‼Sadly, many people misunderstand this, so I feel like I have to explain this scene. Robin Williams plays a citizen of the Soviet Union who has just defected to the US. In this scene he goes shopping for the first time in the US. Products like toilet paper, coffee, shoes, radios, pineapples etc., especially imported ones were hardly available or not available at all in the USSR at that time. People living there could get them only illegally for extremely much money or by standing in a indescribably long line for hours, days, sometimes they had to stand in this line from 6am to 6am a week later- and that often in bad conditions, especially when it was winter, since they usually were outside. In a scene of this movie you can see one of those typical long lines (although my mother said that once she had to stand in an even longer one to get a sack of apples). Now, you have to know that there were immensely many cases very similar to the one presented in the scene above: Soviet people who just have defected to a capitalistic country like the US, West Germany etc. and went shopping for the first time got so overwhelmed by the diversity and the mass of products (and even without a single line!) which were so easy to get and which they maybe haven't even ever seen in their entire life before that many of them simply passed out, ran screaming through the store, or even got crazy. The famous Russian actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky even vomited when he saw the full shelves in a US store. The scene with Robin Williams' character loosing control over himself is no propaganda or anything else- it is a typical story which many former citizens of the Soviet Union have experienced.‼
Well that explains a lot. I never understood why people in the theatre laughed. I just felt wide-eyed panic at all the words and colors and the thought that the *smell* must be overwhelming to this man.
@@nsf001-3 yes I was one of the lucky ones with enough of an education to figure out where it was going early, and got my behind out of there before the $#i7 hit the fan
Im from Buenos Aires. That happened to me when I went to a monster supermarket chain in Australia, Sydney. I saw all the food, the colorful products and felt bad inside. Overwhelmed. I only wanted to taste peanut butter cause Ive seen it in the movies. So I bought that and got out. But the feeling didnt go away until the next day. I was 17.
@@tuamigajordana I remember the same happened to me as i was in Japan.The year,1986.So many things i 've never seen in....Buenos Aires also.I was shocked.
I know someone from Russia, he won’t tell me what it was like:( I really like this film though and Robin Williams, my mom met him. I grew up in Marin where he’s from. Miss him 😢❤
In the late 80s Gorbachev visited a US supermarket. He saw all the choices available and that common people could buy fresh vegetables and he knew the Soviet system couldn't compete.
And Bernie Sanders went to Soviet Union, where they set the price based on prices in the US, only with a bureaucratic delay of about 5 years. Bernie was impressed that they only had one kind of cheese, but it was really cheap!!
I met and worked with people who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, and I have a friend from Belarus, this isn't unusual for some. The overload of newness.
This kinda happened to Boris Yeltsin when he stopped in a supermarket in Texas on a goodwill trip to the US. I've heard some people claim that whatever shreds of loyalty to the Communist Party he still had at that point died after that.
And the realization that your government was intentionally lying to you about scarcity for your entire life - people do in fact have choice but the folks running your country intentionally deprived its citizens. I can't imagine how betrayed I'd feel - I'd probably fall to my knees and weep.
I had a similar reaction to a supermarket cheese section after two years in Albania with the Peace Corps. Albania, at the time, had two kinds of cheese and both were white. Suddenly I was in a Dillon's in the USA facing a wall of cheese of various colors and I had a small panic attack. Didn't pull anything off the shelves, just kind of froze up and told my sister I was quietly freaking out. (Her reaction: Well, you are a freak, so that's natural.)
Cheese seems like one of the few items where such extreme choice is justified. There’s just so much variety, I can’t imagine only having access to two types of cheese
Mee to! I had a melt down in the waffle section one day at the store blueberry waffles plain waffles cinnamon waffles unicorn waffles gluten-free waffles waffles waffles waffles!
Not entirely related but in the 80's in the UK we only had Supermarkets, which used to be much smaller than today and definitely smaller than US stores. They opened a Hypermarket near my home in the 90's which became sort of a tourist attraction. Why? Because nobody had seen something so absurdly big. As a child I remembered feeling everything was unnecessarily enormous, from the parking that was styled like a theme park to the seemingly endless shop flooring that went on forever. Entire isles dedicated to 1 type of food and popular brands of imported food and drink you'd never seen before in your life. The place was so big it had to be shared with a few other smaller stores. It was later bought over by Asda (Walmart) and converted the entire place to it's own brand.
I live in central Asia, and had similar experience in Thailand, at a Bangkok supermarket. I didn't know there could be so much variety of pastries and bread.
My dad worked on kwajaleen. A VERY tiny atoll in the pacific . 3 miles long and a mile wide. And older guy there had never left the island. His entire world was that tiny island. My dad and his friends all chipped in and they paid for him and his grandkids to take a vacation to Disneyland in California. They probably should have picked somewhere less populated.. because it almost gave the poor old guy a heart attack. His kids said right as they went to their first store the doors opened automatically.. like they all do here. And it freaked him out very bad. He literally thought it was bad magic. Disneyland was way to.much for him. On kwajaleen they don't even have cars or roads. Let alone animatronic dancing bears and dragons. And rides with ghosts and roller coasters. It was totally sensory overload for the poor.guy.
He was so much more that just a comedian. He could play so much more than just a funny man and do it very well. Robin Williams was a very versatile actor, amongst the best in my humble opinion.
@@hotelworker812 So true, I grew up watching him on Mork and Mindy. He always made me laugh. Then I learned he was a stand up comic and his own material made me laugh in a different way as I grew up. I learned when Christopher Reeve , his room mate in Juliard acting school took Robin in when he was waiting for his financial aid to come through. Robin heard of Christopher's riding accident and that week snuck into his hospital room in scrubs to cheer him up. Christopher was also Robin's sons godfather. He had his troubles with drugs and alcohol but i'm glad he had his family to come back to. When I heard he died, I was at a grocery store and I couldn't move, frozen in place from the shock. I then learned the details of how he died and it tore me up. The man made us laugh and cry and if there's any justice in this world, he's up there in heaven making everyone laugh at a comedy club.
I once met a man whose family escaped from the Soviet Union when he was a teenager and he described his first experience with an American supermarket. I never really understood until I saw this movie. This movie should be required viewing for anyone who believes communism/socialism would be good for America.
