(Left text): With a salesperson

(Right text): Without a salesperson*

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*Until 1970, shopping for commercial goods from Soviet state-owned stores involved a very complicated (and inefficient) process of lining up for three different queues.

The first queue involved a salesperson who would collect the goods and weigh each different type with a scale. The customer would have to memorize the weight of each item (or be given a list of items collected), before going into the second queue for the cash register.

Once there, the customer would call out the memorized amount and the section number from which the specific goods were taken from (e.g. "Two fifty-eight for No.2 in Meat Section", "Three seventy and one fifty for No.1 in Dairy Section").

After paying for the goods to the cashier, the customer would then be given a receipt (or several ones for each section) and proceed to the third queue to collect the items purchased from another salesperson.

Though the system would very time-consuming and inefficient, this was implemented to provide more opportunities of employment among workers and to prevent any corrupt shady dealings between the customer and the seller.

By 1970, the USSR had its first modern self-service supermarket in Leningrad, which did away with the complicated queue system and allowed customers to pick out and purchase items unsupervised (a concept considered pretty radical in socialist Russia then).

In this political cartoon, the salesgirl on the left panel is attempting to cheat more money out of its customer by pressing her finger on the weights, and thus cause the suspicious female shopper to look intensely at the scale needle.

On the right panel, it is the shop clerk who suspects the customer is taking more items than she had paid for, and thus had her eyes intensely focused inside her shopping bag (remember that there were no electronic anti-theft systems and surveillance cameras back then, so vigilance against the shoplifters was at its upmost peak)

Reference: "Soviets" by Danzig Baldaev & Sergei Vasiliev, pg 165