From the early days of the Stalin era, Group A received top priority in economic planning and allocation so as to industrialize the Soviet Union from its previous agricultural economy.
The Party Congress of February 1934 bolstered the calls for improvement of both quantity and quality in food products and other consumer goods.
[1] To a Soviet consumer, a luxury item was any good with the exception of plain breads, cabbage, potatoes and vodka.
The government used consumer items as legitimate awards to honor comrades whose work contributed to the building of socialism.
[5] The first five-year plan caused the closure of all artisan methods of consumer goods production, such as small private factories and workshops.
[6] In May 1936, a law was passed that slightly improved the supply of consumer goods by legalizing individual practice of trades such as cobbling, cabinetmaking, carpentry, dressmaking, hairdressing, laundering, locksmithing, photography, plumbing, tailoring, and upholstery – it slightly improved the shortage of consumer goods.
The State also set up Torgsin stores that sold scarce goods in exchange for foreign currency, gold, silver, and other valuables.
The purpose of these stores was to expand Soviet hard currency reserves so that the country could import more equipment for the industrialization drive.
The end of the first rationing period and the abolition of the closed distribution system in 1935 caused the commercial store network to expand.
During the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact period (1939–41), the Soviet citizens' primary interaction with the outside world was with the newly occupied borderlands of Finland, the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and Poland.
[10] Goods considered scarce in the USSR such as watches, bicycles, clothes and food products were plentiful in these regions.
Viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire them, soldiers bought large quantities of these goods to send back to their families in the USSR.
The American National Exhibition was sponsored by the American government and featured many displays of the latest "home appliances, fashions, television and hi-fi sets, a model house priced to sell [to] an 'average' family, farm equipment, 1959 automobiles, boats, sporting equipment and a children’s playground.