Yeah it seems accurate to native-born citizens as well. It reminds me how I felt as a kid when my mom took me to a big store like that for the first time. I'm sure it's the same sense of joyous wonder and befuddlement for people who travel or immigrate
This is NOT propaganda. I was born in the ussr and i do know it's all TRUE. This movie made BEFORE perestroyka. Gorbachev started perestroyka in 1986-87, but this movie is from 1983. Its all true
This movie is from 1983' *Brezhnev* times. *before Gorbachev,s era* it shows the reality of Brezhnev era. You can ask any former soviet immigrant they tell you similar stories. I was born in the USSR
Coffee.. Price bottomed... It's going to get expensive. in terms of USD.. I remember pre-Gorbachev ... propaganda about the ussr was heavy here in 'Murica
I was baking a cake and needed some vanilla extract for the frosting. I went to my local, ordinary, medium-sized, neighborhood (suburban Chicago) grocery store. They had 11 kinds of vanilla extract to pick from! We live in a great country!
I remembered the scene but not what movie it was from. Happy to see it here. :-) We have SOOO much to be grateful for in the USA! And I don't even like coffee...
i love this movie, i love Robin, i respect USA very much. This movie made me want to stay in Russia even more, because of this russian nostalgia.. i know people who came back home from the USA because of that..
I can see why. That had to be extremely difficult. I’m American and I have a hard time in stores though not as bad as Robin or the people you know. I only ever buy 1 kind of tea or toothpaste and if they don’t have it then I start to panic because then I have to make a choice with all the other toothpastes. It’s overwhelming especially in clothing stores. I have limited money and too much choice and when I’m done I wish I never when to buy food or a dress or anything. It’s all so much pressure. 😰 If it’s rough for an American who has been around this, it must be very rough for everyone else who comes here.
In the USSR, most of the coffee that people drank was instant coffee because it didn't require a machine to make it, only hot water, which everyone had access to. It wasn't the instant coffee, like we have here, though. The instant coffee there was actually good. It had to be, or nobody would drink it. The best brands were imported from India.
I'm American and I drink instant coffee but I don't even add hot water I just throw a spoonful of granules in my mouth and drink it down with a bit of water. If I were alive in the Soviet Union, the coffee wouldn't be something that would be bothering me
@@michaelhart8257 I checked your channel and I like the presentation style of your videos. Have you ever thought of doing videos about your personal experiences in The Soviet Union?
this is actually based on a real experience Yelsin the Communist Party Leader went into a Texas supermarket after a trip to the space center and freaked out. He quit the communist party soon after.
GetToHellOut+ We had a Russian exchange student when I was in high school and he basically lost his mind when we took him to a Walmart. He said the shelves were bare in the USSR and you had to wait in a line for hours for even a chance to get something you needed. Even Boris Yeltsin lost his faith in Communism when he visited a US grocery store in the late 1980s. The propaganda was on the Soviet side in this case... their economic system was shit and they had to brainwash their citizens to keep them from revolting.
Businesses in free market economies live or die based on how well or poorly they meet the wants and needs of consumers. Communism is the Bolshevik version of serfdom. Bolshevism is not about meeting the needs of people. It's about making the people meet the needs of a hereditary Bolshevik aristocracy. So also Maoism. So also Ba'athism. So also Juche. So also all of these horseshit Marxist ideologies.
Things like this actual happened to Russian defectors Imagine waiting in line for 4 or 5 hours to get sausages so bad dogs would not eat them for most of your life ,and then coming here and walking into Winn-Dixie
I had a similar large experience in a liquor store in Nashville. I had never been in a liquor store where they had shopping carts and was the size of a smallish WalMart. An entire aisle of vodka. Just froze and stared until a clerk came up to me and asked if I were alright.
When my family immigrated from the soviet union as religious refugees, the first time they seen a fully stocked grocery store my mom broke down and cried 😢 It mustve been such an experience seeing so much food as someone who had to survive on scraps most of their lives. My dad spent his first two paychecks on chocolete and ribs 😆
How mean would it be for me to walk up to him while he's on the ground and softly whisper: "... and that's just the coffee...you should check the bread isle..." ... ASMR style?
I was listening to a Talk Show host, Sébastien Gorka, who had Hungarian parents but grew up in England. He mentioned going to the supermarket after moving to the US in the early 80's and being mezzmorized by the countless brands of.. YOGURT.. 😉🇺🇲
I worked with a couple of guys who came here from a different country and they had the same reaction when they went to a grocery store to get coffee.they said we're they came from they could only get one type of coffee and they could only get so much food and that was it.
Imagine being an immigrant from a country like say the Soviet Union or some other communist controlled country and this scene is EXACTLY how you feel when in America. Vlad got so overwhelmed by the amount of choices in the store that he had a panic attack essentially. Living in the USSR, he wasnt used to choices. Everyone in USSR got only one item, that was it. The way of life is so much different than America. Now you know why immigrants want to be here more than any other place.
Yes, sure, still the question lingers on - which way of life is better, on a global, universal, universum scale? The Soviet people in the USA expected those various goods to smell like coffee, to have a taste of strawberry, to be natural. But it wasn't. Even legends like Coca Cola are a mixture of chemicals these days. So, is it great to become a slave to your stomach? That's a philosophy coming in, so to each his own. You couldn't just go to the store and buy a box of chocolate candies in the USSR - but if you managed to eventually do, you got chocolate made of cocoa, in turn planted on cocoa trees and processed from cocoa beans. For a rather small price, suitable for any purse. In the USA even back then you paid more and got what you wanted, but it was oil mixed with gasoline mixed with chops and chips of cocoa beans' shells with a fragrance of passion fruit made from urine. That's it, basically. I strongly condemn regimes like North Korea's, but in all sincerety, the Soviet way of life was weird, fruitful and had its benefits.
@Matt Brewer I was talking about the post-Stalin USSR, you seem to talk about the Stalin era. Stalin has died in 1953. Not so sure about your level of knowledge on the topic, but in the post-Stalin time there was no fear about being immediately imprisoned for your thoughts spoken out in public. When a person said something seemingly anti-Soviet, the respective people informed him/her that it was anti-Soviet... If the person still insisted, there would most likely be consequences. In the 70s-80s consequences most likely meant losing one's job. However, in absolute most cases people understood everything right from the very beginning... They just sort of said in return, "Ouch! I'm so sorry! I was wrong" and that is how it all worked. What you told me was the Stalin's way of treating people, the way died along with Stalin himself. The Soviet people generally knew what borders they were not to cross, and they simply did not cross them. Which was actually not a catastrophe for them, at all.
