Summary
Transcript
So a longstanding feature, maybe the longest standing feature of cold war propaganda in the west was the soviet grocery store. No products, no choices, shoddily made things. And it wasn’t actually propaganda, it was real. And you can look up the pictures on the Internet if you want. So we thought it would be interesting to take a look at a contemporary, modern day 2024 russian grocery store two years into sanctions.
Here we go. All right, here we go. So I guess you put in ten rubles here, and you get it back when you put the cart back. So it’s free, but there’s an incentive to return it and not just bring it to your homeless encampment. Okay, here’s the grocery cart escalator. This is designed. I’m figuring this out now, where the wheels don’t move, they lock on the grocery cart escalator.
Look, ma, no hands. Retail placement here is a little bit different. So you’re like walking through Macy’s to get to whole foods. Okay, we’ve gotten through the perfume section to get to the grocery store, so we’re going to try and buy what a family of four would buy every week, and we’re going to see what the selection is, and we’re going to see what it costs. Now, Russia is famous for its bread, which is one thing I can assess pretty well.
The low carb lifestyle is not swept Russia, thank heaven, because look at that. It’s fresh, too. Look at that. Come on. Unicorn and mini mills. All right, some kind of russian wheat cookies. We need coffee, don’t we? I don’t know if this is sugar or flour, to be honest with you, but it looks like a staple, so we should get it. It’s a very good looking package. It’s got to be flour, right? And this is russian wine.
It’s from Crimea, which not only has the warm water naval base, but also is the source of most of the grapes in this part of Russia for wine, so it’s currently pretty good. Cheese puffs you check out of a grocery store and you’ve got gum, razor blades, and candy. Actually, they hide the razor blades because we steal them, but these are all seem to be western products. Mars Twix, Snickers, Milky Way bounty, Gillette, Paul’s cough drops, Mentos.
It’s pretty non sanctioned to me, but what do I know? I went from amused to legitimately angry, so we were guessing what this would cost. Everybody here is from the United States buys groceries, and we didn’t pay any attention to costs. We were just putting in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. And we all came in around $400, about $400. It was $104 us here.
And that’s when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought. Corruption. If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want at that point, maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person. You’re wrecking people’s lives in their country.
And that’s what our leaders have done to us. And coming to a russian grocery store, the heart of evil, and seeing what things cost and how people live, it will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel, anyway. Radicalized. We’re not making any of this up, by the way, at all. .