How one supermarket visit connects Soviet scarcity to today’s grocery debate.

Comment “Groceries” and we’ll send you the full video behind this carousel. In September 1989, during his US visit, Boris Yeltsin made an unscheduled stop at a supermarket in Houston. What stunned him was not luxury, but ordinary abundance: shelves filled with food and household goods Soviet citizens rarely took for granted. The episode dramatized a basic economic question: how can millions of goods reach consumers without a planner deciding what to produce, where, and in what quantity? That question matters again because grocery prices rose sharply after 2020. The pandemic constrained supply while the money supply expanded rapidly. Yet the inflation that followed is often blamed on corporate greed. Prices do more than charge consumers: they coordinate scarcity and production. Price controls can suppress that signal, while government stores can hide losses by shifting them to taxpayers. Neither creates more goods.