I recall stories like that.
But the one that I remember from the nineties was this:
There was a guy who came over to America after the end, who'd been a builder or carpenter by trade. He knew about grocery stores, those didn't phase him. What shocked him was a Menards. He was walking through the lumber yard just dumbstruck and asked a worker if everything there (pointing at the big, banded stacks of dimensional lumber) could be bought by just anyone.
The employee was like, sure, do you have a contractor account? And he's like "No", thinking that it's the same sort of situation as in Russia, that you needed connections and paperwork.
And the employee just cheerfully, like "Okay, well, we can go over to the service desk and set one up."
And that's when he broke down. The idea that just anyone, ANYONE can walk into a store and buy a truckload full of wood. A whole freaking truckload, delivered wherever you want it, and all you need is the money. No papers, no approvals, nothing, just slap the money on the table and done.
But the famous one was when Bush invited Yeltsin to visit Houston to see the progress on Space Station Freedom (what would become the ISS). After a tour of Houston, the delegation made a surprise stop at a Randall's grocery store.
Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that it was that trip that broke his confidence in the Soviet Union.
I recall stories like that.
But the one that I remember from the nineties was this:
There was a guy who came over to America after the end, who'd been a builder or carpenter by trade. He knew about grocery stores, those didn't phase him. What shocked him was a Menards. He was walking through the lumber yard just dumbstruck and asked a worker if everything there (pointing at the big, banded stacks of dimensional lumber) could be bought by just anyone.
The employee was like, sure, do you have a contractor account? And he's like "No", thinking that it's the same sort of situation as in Russia, that you needed connections and paperwork.
And the employee just cheerfully, like "Okay, well, we can go over to the service desk and set one up."
And that's when he broke down. The idea that just anyone, ANYONE can walk into a store and buy a truckload full of wood. A whole freaking truckload, delivered wherever you want it, and all you need is the money. No papers, no approvals, nothing, just slap the money on the table and done.