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Now hardly any buyers can be found.
Letters and editorials in the Soviet press often complain about the inferior quality of Soviet-made merchandise. The worst are footwear and clothing. According to Moscow's Literary Gazette, the seal of quality, which indicates that an item conforms to international standards, was awarded to only 0.6% of all Soviet footwear and less than 1% of clothes in 1974. Krokodil recently published a satirical sketch about a couple seeking to buy furniture. The sofas were all big, clumsy and "of a shade combining the colors of a country backroad in autumn and of a World War I dreadnought destroyer." The author recommended against buying these dreadnought sofas because "one mustn't scare the children with furniture."
City dwellers constitute about 60% of the population, and housing construction scarcely keeps pace with continuing migration from the countryside. The shoddy quality of the new buildings is the butt of considerable ridicule. As one Krokodil cartoon says: "It's good luck to let your cat go into a new apartment first." The drawing captures the startled expression of a family on the threshold of their new home as the weight of their cat walking into the living room causes the floor to give way.
Self-service stores are gradually appearing in major Soviet cities, and are considerably easing the problem of shopping. Yet even in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, thousands of Russians must still go to one store for meat (if any is available), another for bread, yet another for vegetables. In each shop, they are likely to find limited supplies, long queues and bored, surly sales help whose apparent goal is to impede the customer. A classic Soviet cartoon shows a frazzled would-be purchaser simultaneously blowing a noisemaker, shaking a baby rattle and waving his hat, all in a vain effort to attract the attention of saleswomen chattering behind the counter. A survey, by the magazine Soviet Culture, of 1,700 customers in the records section of a Moscow department store showed that "the majority complained they could not find the records they wanted. The problem is with salespeople who consider selling records a big nuisance." Besides that, the desired records may not be in stock, since the store comes under the jurisdiction of one state ministry and the record-making plants are run by another.
The frustrations of trying to cope with an unresponsive system have led to widespread corruption, ranging from petty pilfering to gigantic rip-offs of state property. Stealing is so common that plainclothesmen from O.B.K.h.S.S. (Department for Combatting Theft of Socialist Property and Speculation) are almost as ubiquitous as agents of the secret police.
In Odessa, a street vendor has been doing a brisk business in used light bulbs at 20 kopeks (26.50) each.