The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 3: Clean Up On Aisle 4!

Episode Date: March 1, 2016

How did the clerks in a modest grocery store change the world as we know it?

This is the way I heard it. September 16th started off like any other day for the employees at Randall's grocery store. They arrived at 5 a.m. and began prepping the produce and wiping down the cash registers. The smell of baked goods filled the aisles as the employees began the endless process of stocking and rotating thousands of products on hundreds of shelves. It was really just an average day in an average grocery store until it wasn't. showed up, anxious and frazzled. Apparently, some bigwig was in town visiting the nearby space center, and they had just received word he was about to drop by the grocery store for an unscheduled tour. Who could it be? Some muckety-muck from the home office? A shareholder? Maybe Mr. Randall

himself coming by for a surprise inspection. The boss sparked orders to make sure the place was tip-top, and the employees took things up a notch. A few hours later, The store was sparkling, and the mystery guest arrived. Whoever he was, he didn't work for Randalls. Looking outside through the glass, the employees could see that this was clearly a very powerful, very important man. He had an entourage with security, and the media followed close behind. He was smiling for the cameras, confident and sure. But then he walked through those automatic doors, and everything changed.

changed. The man looked as if he'd seen a ghost. He wandered up and down the aisles, slowly at first, and then with increased agitation. His expression seemed to switch back and forth between fascinated and demoralized. He paused to stare in wonderments at the fresh fish, the meat selections, and the produce department. He was enraptured, peppering the customers with questions. At one point, the man asked the store manager, what type of advanced education was required to run a store as magnificent as this? The manager blushed. The employees had never seen anything like it. By all accounts, though, it was the site of frozen pudding pops that left the visitor in utter disbelief. Like an indigenous member of some forgotten tribe deep in the Amazon who glanced up one day

and saw a 747 flying overhead, this well-dressed visitor, this highly educated, undeniably successful, and clearly important individual was left slack-jawed by pudding pops. There were just so many, in such a rich variety of flavors. By the time he boarded his private plane, he was unable to speak to his staff. His world had been turned upside down in an instant. You see, the man who visited the grocery store that fateful day in 1989 had just been elected to the new Soviet parliament. And in all his years, he had never seen so much food in one place. He later said, when I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair

for the Soviet people, that such a potentially super-rich country is ours, has been brought to a state of such poverty, it is terrible to think of it. And just like that, one man's loyalty to communism was completely destroyed. He returned home and promptly left the party and started making reforms.

And then, just two years later, under his presidency, the Soviet Union would dissolve. True, Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down this wall, but back in 1989, that wall was still standing. And who knows, it might still be there today, if not for the hardworking employees at a Randall's grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas, who kept the shelves fully stocked. So another Soviet, a Soviet named Boris Yeltsin, could come face to face with a freezer full of pudding pops and change the history of the world.

Anyway, that's the way I heard it.