@IMxYOURxDADDY I am always glad to have a conversation on topics like that. However, I am also aware that all of us have something ingrained into our consciousness, we have childhood experience, adult life experience. We sometimes can't believe the other ways of living may be as normal as ours is. In very short, in one sentence: you had to live in the former Soviet Union and then after its dissolution in what has remained of it to fully understand the idea of what it really was. You had to be intelligent enough, notice lots of things, analyze, compare, so on. What you're telling to me is most likely a media-driven carcass. Even if you've watched and read a lot on the topic, what you have now at maximum is a carcass of the idea of what the USSR was like. To get to the muscles, the fat, the meat, the nerves of it, you should have some experience of living in it. And the carcass, you know... The carcass of the most beautiful woman in the world is the same as of the ugliest criminal in the world: the same skull, the same shoulder bones. The things that you told me in the comments are taken from the surface. The surface perspective actually means very little.
@IMxYOURxDADDY The processes that happened in the USSR were much more complex than just black/white division. Approximately 3 mln Russians and Ukrainians came to the US, approximately 200 mln didn't. In 1990 in the nation-wide referendum the majority of Soviet people voted for the existence of the USSR... In 1991 what the people saw that there was no chance to preserve their country so they voted to dissolve it. I prefer the term Soviet Totalitarian Socialism, as the Communism was a Utopia never to be achieved anywhere in the world. The level of totalitarianism happened to be different during the different eras of USSR's existence. Lenin's USSR, Stalin's USSR, Khrushchev's USSR, Brezhnev's USSR and Gorbachev's USSR were totally different countries with very little in common. In particular, Lenin and Khrushchev were militantly anti-religious, while Stalin since the 1940s and especially Brezhnev were rather tolerant to religions. Brezhnev was the man that never participated in Stalin's repressions, while Khrushchev did. Lenin and early Stalin tolerated new forms of art, all those abstract, surreal, abnormal things. Lenin tolerated gays and abortions. Majority of the Soviet people had enough of total lack of food in the stores, enough of lack of future because of vague political reality in the 1990 and 1991. It had nothing to do with such western propaganda concepts as fear of KGB, fear of imprisonment, fear of whatever. It was a fear of not be able to visit Disneyland, if you will, that dissolved the USSR. What happened in Eastern Europe though is another issue: for the Soviet people it was their own, domestic, intrinsic history, regime, power. For the Eastern Europe it was a tyranny of other country. The Totalitarian Socialist regimes were violently held there by force, the Soviet force, the force of the other country, the big brother-bully, the USSR. In certain countries like East Germany or Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia, of course) the Totalitarian Socialism was a more or less suitable model, while for countries like Poland or (now) Czech Republic it simply was totally alien for the respective populations' mentality. You are trying to simplify somewhat.
Genuinely, when i found a small high end British supermarket in China I was shamefully excited. This was after only a year. Imagine how you'd feel over a lifetime.
I am from slovakia born in 1990. The whole world changed. I lived happily through Balkan wars. Went for a sea trip to Croatia, seen bombarded building, mine fields, well it was an eye opener to people who never seen war so close.
@@lotuseater7247 I remember in the US after the Yugoslav wars Zastava dumping tons of milsurp on the American market so you could get a "Yugo" SKS for $250 in ~2007. To this day people still call them Yugos even post-SFR and despite FR Yugoslavia and the Union of Serbia and Montenegro being defunct. I was only 15 or 16 and wasn't aware of any of that at the time, but I do know I'd rather the wars and destruction be avoided even if it meant I had to pay more for a rifle
@@izdatsumcp No. State Capitalism also exists, such as in China and they own the production. The situation in the scene shows the joy of finding a consumer product unavailable in his own country, but that is not reflective of the powers of Capitalism, not in these times. It only reflects the power of the free market in the 1980's/90's under western Democratic conditions. I just don't agree that it is a sign that 'cpaitalism is superior'. But I'm not Socialist either and I don't agree that this scene reflects the ills of Socialism, but Communism.
carlindelco something tell me that you don’t know what you’re saying, Bernie Sanders did the impossible, challenge the wealthy and powerful, and if you ignorantly think he is for authoritarian communism you are a bigger fool than Thought
@@samuelcontreras2230 There are two kinds of socialists: The true believers who actually believe it can work. They tend to be well intentioned but ultimately misinformed. And the second kind: Those who know it's a sham, that it can never work in the real world, but use it anyway as a means to obtain power.
Francisco Maldonado you’re thinking of the complete government takeover of means of production like in Cuba, Bernie Sanders want us to be more like Scandinavia, you might say they aren’t socialist, just have progressive policies, that’s simply the polices Bernie wants, the king Teddy Roosevelt in the progressive era fought for
@@samuelcontreras2230 Given the fact that none of the Scandinavian nations is a Socialist regime, you clearly fall under the first type of "socialist". www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2018/07/08/sorry-bernie-bros-but-nordic-countries-are-not-socialist/#1f533f5174ad After all the free market is predominant in the Nordic states. so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/ noun a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole. Socialism cannot work alongside freedom, since its very definition demands the forceful confiscation of wealth, therefore it can only work when government uses the threat of violence to take the legitimate property of some under the excuse of "distributing" to others. Naturally the only people who thrive under such a system are those in power.
My family hosted a pair of Soviet cosmonauts during the period of glasnost before the fall of the USSR, for an airshow North of Seattle. My dad took them to the local shopping mall and they were floored. Scary how much America has bent toward becoming what the USSR was. Among the many things they shared, "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."
I had this reaction too as an American living in France then returned to California and went to Costco. Oversized Americans in their oversized cars buying oversized portions. Too mamy options. Too many calories. Too many zombies pursuing the "dream".
Yes, exactly. In Moscow, there aren't or at least at the time this movie was made, dozens upon dozens of variety of coffee. In America, Robin's character is overwhelmed at the vast quantity of different kinds of coffee and in effect, its an example of what many Russians who had never been to the U.S. before were experiencing when they were first introduced to the consumer society of the United States.
He just didn't know that there are many different brands of coffee, not just one. So it scared him a little. Having knew and worked with people from the former Soviet Union in past jobs, I used to help them with their understanding of English (especially with terminology as it pertained to the work we did). And a friend of mine from Belarus whom I took to places to see.
