Videos of Russian supermarkets on YouTube

[TheFugitive]

I've noticed in surfing around YouTube that it seems to be overrun these days with videos giving tours of supermarkets and hypermarkets in Russia.

The tours are generally guided by an English-speaking expat from Britain or Australia or someplace and they walk you through aisle by aisle to show you the assortment of items being sold and their cost.  The stores are amazingly similar to Aldi or Costco here in the US and show an abundance of product (food especially) that a guy like me who lived through the Cold War could not have imagined being available to average people in Russia.

In some cases the prices being quoted were significantly lower than what you'd pay for these items in the U.S.

It is generally thought that this surge of videos of Russian supermarkets is part of a propaganda effort by the Putin government to demonstrate that they aren't really being hurt much by international sanctions that have been imposed on them due to the invasion of Ukraine.  After all the Russians do have a long history of that sort of thing, so there is probably some truth to this.  Although there are so many of these videos out there from so many different regions of the country it's hard to imagine the stores have all been pimped for the benefit of a global audience.

The main thing you notice that is likely the result of sanctions is that well-known American brands like Pepsi have disappeared from the shelves and have been replaced by domestic Russian brands.  Though not all.  I did see some Nescafe coffee and Heinz ketchup in a couple of these videos.

[TheFugitive]

Watched another one of these videos which showed the Grand Opening of a DA! Supermarket.  Da is the Russian word for yes. It's a locally owned discount grocer that looks suspiciously like an Aldi.

It had largely the same layout and even an Aldi Finds section down the center aisle.
The video's host panned the soft drink aisle and showed several Russian brands of cola that have come to dominate the market there due to sanctions.  However, there were cans of Coca Cola on the shelf as well (at the equivalent of a dollar per can, substantially higher than the local brands).  He pulled one from the shelf and turned it around.  Much of the back of the can had been covered over with a label that gave nutritional info in Russian.  However the original mark of the bottler was still visible, and it turns out that this Coca Cola had been imported from a local franchise bottler in ANGOLA (West Africa)!

The way in which stores from one country to the next have come to look the same, and the degree to which familiar products circulate around the globe (despite concerted efforts to stop them) is truly amazing. I wonder if when Pepsi shut off our deliveries at Ames when we couldn't pay the bills did Peter Hollis and the boys look into importing gray market Pepsi from Africa?

[Retail Regents]

The video's host panned the soft drink aisle and showed several Russian brands of cola that have come to dominate the market there due to sanctions.  However, there were cans of Coca Cola on the shelf as well (at the equivalent of a dollar per can, substantially higher than the local brands).  He pulled one from the shelf and turned it around.  Much of the back of the can had been covered over with a label that gave nutritional info in Russian.  However the original mark of the bottler was still visible, and it turns out that this Coca Cola had been imported from a local franchise bottler in ANGOLA (West Africa)!

The way in which stores from one country to the next have come to look the same, and the degree to which familiar products circulate around the globe (despite concerted efforts to stop them) is truly amazing. I wonder if when Pepsi shut off our deliveries at Ames when we couldn't pay the bills did Peter Hollis and the boys look into importing gray market Pepsi from Africa?

I would not be too terribly surprised if they considered, or even imported foreign-made "gray market" name brand merchandise! If a government can take such desperate measures in order to keep stores stocked, so can any business big or small.

[TheFugitive]

I would not be too terribly surprised if they considered, or even imported foreign-made "gray market" name brand merchandise! If a government can take such desperate measures in order to keep stores stocked, so can any business big or small.

You're probably too young to remember this but back in the day (late 70's/early 80's) this was a major bone of contention between major manufacturers and deep discounters, particularly in the catalog showroom space (Service Merchandise, BEST Products, David Weis, Brendles, etc.)

Those catalog chains would reimport gray market cameras and electronics from third countries where they were available for less.  This circumvented the official distribution chains for those manufacturers and they objected.  There were long legal battles where people like Minolta, Pentax and Panasonic fought in court to prevent those items from being reimported.  And they did have some success (I recall at David Weis in the mid-80's we had to stop selling Panasonic and Technics products due to court action).

The main argument against buying gray market goods as I recall was that those manufacturers would not stand behind their warranties in the US.  And there were issues with reimporting stuff like audio and video equipment from parts of the world that ran on different broadcast standards.

Years ago I was in a local dollar store where I did see Crest toothpaste that had been imported from Korea with the Korean labels covered over by one in English.