Having been born under the Soviet occupation and witnessing it for a few years before the the whole thing collapsed, it was the German mail order catalogs that made most people realise how bad we had. So the soviet union collapses, there's litterly nothing to buy, huge unemployment,etc. But some start going to western Europe (especially Germany) and suddenly you go from only seeing crappy russian made stuff to Japanese VHS players, proper audio systems, clothing that looks cool and comfy. I used to scroll those catalogs for hours thinking how the hell Germans have so much stuff+ trying to convert deuchmarks to our own currency just to realise that it would take my dad's entire salary just to buy some of of those things in the catalog. The beginning of 90s was crazy: we started having these black plastic carrier bags with celebrities printed on them- it was insanely popular thing to buy! I remember we had this guy in a wheelchair in our town - someone brought him a proper baseball hat from the US, people kept talking about it for weeks how he's the only one with this hat( some jackass took the hat from the poor guy a few weeks later). We were litterly decades behind. And then wild capitalism started. By the end of 90s, the country had more or less anything you could buy in western countries. Looking back,even though I was just a little kid back then,the progress we made in three decades is insane.