***** Dead wrong pal, The various Slavic former Soviets I knew were immigrants from Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. Only one was Jewish from Lithuania. But in regards to this film, some of the same adjustments to American life depicted in this film, both joys and fears, pros and cons, that Vladimir experienced were exhibited by former Soviets I knew and worked with. I've witnessed it. And even from other immigrants from other countries as well. And they trusted me, a Black American, to keep it real, and they thanked me always. And at my current job, many still do. :)
To understand this scene you had to know how difficult it was to get items in the USSR..... I was there in 1983 and there was a line outside a store in Moscow because they had lemons..... I would go into a store and there would be three items only on the shelves... such as big jars of pickles, large crude bars of soap, and a few biscuits... imagine a USSR citizen walking into a USA supermarket thinking maybe he would be lucky to get in line to have a chance to buy coffee... and seeing 100 different brands instead!!!! I lived in france for over 20 years and when I moved back to the usa and walked into frys to buy things, including coffee... I almost had the same experience as robin Williams!!!
This movie makes very good propaganda for capitalism. The greatest freedom of capitalism is the freedom to watch porn, consume advertising and wear jeans. Who wouldn't want to experience these freedoms of capitalism?
This to me shows the perils of consumerism. I feel like that a lot when I go to stores even before covid. Too much choice, too many colors too many products - coming from a born and raised American. Do we really need to be SO many options to the points it’s overwhelming? Variety and freedom is good but excess? Not that those few brands he listed are excessive but I’ve seen huge ass coffee aisles, cosmetics stores, malls. Can’t do it. Too much. I can relate to Vlad very much 😓
You seem to have missed the point of this scene. It's a man coming to terms with having lived his life with no freedom. You should watch the whole movie.
Speaking about "the perils of consumerism" and "too much choice", would you prefer "no consumerism"? Would you rather somebody else made the choices for you? If your answer to the above is yes, you are not American. Or, you are tragically brainwashed with cheap leftist propaganda. Or, both these things.
Who are you to decide what's an "excessive" number of choices? There are so many choices precisely because some people make them. Where do you get the idea that they shouldn't be allowed those choices?
@@thewonkyembouchure This is not a false dichotomy, smartass. This is real life. Have you ever experienced seeing people standing in long lines for bare necessities? Have you ever seen empty shelves in food stores? I have. Therefore, I do relate with Vladimir Ivanov here.
‼Sadly, many people misunderstand this, so I feel like I have to explain this scene. Robin Williams plays a citizen of the Soviet Union who has just defected to the US. In this scene he goes shopping for the first time in the US. Products like toilet paper, coffee, shoes, radios, pineapples etc., especially imported ones were hardly available or not available at all in the USSR at that time. People living there could get them only illegally for extremely much money or by standing in a indescribably long line for hours, days, sometimes they had to stand in this line from 6am to 6am a week later- and that often in bad conditions, especially when it was winter, since they usually were outside. In a scene of this movie you can see one of those typical long lines (although my mother said that once she had to stand in an even longer one to get a sack of apples). Now, you have to know that there were immensely many cases very similar to the one presented in the scene above: Soviet people who just have defected to a capitalistic country like the US, West Germany etc. and went shopping for the first time got so overwhelmed by the diversity and the mass of products (and even without a single line!) which were so easy to get and which they maybe haven't even ever seen in their entire life before that many of them simply passed out, ran screaming through the store, or even got crazy. The famous Russian actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky even vomited when he saw the full shelves in a US store. The scene with Robin Williams' character loosing control over himself is no propaganda or anything else- it is a typical story which many former citizens of the Soviet Union have experienced.‼
Correct. The Soviet people did not have much. Mostly they drank tea. Coffee that was available was instant coffee.
Yep, none of this surprises me, given what these people had to live through.
Well that explains a lot. I never understood why people in the theatre laughed. I just felt wide-eyed panic at all the words and colors and the thought that the *smell* must be overwhelming to this man.
I consider that scene a magnificent repudiation of socialism and an example of capitalist abundance.
Wow! Thank you for the insight 🌹
This is how many of my venezuelan friends/family have felt when they have escaped out
Did you manage to escape as well?
@@nsf001-3 yes I was one of the lucky ones with enough of an education to figure out where it was going early, and got my behind out of there before the $#i7 hit the fan
Im from Buenos Aires. That happened to me when I went to a monster supermarket chain in Australia, Sydney. I saw all the food, the colorful products and felt bad inside. Overwhelmed. I only wanted to taste peanut butter cause Ive seen it in the movies. So I bought that and got out. But the feeling didnt go away until the next day. I was 17.
Estás todavía en Australia?.
@@anibalcesarnishizk2205 No, Im back in Buenos Aires
@@tuamigajordana
I remember the same happened to me as i was in Japan.The year,1986.So many things i 've never seen in....Buenos Aires also.I was shocked.
So what year would that be....ballpark ??
@@nickkickball2322 It was 2005. I feel old now!
wow. this scene could explains how sensory overload works - much like a soviet everyman entering american supermarket.
I know someone from Russia, he won’t tell me what it was like:( I really like this film though and Robin Williams, my mom met him. I grew up in Marin where he’s from. Miss him 😢❤
In the late 80s Gorbachev visited a US supermarket. He saw all the choices available and that common people could buy fresh vegetables and he knew the Soviet system couldn't compete.
Yeltsin, not Gorbachev.
@@pjabrony8280 Both were criminals
And Bernie Sanders went to Soviet Union, where they set the price based on prices in the US, only with a bureaucratic delay of about 5 years. Bernie was impressed that they only had one kind of cheese, but it was really cheap!!
I met and worked with people who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, and I have a friend from Belarus,
this isn't unusual for some.
The overload of newness.
This kinda happened to Boris Yeltsin when he stopped in a supermarket in Texas on a goodwill trip to the US. I've heard some people claim that whatever shreds of loyalty to the Communist Party he still had at that point died after that.
Is he in charge of forcing down planes to nab journalists?
And the realization that your government was intentionally lying to you about scarcity for your entire life - people do in fact have choice but the folks running your country intentionally deprived its citizens. I can't imagine how betrayed I'd feel - I'd probably fall to my knees and weep.
