What is the level of market now in terms of quality and price?
It would help to understand the history of the Soviet/Russian market since the first openings in the late 1980s. Until the first year or two of the 1990s, the main buyers were State Foreign Trade Organizations and certain Joint Venture companies who tended to buy in rather large volumes and immediately sell the goods off. This business was driven not so much by market demand, but rather as “exchange rate arbitrage”: the ruble/dollar rate at auction might have been 40:1, but the ruble/dollar rate expressed in, for example, PCs, was 90:1 (this is a real case, dating from about 1990). Price was usually the over-riding factor in these deals. As the market opened, Russians started to buy their first pairs of sport shoes, jeans or down jackets. Given that the market had very little experience with consumption, and that there was still little choice, consumers had great difficulty distinguishing between similar products of differing quality. In addition, the vast majority of goods tended to b
