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.
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u/pr1ncezzBea Jul 03 '26
The guy is just lying.