Cited on HN 4 times, 2015–2021, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Cited as visual evidence of Soviet command-economy scarcity, usually in arguments about choice and central planning.
A short amateur clip of a Moscow grocery store from 1989, filmed by a visiting production worker. The shelves look sparse, and the uploader adds a note on the hard-working people living under a system that did not reward them.
“Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989” (HN, 2020)
No doubt Barry Schwartz has never lived without choice. He's wrong, and obviously so. Freedom of choice is vastly superior, in every possible way, to the alternative. A nicer Soviet-era grocery store: [this video] The stories are overly plentiful of people that were held in low-choice captivity in the former USSR, breaking down in tears upon seeing western grocery stores. I know several people who lived under Communism in Romania, their experience was identical. I'd suspect that very few people arguing against choice, have ever lived in a situation where they were actually deprived of it. They're essentially spoiled brats.
Soviet grocery store footage used to argue for freedom of choice
[this video] - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much. And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.
Moscow grocery store footage linked from the article
> democratically planned economy Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale. Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects. Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving. EDIT: Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989: [this video]
Moscow grocery store in 1989 as an example of command economy
> a communistic state Yeah that worked out well for the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик! It managed to give the world the worst nuclear disaster ever seen! And also managed to keep an entire nation with vast resources so fucking poor that their supermarkets - lol, who am I kidding? There were no supermarkets in Soviet Russia. Hell, there were barely even markets... but they basically looked like this: [this video] Keep your goddamned "Ridiculous idealism that will never work because it defies human nature" to yourself. You will never, and I mean ever have a successful communist state. There's never been a single one, and never will be.
Shows barren Soviet grocery store to mock communism
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