I had a similar reaction to a supermarket cheese section after two years in Albania with the Peace Corps. Albania, at the time, had two kinds of cheese and both were white. Suddenly I was in a Dillon's in the USA facing a wall of cheese of various colors and I had a small panic attack. Didn't pull anything off the shelves, just kind of froze up and told my sister I was quietly freaking out. (Her reaction: Well, you are a freak, so that's natural.)
Doesn't surprise me. Seeing multiple types of the same thing must've been a complete eye opener for many in your situation.
white cheese is racist
~rolls eyes ~
Cheese seems like one of the few items where such extreme choice is justified. There’s just so much variety, I can’t imagine only having access to two types of cheese
@@gregp103 how?
Robin Williams was amazing in this.
I LOVE this movie. Robin Williams RIP. MISS YOU😢
I always think of this scene when shopping for coffee.
Not me, I think about how Jim never had a second cup of coffee at home until Yuban coffee 😂
Mee to! I had a melt down in the waffle section one day at the store blueberry waffles plain waffles cinnamon waffles unicorn waffles gluten-free waffles waffles waffles waffles!
@@georgiasmith64 brilliant 🤠
@@SS-tx3bt lol😂
@@georgiasmith64 Jim never vomits at home.....
Not entirely related but in the 80's in the UK we only had Supermarkets, which used to be much smaller than today and definitely smaller than US stores. They opened a Hypermarket near my home in the 90's which became sort of a tourist attraction. Why? Because nobody had seen something so absurdly big. As a child I remembered feeling everything was unnecessarily enormous, from the parking that was styled like a theme park to the seemingly endless shop flooring that went on forever. Entire isles dedicated to 1 type of food and popular brands of imported food and drink you'd never seen before in your life. The place was so big it had to be shared with a few other smaller stores. It was later bought over by Asda (Walmart) and converted the entire place to it's own brand.
I remember Wal Mart stores in the 90's and how gigantic they were. The one I went to as a kid was converted from an old flea market
I live in central Asia, and had similar experience in Thailand, at a Bangkok supermarket. I didn't know there could be so much variety of pastries and bread.
My dad worked on kwajaleen. A VERY tiny atoll in the pacific . 3 miles long and a mile wide. And older guy there had never left the island. His entire world was that tiny island. My dad and his friends all chipped in and they paid for him and his grandkids to take a vacation to Disneyland in California. They probably should have picked somewhere less populated.. because it almost gave the poor old guy a heart attack. His kids said right as they went to their first store the doors opened automatically.. like they all do here. And it freaked him out very bad. He literally thought it was bad magic. Disneyland was way to.much for him. On kwajaleen they don't even have cars or roads. Let alone animatronic dancing bears and dragons. And rides with ghosts and roller coasters. It was totally sensory overload for the poor.guy.
Lol this man was a true comedian, his work speaks for itself.
He was so much more that just a comedian. He could play so much more than just a funny man and do it very well. Robin Williams was a very versatile actor, amongst the best in my humble opinion.
@@hotelworker812 So true, I grew up watching him on Mork and Mindy. He always made me laugh. Then I learned he was a stand up comic and his own material made me laugh in a different way as I grew up. I learned when Christopher Reeve , his room mate in Juliard acting school took Robin in when he was waiting for his financial aid to come through. Robin heard of Christopher's riding accident and that week snuck into his hospital room in scrubs to cheer him up. Christopher was also Robin's sons godfather. He had his troubles with drugs and alcohol but i'm glad he had his family to come back to. When I heard he died, I was at a grocery store and I couldn't move, frozen in place from the shock. I then learned the details of how he died and it tore me up. The man made us laugh and cry and if there's any justice in this world, he's up there in heaven making everyone laugh at a comedy club.
not just comedian. damned good dramatist too.
R.I.P. ROBIN WILLAMS
fuck off.
I once met a man whose family escaped from the Soviet Union when he was a teenager and he described his first experience with an American supermarket. I never really understood until I saw this movie.
This movie should be required viewing for anyone who believes communism/socialism would be good for America.
Yeah it seems accurate to native-born citizens as well. It reminds me how I felt as a kid when my mom took me to a big store like that for the first time. I'm sure it's the same sense of joyous wonder and befuddlement for people who travel or immigrate
This is NOT propaganda. I was born in the ussr and i do know it's all TRUE. This movie made BEFORE perestroyka. Gorbachev started perestroyka in 1986-87, but this movie is from 1983. Its all true
This movie is from 1983' *Brezhnev* times. *before Gorbachev,s era* it shows the reality of Brezhnev era. You can ask any former soviet immigrant they tell you similar stories. I was born in the USSR
@@ninae6391 +
Coffee.. Price bottomed... It's going to get expensive. in terms of USD.. I remember pre-Gorbachev ... propaganda about the ussr was heavy here in 'Murica
I was baking a cake and needed some vanilla extract for the frosting. I went to my local, ordinary, medium-sized, neighborhood (suburban Chicago) grocery store. They had 11 kinds of vanilla extract to pick from! We live in a great country!
Interesting metric for greatness.
I remembered the scene but not what movie it was from. Happy to see it here. :-) We have SOOO much to be grateful for in the USA! And I don't even like coffee...
Chokes me up every time.
I actually went shopping in Russia in 1992 and saw the bare shelves.
Me, the first time I set foot in an American supermarket...
This is how I feel this morning. Coffee!
Amen!
i love this movie, i love Robin, i respect USA very much. This movie made me want to stay in Russia even more, because of this russian nostalgia.. i know people who came back home from the USA because of that..
I can see why. That had to be extremely difficult. I’m American and I have a hard time in stores though not as bad as Robin or the people you know. I only ever buy 1 kind of tea or toothpaste and if they don’t have it then I start to panic because then I have to make a choice with all the other toothpastes. It’s overwhelming especially in clothing stores. I have limited money and too much choice and when I’m done I wish I never when to buy food or a dress or anything. It’s all so much pressure. 😰
If it’s rough for an American who has been around this, it must be very rough for everyone else who comes here.
i live in Russia its nice
@@Hamza-hq8ud Which part? The Kremlin? The Rublyovka?
I'm from America and I don't like USA for various reasons including this one. Too much capitalist BS. Anyway hope you're doing well
In the USSR, most of the coffee that people drank was instant coffee because it didn't require a machine to make it, only hot water, which everyone had access to. It wasn't the instant coffee, like we have here, though. The instant coffee there was actually good. It had to be, or nobody would drink it. The best brands were imported from India.
