When empty shelves become empty stores

Watching Trump play paper dolls with tariffs makes me shudder

Grocery store, Moscow, 1990 (video here)

I’ve seen a historic world city with empty shelves in barren stores. It wasn’t like our pandemic with gaps on shelves; it was more like the world had ended. Watching trump play the tariff shuffle, brings back memories that still haunt me.

Moscow, 1990, Summer … 50 teenagers from the US gathered with 50 teenagers from the USSR in Moscow for a two-week accelerated learning camp. I had the privilege of going with them as a volunteer. It was a shock to my system in so many ways:

• Completely empty stores. Empty shelves. Barren counters. Gaping meat coolers with nothing to cool. Bread was sold in separate kiosks … where the average wait was four hours.

• Lunch with a host family in their tiny, plain apartment that housed three generations in a middle-income family.

• The generous hospitality of the people who for the first time in their recent history could talk openly to outsiders. Fortunately, we had been told to bring small presents as one of their customs was to give small gifts to everyone they met. Each of us were showered with toys, postcards, and other small remembrances. We were mostly middle class Americans. They thought we were rich.

Customer at the opening of the first McDonald’s in Moscow, January 1990. (video)

• The beauty of Red Square and the lush birch forests surrounding the campus where we stayed were stark comparisons to the grim ugliness of the high-rise, unadorned concrete apartment buildings where people lived crowded, spartan lives.

• Conversations with people I had been schooled to hate, believing they were our enemies. When I asked a teacher if they hated us as we had been taught to hate them, she quickly responded … “Oh, no, we loved Americans. When I was little, they dropped winter coats to us.”

  Today, that teacher’s comment reminds me of what we’ve lost as we’ve destroyed USAID, a program intended to deliver our help and generosity to make friends around the world.

  It seems as though it was a program with flaws … but rather than fix the flaws, we just dumped DOGE’d it.

I remember wondering why the stores were barren … why people had to wait years to get married because there was no available housing … why people took the windshield wipers off their cars at night … why visiting a lumber yard in order to build something for the camp felt like going back in time a hundred years … why the best place to buy car parts was at a swap meet on the side of a major highway where most of the parts were probably stolen … why most of our teenagers left their jeans and small appliances for their friends who were amazed at our wealth.

We sang a lot of songs that summer, many honoring diversity … one popular song stepped through the colors of people … black is so beautiful … brown is so beautiful … etc. After taking off from the Moscow airport, the US teenagers broke out in song with a change that had never been used at camp … “capitalism is so beautiful.” While capitalism is far from perfect, it was interesting to see this response from the students.

Over the years, I’ve continued to wonder about what we saw in Moscow … so I took my question to Perplexity.ai and the response made more sense than it would have a few months ago … it wasn’t a drought or a catastrophic event, it was the government.

Perplexity: Why were stores empty in Moscow in 1990?

When people lose confidence in their government’s ability to manage the economy, things have a tendency to go badly.

Here’s an image and story from the first day of May:

Trump has threatened companies that raise their prices because of his tariffs … but how is a company supposed to cope when their cost of goods more than double?

Tariff on an invoice for floodlights

May wisdom bloom like flowers in these strange times.

Birds of Paradise