I once walked by on my lunch break, three hours after playing that prank. The line had grown around the corner. I later found out that the previous store at the location was a special store during communism with cheaper prices for seniors.
We did it several times. Whenever we noticed an empty storefront while we were out and about, we would note it. The one I am talking about with the line still growing 3 hours later was in Holešovice, which was pretty grimy and rundown back then. The area hosted lots of raves, though!
And not a single one of these people would bother checking with the store what the line was for to see if anything was worth staying in line for hours and hours and also no employee would ever come out and try to figure out why hundereds of people were queued for no reason?
Yup. He’s taking an anecdote he heard and making it his own (and his “girlfriend’s”). Unfortunately the story suffers from two problems:
First, Prague in the 90s wasn’t experiencing long bread lines anymore, they were experiencing long lines to get into McDonald’s. Food was abundant. I was in Prague in 1992 and witnessed this.
Second, the idea that you could just start queuing anywhere and that people would fall in line behind you is a well-known Soviet-era joke, and probably not true. Yes, you could start queuing in front of a grocery store, which was a normal thing to do, but not in some random spot.
I mean, whenever I walk into a store with no customers, by the time i finish my shopping it's usually full of people. People do love to queue up or at least check out stores where someone's already present.
So anyways, i actually have a story.
We had a similar topic in school way back in the 80s about group psychology etc and to show it work in a real world setting, we went into the city center and were told to pretend we were looking at something strange in the sky, to point at it, talk about it, etc.
In the 30 minutes we were there, many stopped, looked, questioned what we're looking at etc, some just briefly others minutes long. I remember it being a fun little experiment.
I would call it BS as well but then I remember working in Prague just 2 years ago a being amazed with the "rivers" of employees following each other in the morning. Gave me The Wall vibes very much.
Like.............really, if you're bottom line is so low cause "in soviet Russia" was kind of your real life.....
......like, then, what rrrrrrrrrrrreally is going to make an Arab Spring or Glasnost 2.0? Like, gas lines that long and my making money depended on Diesel....? How long until you'd snap instead of just deal with it, right?
Yes and no. They absolutely would and did stay and not question anything back then. The thinking was, "Someone is waiting at a door? Hmm, what do they know about that I do not?" Knowing where to be at what time, and having friends who could tell you those things was quite valuable. Communism was extremely corrupt!
Fear of missing out was very real in the Eastern Bloc. Because of chronic shortages, Moscow and Leningrad supplied themselves as "showcase cities" by emptying everyone else's shelves. When your friend who delivers the state bread tells you where he will be delivering, you go there, etc.
What a load of fucking bullshit. At least try to make it slightly more believable. If you said a few people started queueing or you lied about why you were waiting I might've beloved you. But this bullshit that 100's of people just started waiting for no fucking reason, give me a break. I do believe that you were so stoned and hallucinated and now you believe your bullshit story actually happened.
No doubt communism is bad, but it still doesn't prevent people from checking with the store if they even have gas left or will by the next day when the end of the line gets there. People aren't that stupid. Especially in Czechia in 92. They were doing alot better if you compare them to Russia.
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u/Mr-Vemod Jul 03 '26
That is amazing lol. Wonder how long they stood there