It did not have to be. It was all that was available. I am from the Soviet Union.
I'm American and I drink instant coffee but I don't even add hot water I just throw a spoonful of granules in my mouth and drink it down with a bit of water. If I were alive in the Soviet Union, the coffee wouldn't be something that would be bothering me
@@michaelhart8257 I checked your channel and I like the presentation style of your videos. Have you ever thought of doing videos about your personal experiences in The Soviet Union?
this is actually based on a real experience Yelsin the Communist Party Leader went into a Texas supermarket after a trip to the space center and freaked out. He quit the communist party soon after.
I love this scene so much😂♥️
Still my favorite RW movie. He was brilliant.
Reaction of every Soviet in America - they saw maybe that much food in their entire life!
Propaganda bullshit
Thank you comrade for your contribution. Can I send you some coffee?
GetToHellOut+ We had a Russian exchange student when I was in high school and he basically lost his mind when we took him to a Walmart. He said the shelves were bare in the USSR and you had to wait in a line for hours for even a chance to get something you needed. Even Boris Yeltsin lost his faith in Communism when he visited a US grocery store in the late 1980s. The propaganda was on the Soviet side in this case... their economic system was shit and they had to brainwash their citizens to keep them from revolting.
Idi kcherty!
Businesses in free market economies live or die based on how well or poorly they meet the wants and needs of consumers. Communism is the Bolshevik version of serfdom.
Bolshevism is not about meeting the needs of people. It's about making the people meet the needs of a hereditary Bolshevik aristocracy. So also Maoism. So also Ba'athism. So also Juche. So also all of these horseshit Marxist ideologies.
Things like this actual happened to Russian defectors
Imagine waiting in line for 4 or 5 hours to get sausages so bad dogs would not eat them for most of your life ,and then coming here and walking into Winn-Dixie
Just bring your credit card.
I had a similar large experience in a liquor store in Nashville. I had never been in a liquor store where they had shopping carts and was the size of a smallish WalMart. An entire aisle of vodka. Just froze and stared until a clerk came up to me and asked if I were alright.
Makes me think of Nicholas Cage filling up supermarket carts full of booze in a giant liquor store in Leaving Las Vegas.
The clerk asked me if I was alright. I said no, but I was buying liquor.
One very important defector left in part because he could buy whatever fruits he wanted in a Canadian supermarket.
When my family immigrated from the soviet union as religious refugees, the first time they seen a fully stocked grocery store my mom broke down and cried 😢 It mustve been such an experience seeing so much food as someone who had to survive on scraps most of their lives. My dad spent his first two paychecks on chocolete and ribs 😆
This reminds me of taking my Cuban girlfriend to the grocery store... 🤣🤣🤣
Is it just me or was Robin Williams incredibly handsome in the 80s??
Not just you .he's very sexy in this movie .Rugged,scruffy,jazzy
How mean would it be for me to walk up to him while he's on the ground and softly whisper:
"... and that's just the coffee...you should check the bread isle..."
...
ASMR style?
He'd whisper back, "aisle*"
He'd probably say "Where do I board the ferry to this bread island?"
Is Coffee Isle near Gilligan's Isle?
Yup.. for that time .. not an exaggeration Capitalism = FREEDOM of Choice..and plenty of it
I was listening to a Talk Show host, Sébastien Gorka, who had Hungarian parents but grew up in England. He mentioned going to the supermarket after moving to the US in the early 80's and being mezzmorized by the countless brands of.. YOGURT.. 😉🇺🇲
Thank You. May he R.I.P. nano,nano”. Mork & Mindy. 🇺🇸🇺🇸👍
nanu nanu*, imbecile.
What is this? Cheese
And what’s this cheese? Cheese
Ahh how about this? That’s cheese
And this one- it’s a potato? No that’s cheese
'Murica got da cheese strat for cheese.
In Soviet Russia, cheese gets _you!_
I felt a bit like this when looking for coffee for some friends in a supermarket in my country. I am not a coffee buyer 😜
0:45 - Me after my wife shops me to death for 2 hours.....
I worked with a couple of guys who came here from a different country and they had the same reaction when they went to a grocery store to get coffee.they said we're they came from they could only get one type of coffee and they could only get so much food and that was it.
In the old Soviet Union you just bought coffee! Assuming of course you could find it!
Right! He was so confused that there wasn't a line for coffee!
Assuming of course you had money!
Imagine being an immigrant from a country like say the Soviet Union or some other communist controlled country and this scene is EXACTLY how you feel when in America. Vlad got so overwhelmed by the amount of choices in the store that he had a panic attack essentially. Living in the USSR, he wasnt used to choices. Everyone in USSR got only one item, that was it. The way of life is so much different than America. Now you know why immigrants want to be here more than any other place.
Yes, sure, still the question lingers on - which way of life is better, on a global, universal, universum scale? The Soviet people in the USA expected those various goods to smell like coffee, to have a taste of strawberry, to be natural. But it wasn't. Even legends like Coca Cola are a mixture of chemicals these days. So, is it great to become a slave to your stomach? That's a philosophy coming in, so to each his own. You couldn't just go to the store and buy a box of chocolate candies in the USSR - but if you managed to eventually do, you got chocolate made of cocoa, in turn planted on cocoa trees and processed from cocoa beans. For a rather small price, suitable for any purse. In the USA even back then you paid more and got what you wanted, but it was oil mixed with gasoline mixed with chops and chips of cocoa beans' shells with a fragrance of passion fruit made from urine. That's it, basically. I strongly condemn regimes like North Korea's, but in all sincerety, the Soviet way of life was weird, fruitful and had its benefits.
@@DeadnWoon Until you committed thought crime and spent the rest of your live in Siberia mining salt and wearing your wife's head as a hat.
@Matt Brewer I was talking about the post-Stalin USSR, you seem to talk about the Stalin era. Stalin has died in 1953. Not so sure about your level of knowledge on the topic, but in the post-Stalin time there was no fear about being immediately imprisoned for your thoughts spoken out in public. When a person said something seemingly anti-Soviet, the respective people informed him/her that it was anti-Soviet... If the person still insisted, there would most likely be consequences. In the 70s-80s consequences most likely meant losing one's job. However, in absolute most cases people understood everything right from the very beginning... They just sort of said in return, "Ouch! I'm so sorry! I was wrong" and that is how it all worked. What you told me was the Stalin's way of treating people, the way died along with Stalin himself. The Soviet people generally knew what borders they were not to cross, and they simply did not cross them. Which was actually not a catastrophe for them, at all.
