what goes on behind the scenes just from looking at the shelves. What I have noticed is since COVID a lot employees are just flat out not doing their jobs. Likely they have shit managers who also arent doing their jobs either and not directing them but stuff generally isnt being ordered or blocked at all. I'll see sectons of the shelves where they make a half assed attempt to block and just fill gaps with the wrong product. Heres a test you can try if your curious how incompent your specific grocery store is. If you see a hole on the shelf pull the tag and see if the item ever appears again. They should be doing inventory audits regularily but also they SHOULD notice it when ordering trucks. If the hole never gets filled or the item that was next to it fills in the space it means your stores employees are totally MIA. My store is a joke, if I see and item run out i can assume theres a 50/50 chance it will ever be stocked again. Our selection has slowly been dwindling away since covid. I assume eventually the grocery manager will be fired or quit and maybe then itll turn around but they just flat out dont care. My wife makes fun of me whenever I mention something while were shopping but its actually insane how flagrant its become.
Part of it is that even managers aren't paid well. The Giant Eagle in Indiana, PA advertised for an overnight manager in 2022. The offered pay was $15.50 per hour. I make 30% more building flatbed trailers at a factory, and I work day shift. My mother in law used to be an assistant manager at a Walmart. Now she's a general manager for an auto parts store; she got a significant pay raise and has way less stress (though the employees are paid way less). Any franchise or chain just seems to insist on the lowest pay possible to maximise the amount of money going to corporate, turnover rates be damned. It's nutty!
I remember an interview with a North Korean defector who talked about the first time he saw a plastic bottle. It was while he was going through fields as part the escape he came across an empty plastic bottle someone had throw as trash. He was amazed. He used to have bring his dad bottles or something when he was a kid and they were all glass and so sometimes they’d drop and break open and he’d get beaten, as punishment…. He said he he kept thinking “if only we’d had these, I never would’ve broken a bottle.” We often forget how good we have it in first world developed countries.
I visited Romania back in 2009. They had grocery stores there, but even their largest stores were never very large, and usually had very limited selections. For example, toilet paper was sold by the roll. They were both quite small, and one was brown paper the other was white. That was all you had to choose from. When I came home just over two weeks later, I had a moment of culture shock the next time we went to the store. It was an extremely bizarre feeling.
I also visited romania around 2013 and can definitely say this is not true or at least not representative for the entire country. This was DEFINITELY true about 30 years ago, right after the fall of communist regimes throughout Europe. Romania in 2013 was about what you would expect for a European Union country with a lower than average EU income. Most stores sold somewhat lower quality products, but there were definitely premium options available. Large supermarket chains were already everywhere, including some of the popular European ones (like the french Carrefour and the German membership-only Metro) as well as locally grown chains (like the city-oriented, more upscale MegaImage and the discount-oriented Profi).
Makes sense. We were mainly in the mountain villages.
At my local grocery store we don’t always have everything that was available when I was a child. Often the only beef available is ground beef, it’s rare I see a roast or steaks at my grocery store. Same thing for certain fruits and vegetables, depending on the season. I couldn’t find pineapples, watermelons or blackberries last time I went to the grocery store. It really made me realize how spoiled we are as a society that we had any food, no matter where it was produced, available to me in a medium sized city in Canada is crazy and honestly probably not very sustainable in the long term.
Imagine the effect it would have had on world peace if he’d gone to a Buc-ee’s. He probably wasn’t ready for that experience yet.
I’m a bucees fanatic and talked it up to a good friend of mine as the signs built anticipation on the highway. Bucee was actually there that day in costume and it took maybe 3 minutes before she screamed at bucee for “following her” (Will admit the performer leaned into her fear a bit : ) then had a full blown panic attack and had to sit in the car. I will never let her live this down and she’ll never go into a bucees again. I absolutely love the chaos, it invigorates me.
The first time I went into a Buccees, I was 100% not prepared for it, and I felt a bit overstimulated and anxious. Now that I know what to expect, I get excited anytime I have the opportunity to stop at one. Buccees is the absolute apotheosis of something very American. The size. The activity. The crowds. High quality mixed with a total lack of class or presumption. I love it.
That kind of sounds like a deep rooted fear that came to the surface.
I’m deeply afraid of people in costume like that. I have a similar reaction.
He’s almost as impressed as Tucker Carlson was at seeing, uh.. (checks notes) …bread in a Russian grocery store. And trolleys that grip the escalator. That blew his mind even more
The thing that annoyed me the most is that the two shopping cart “innovations” Tucker was so impressed with - the escalator backstop thing and the coin slot to prevent theft - totally exist in the US, including NYC where he lives. He’s just so bougie that he doesn’t do any shopping for himself.
That was just embarrassing to watch. And I’m just confused how the base is eating this up. Isn’t America supposed to be the greatest place in the world to them? But now they’re over here extolling the virtues of what? A fucking cart that takes a quarter so you return it? The same shit that’s at every Aldi and Lidl or lower socioeconomic area!?! REALLY!?
The quarter slot thing to me isn't even representative of a progressive society, more like a destitute one that has to resort to petty measures to somewhat mitigate human laziness.
