Yeltsin's Eye-Opening Grocery Store Visit

My very favorite grocery story. In 1989, Boris Yeltsin, the

future leader of Russia, made a goodwill tour across the United

States.

This is back in the twilight of the USSR, although no one

really knew it yet. Gorbachev is still running the things.

Yeltsin is waiting in the wings to take over, and indeed, he eventually will.

He is still a communist. He is still a part of the communist

experiment, which was

the Soviet Union, but he visited the United States on a

goodwill tour.

That aspiring Soviet leader flew to Houston, Texas, for a personal

tour of NASA. And on his way back to the airport,

he asked if he could

visit a normal American grocery store.

And his handler said, "Yeah, sure, we got like half an hour to kill."

And they

drove him to a Randalls in Webster, Texas.

Inside the grocery store, an astonished Boris Yeltsin

wandered through the aisles observing the economic miracle

that was

Randalls number thirty on El Dorado Boulevard near the intersection with State

Highway 3. He learned, to his amazement, that the store offered

around thirty thousand unique products.

Yeltsin asked his interpreter to speak with the manager.

He asked him, "To oversee this incredible operation,

did you require some kind of

intense training? Do you have like a PhD in grocery

science?"

No, it was just Randy. Then Yeltsin wandered around

asking random American customers about how much the groceries cost compared to

their salaries. And then after that, he walked over to the frozen goods area

and just stared. Stared at a

box of Pudding Pops,

smiled for the camera,

and when the flash went away, just stared

at the Pudding Pops with a weird look on his face.

And Yeltsin boarded his plane and sat there dead silent in a state

of shock, just

staring into the middle distance after visiting an American grocery store.

Then after some time, he turned to his personal assistant

and he said, "What have

they done to our people?"

Yeltsin said the following of his trip to a Randalls grocery store in

Harris County, Texas: "When I saw those shelves crammed with

hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons of 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 such a state of poverty.

It is terrible to think of." And then he further speculated that

if the Soviet

people were aware of the quality of an American grocery store,

there would be revolution. The premier of the Soviet Union had less

affluent grocery options than the good people of Webster, Texas.

The whole Soviet Socialist Republic was

imperiled by a twenty-minute trip to an American grocery store