@IMxYOURxDADDY I am always glad to have a conversation on topics like that. However, I am also aware that all of us have something ingrained into our consciousness, we have childhood experience, adult life experience. We sometimes can't believe the other ways of living may be as normal as ours is. In very short, in one sentence: you had to live in the former Soviet Union and then after its dissolution in what has remained of it to fully understand the idea of what it really was. You had to be intelligent enough, notice lots of things, analyze, compare, so on. What you're telling to me is most likely a media-driven carcass. Even if you've watched and read a lot on the topic, what you have now at maximum is a carcass of the idea of what the USSR was like. To get to the muscles, the fat, the meat, the nerves of it, you should have some experience of living in it. And the carcass, you know... The carcass of the most beautiful woman in the world is the same as of the ugliest criminal in the world: the same skull, the same shoulder bones. The things that you told me in the comments are taken from the surface. The surface perspective actually means very little.
@IMxYOURxDADDY The processes that happened in the USSR were much more complex than just black/white division. Approximately 3 mln Russians and Ukrainians came to the US, approximately 200 mln didn't. In 1990 in the nation-wide referendum the majority of Soviet people voted for the existence of the USSR... In 1991 what the people saw that there was no chance to preserve their country so they voted to dissolve it. I prefer the term Soviet Totalitarian Socialism, as the Communism was a Utopia never to be achieved anywhere in the world. The level of totalitarianism happened to be different during the different eras of USSR's existence. Lenin's USSR, Stalin's USSR, Khrushchev's USSR, Brezhnev's USSR and Gorbachev's USSR were totally different countries with very little in common. In particular, Lenin and Khrushchev were militantly anti-religious, while Stalin since the 1940s and especially Brezhnev were rather tolerant to religions. Brezhnev was the man that never participated in Stalin's repressions, while Khrushchev did. Lenin and early Stalin tolerated new forms of art, all those abstract, surreal, abnormal things. Lenin tolerated gays and abortions. Majority of the Soviet people had enough of total lack of food in the stores, enough of lack of future because of vague political reality in the 1990 and 1991. It had nothing to do with such western propaganda concepts as fear of KGB, fear of imprisonment, fear of whatever. It was a fear of not be able to visit Disneyland, if you will, that dissolved the USSR. What happened in Eastern Europe though is another issue: for the Soviet people it was their own, domestic, intrinsic history, regime, power. For the Eastern Europe it was a tyranny of other country. The Totalitarian Socialist regimes were violently held there by force, the Soviet force, the force of the other country, the big brother-bully, the USSR. In certain countries like East Germany or Slovakia (then part of Czechoslovakia, of course) the Totalitarian Socialism was a more or less suitable model, while for countries like Poland or (now) Czech Republic it simply was totally alien for the respective populations' mentality. You are trying to simplify somewhat.
A communist seeing our coffie I know we have so much lol I love itoo Robin love you too
Its like browsing a streaming service such as Netflix, scrolling through the movies for an hour unable to make up the mind. Annoying actually.
Too much choice is worse than a curated choice of quality only.
THE ULTIMATE CONSOOOOOOMER
Curated by whom?
Nothing like that.
Browsing Netflix underwhelms.
@@cattysplat That FOMO that paralyzes you.
This is me, every time I go to the store 😂
(anymore why is this so stinkin expensive? )and what's so special about that for it be be $$$...
I loved this movie. Lol
Я всегда таким образом кофе покупаю. Обычное дело.
lol
Bless you for uploading this! I feel this way at Costco all the time! American capitalism at its best/worst......
“coffeeeeeagghhhhhhh!” *End Scene*
Life is trying for the immigrant at the beginning when me and my family came over from Cuba it was difficult
Post corona when toilet paper was back on the shelves
you felt it like the coffee scene from moscow on the Hudson
Iove this movie
Well, that's definitely a different culture.
+broomsterm And you would know this, how?
USSR wasn't so good like Soviet propaganda says, but it wasn't so bad like Western propaganda says.
Brainwashing children newer was an education, and it will never be, no matter how hard your politics try.
DartLuke In the first few decades of the U.S.S.R. it was every kind of bad.
This is me living in China upon finding a Starbucks that sells coffee beans.
Genuinely, when i found a small high end British supermarket in China I was shamefully excited. This was after only a year. Imagine how you'd feel over a lifetime.
@@lotuseater7247 I'm only glad I didn't grow up as a kid in Eastern Europe during the 80's but I'm sure the 90's would be fascinating to live through.
I am from slovakia born in 1990. The whole world changed. I lived happily through Balkan wars. Went for a sea trip to Croatia, seen bombarded building, mine fields, well it was an eye opener to people who never seen war so close.
@@marceelino That's nice. I was born in 86, didn't see any war up close, but I saw it on TV. Didn't look like something I wanted to join in on.
@@lotuseater7247 I remember in the US after the Yugoslav wars Zastava dumping tons of milsurp on the American market so you could get a "Yugo" SKS for $250 in ~2007. To this day people still call them Yugos even post-SFR and despite FR Yugoslavia and the Union of Serbia and Montenegro being defunct. I was only 15 or 16 and wasn't aware of any of that at the time, but I do know I'd rather the wars and destruction be avoided even if it meant I had to pay more for a rifle
Superb example of the superiority of capitalism over socialism!
Communism not Socialism. Also it isn't really a great example since Capitalism has often failed to provide produce and options too.
@@lotuseater7247 I’ll take capitalism over communism/socialism/any other kind of “ism” any day
@@lotuseater7247 Yes, it's socialism. Socialism is the state owning the means of production. That doesn't lead to a situation like this.
@@snizzlefrazzy because you haven't experienced others, that's why.
@@izdatsumcp No. State Capitalism also exists, such as in China and they own the production. The situation in the scene shows the joy of finding a consumer product unavailable in his own country, but that is not reflective of the powers of Capitalism, not in these times. It only reflects the power of the free market in the 1980's/90's under western Democratic conditions. I just don't agree that it is a sign that 'cpaitalism is superior'. But I'm not Socialist either and I don't agree that this scene reflects the ills of Socialism, but Communism.
Did you stand in a line for days? Just for to n coffee? Only one brand?
Bernie Sanders: "Food lines are a good thing!"
yeah he has NO idea what he is saying and his followers don't either dangerous times
carlindelco something tell me that you don’t know what you’re saying, Bernie Sanders did the impossible, challenge the wealthy and powerful, and if you ignorantly think he is for authoritarian communism you are a bigger fool than Thought
@@samuelcontreras2230 There are two kinds of socialists: The true believers who actually believe it can work. They tend to be well intentioned but ultimately misinformed. And the second kind: Those who know it's a sham, that it can never work in the real world, but use it anyway as a means to obtain power.
Francisco Maldonado you’re thinking of the complete government takeover of means of production like in Cuba, Bernie Sanders want us to be more like Scandinavia, you might say they aren’t socialist, just have progressive policies, that’s simply the polices Bernie wants, the king Teddy Roosevelt in the progressive era fought for
@@samuelcontreras2230 Given the fact that none of the Scandinavian nations is a Socialist regime, you clearly fall under the first type of "socialist". www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2018/07/08/sorry-bernie-bros-but-nordic-countries-are-not-socialist/#1f533f5174ad
After all the free market is predominant in the Nordic states.
so·cial·ism /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/
noun
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Socialism cannot work alongside freedom, since its very definition demands the forceful confiscation of wealth, therefore it can only work when government uses the threat of violence to take the legitimate property of some under the excuse of "distributing" to others. Naturally the only people who thrive under such a system are those in power.
My family hosted a pair of Soviet cosmonauts during the period of glasnost before the fall of the USSR, for an airshow North of Seattle. My dad took them to the local shopping mall and they were floored.
Scary how much America has bent toward becoming what the USSR was. Among the many things they shared, "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."
lol this country is absolutely nothing like the USSR. We're just about 100% opposite.
"My family hosted a pair of Soviet cosmonauts"
This is like the ultimate flex and if it were me I'd never shut up about it
The character Robin William's played in this movie he is looking for Coffee
Perfect example on how our Capitalistic Society is versus Communism/Socialism Society that has long lines and shortages.
No shortages, just artificial scarcity. Capitalism has the same end result as Communism
@@nsf001-3 bullshit. People are immensely better off under capitalism.
Coffee
Its amazing how some store employees are so lazy and rude , just walk over there with his and show him.
Amanda Palmer brought me here. Lol.
Ryan H. Dude me too
But i dont get how she relates to this
Her song Olly Olly Oxen Free (I think is the one) mentions this scene and I'd never seen this movie before so I looked it up
Ryan H. Yeah me too
I know she said something about relating to this scene when shes feeling like shit about herself
MOŽETE DA , DOŽIVITE , ŠTO STE PROPUSTILI . UZ VAŠU KAFU ILI MORSKE PLODOVE NA BALKANU.
I had this reaction too as an American living in France then returned to California and went to Costco.
Oversized Americans in their oversized cars buying oversized portions.
Too mamy options. Too many calories. Too many zombies pursuing the "dream".
I never i got this scene very well, did he got to excited from the variety or what? still funny though!
Yes, exactly. In Moscow, there aren't or at least at the time this movie was made, dozens upon dozens of variety of coffee. In America, Robin's character is overwhelmed at the vast quantity of different kinds of coffee and in effect, its an example of what many Russians who had never been to the U.S. before were experiencing when they were first introduced to the consumer society of the United States.
He just didn't know that there are many different brands of coffee, not just one. So it scared him a little. Having knew and worked with people from the former Soviet Union in past jobs, I used to help them with their understanding of English (especially with terminology as it pertained to the work we did). And a friend of mine from Belarus whom I took to places to see.
***** I don't agree that this film is propaganda, I knew and worked with former Soviet Union people who had challenges with things like this.
***** Dead wrong pal,
The various Slavic former Soviets I knew were immigrants from Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine.
Only one was Jewish from Lithuania.
But in regards to this film, some of the same adjustments to American life depicted in this film, both joys and fears, pros and cons, that Vladimir experienced were exhibited by former Soviets I knew and worked with. I've witnessed it. And even from other immigrants from other countries as well.
And they trusted me, a Black American, to keep it real, and they thanked me always.
And at my current job, many still do. :)
To understand this scene you had to know how difficult it was to get items in the USSR..... I was there in 1983 and there was a line outside a store in Moscow because they had lemons..... I would go into a store and there would be three items only on the shelves... such as big jars of pickles, large crude bars of soap, and a few biscuits... imagine a USSR citizen walking into a USA supermarket thinking maybe he would be lucky to get in line to have a chance to buy coffee... and seeing 100 different brands instead!!!! I lived in france for over 20 years and when I moved back to the usa and walked into frys to buy things, including coffee... I almost had the same experience as robin Williams!!!
Who's here from TikTok?
This movie makes very good propaganda for capitalism. The greatest freedom of capitalism is the freedom to watch porn, consume advertising and wear jeans. Who wouldn't want to experience these freedoms of capitalism?
Man, what would I do without my 40 flavours of toothpaste? Utter shite.
This to me shows the perils of consumerism. I feel like that a lot when I go to stores even before covid. Too much choice, too many colors too many products - coming from a born and raised American. Do we really need to be SO many options to the points it’s overwhelming? Variety and freedom is good but excess?
Not that those few brands he listed are excessive but I’ve seen huge ass coffee aisles, cosmetics stores, malls. Can’t do it. Too much. I can relate to Vlad very much 😓
You seem to have missed the point of this scene. It's a man coming to terms with having lived his life with no freedom. You should watch the whole movie.
Speaking about "the perils of consumerism" and "too much choice", would you prefer "no consumerism"? Would you rather somebody else made the choices for you?
If your answer to the above is yes, you are not American. Or, you are tragically brainwashed with cheap leftist propaganda. Or, both these things.
Who are you to decide what's an "excessive" number of choices? There are so many choices precisely because some people make them. Where do you get the idea that they shouldn't be allowed those choices?
@@amenhotepavoskin1307 Why reduce it to a false dichotomy?
@@thewonkyembouchure This is not a false dichotomy, smartass. This is real life.
Have you ever experienced seeing people standing in long lines for bare necessities? Have you ever seen empty shelves in food stores?
I have. Therefore, I do relate with Vladimir Ivanov here.
Coffee line...
Life is trying for the immigrant at the beginning when me and my family came over from Cuba it was difficult