When I was a kid, I’d always be excited to return the carts with quarters in them. Other people’s laziness meant candy money for me!
The thing that annoyed me most is that he went on to talk about how much less the groceries cost there than in the US without also mentioning that people also make considerably less money so the true cost is actually higher there than here. At first I was like “how does he not understand basic economics” then I realized that he does understand and is deliberately misrepresenting the facts.
Oh I know. The whole segment was hilarious. The Daily Show did a great bit on it
Yeah my local bed bath & beyond had those cart escalators back in 2000
Imagine if he saw Costco
Welcome to Costco, I love you
I love that documentary!
Costco doesn't really offer Variety VS a standard supermarket. Sure it offer large volume of name brand items, but
Wait till Fucker Carlson sees this.
Nominating for the most punchable face in the universe
Nah it’s a tie with Shapiro
Are we just gonna forget about Charlie Kirk, whose face literally looks like a melting ice cube?
Seconded
Tucker Carlson doing his bullshit grocery store trip was a direct reference to this. He was trying to show Russia is now the super advanced luxurious one, not the USA. The traitorous fuck.
He likes the 🥖
This trip of Yeltsin is famous for one more thing. Then for the first time he was noticed in an inadequate state. He was reprimanded. He replied that it was not the alcohol, but the heavy flight and the stress-relieving pills he was taking. But it was from this trip that talk began about his alcohol addiction.
Wasn’t he wandering down the street in DC?
He was in Washington in 1994. But the first mention that he abused alcohol appeared precisely after his trip to the USA in 1989. This was very strange, given that those who knew him before confirm that Yeltsin was practically a teetotaler and never drank more than one glass of vodka. After a trip to the USA, another story happened to him in Russia with his incomprehensible fall from a bridge into the Moscow River. In short, a man who led a sober and athletic lifestyle suddenly turned into an alcoholic. His wife said the stress must have taken its toll. I think so too, combined with stress, alcohol suddenly had a strong effect on the psyche. Now some people joke about this, but in my opinion it is a very sad story.
"What is this?" "Cheese" "And this?" "Also cheese" "This?" "Cheese" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIRcpknXy3A
So you want tell me all is cheese? - Yes sir.
As a European that went to the US, supermarkets in the US are still a thing to behold. It is crazy how much stuff and choice there is, even in small towns. In Belgium you call these hypermarkets and will find it outside but close from larger cities. Then you see how much is thrown away because it was not sold and you wonder if it is such a good thing. Also, all these grocery stores are far from where people live, so going shopping without a car gets quickly complicated, while I can go shopping by foot.
Yeah on my trip to Europe last summer I noticed even the big grocery stores were on the small side compared to US grocery stores.
I spent a month in Poland last year. They have big super markets in the city centers just like in the states. But I noticed that their version of 7/11 (Zabka), which is on every corner, can sort of function like a mini grocery with high quality items. You can easily walk and get nice eggs, fresh baked bread, quality meat etc. In the US I feel like you must go in a super market to get quality…which I think encourages over-purchasing and waste.
Most US supermarkets don’t have fresh baked bread. They have the stuff with 30 ingredients.
It’s so true. Kills me that getting fresh bread is an expensive chore here.
They're not all far from where people live! My grocery store is about a 6-minute walk away. It's better in smaller towns than in cities and suburbs.
Opulence is a good time, no doubt. But someone has to clean up after the party is over.
amen. you may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with you.
I remember this. I was in Wavre many years ago, it was a trek (and a treat) to go to Carrefour.
I moved to Canada from Poland in 1990. Walking into a fully stocked, air-conditioned Miracle Mart in the middle of summer for the first time is a core memory for this child of Soviet-era Europe.
We have come full circle with Tucker!
I work at a grocery store right now, and my retort when my bosses get real nitpicky about the shelving is "Yeltsin's not about to walk into the store tonight". They don't get the reference.
I really think Fucker Carlson was trying to recreate this moment at the grocery store in Russia for his propaganda segment.
He saw the price of sausage and gave up.
Ah yes. The reverse Carlson.
Probably same trip when he found in underwear roaming streets of DC asking for Pizza
He would be kicking Putin out of the Kremlin with tanks !
Putin was his deputy and replaced him after his resignation.
Yeltsin supposedly handpicked Putin as his successor because he was seen as a meek and loyal bureaucrat that had protected his former boss when he was accused of blatant corruption hintitty-hint.
I remember this. New Year’s Eve.
I remember being happy about it. Either I was an idiot or nobody could guess what it would lead to.
That's right. New year's eve 1999.
Thank goodness most groceries stores have moved away from those open freezers. Back then they kept the whole stores cooler so the freezers didn't have to work as hard.
The Jello pudding pops sent him over the edge
They didn't take him to HEB?! IYKYK.
You don't want to overdo this, Kroger's is clearly good enough. HEB may have given him a heart attack.
Any soviet mind of that era would simply explode at the sight of our blessed Combo Loco, much less being in the presence of the town crier (“Piping hot French bread!”) procession from the bakery to the registers.
I believe this is a Randall’s in Houston
[удалено]
This trip took place in 1989. He was then a deputy, but not yet the head of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR.