Hi, YouTube!
It's Max Sparrow, the Autistic Nomad.
Max!
I'm Max now!
I'm standing in Webster, Texas, in front of
the grocery store that caused the downfall
of communism and the destruction of the Berlin
Wall.
How, you may ask?
Well, it appears that Boris Yeltsin came to
Houston and on September 16th, 1989, he decided
he wanted to look around a little bit and
see how Americans live.
Now, if you know anything about Russian history,
they would set up Potemkin Villages that looked
really, really great and when people from
other countries came to visit, they would
funnel them through the Potemkin Village to
give them an illusion of what life was like.
But Yeltsin knew that he was going off script
and no one had time to prepare a Potemkin
grocery store.
So his whole entourage came here.
It was a Randall's at the time.
Now it's Food Town.
And he went in to see how Americans shopped
for food.
Well, he was overwhelmed because there was
so much food and so much variety.
He got stuck in the frozen pudding pop display,
just amazed.
He couldn't get over the idea of frozen pudding
pops.
It's weaponized food, people.
It took down The Wall.
It can take you down, too.
And he said to his traveling companions that
if the Russians could see how Americans lived
and shopped and ate every day there would
be a revolution.
On the plane ride away from Houston, Yeltsin
sat by himself with his head in his hands,
just thinking about the grocery store.
And it was less than two months after that,
the Berlin Wall came down.
And a year later, Yeltsin left the Communist
Party.
And in 1991, the Soviet Union was officially
dissolved.
So here you have it: the grocery store that
took down the Berlin Wall.
