Supermarket choice is often largely the illusion of choice -- the same product (substantively, and often literally, made in the same facility to the same specifications) in different packaging
If it is an "illusion", it's still built on a solid base of real choice that centralized government management completely failed to produce.
> From jeans to dating partners and TV subscriptions to schools, we think the more choices we have the better. But too many options create anxiety and leave us less satisfied. Could one answer lie in a return to the state monopolies of old?
I've heard (although can't verify) that products were differentiated in the Soviet Union by where they were made. So essentially, the consumer would have a choice of "factory 1 shampoo", "factory 2 shampoo" and so on. Meaningful? Sure, but seems silly to me.
Now, it is true that it requires more effort to find the foods you're interested in. That's because most people aren't interested in the same foods you are. There's no way to "fix" this problem beyond heavy-handed government intervention, and in a socialist society I can guarantee you that -- unless the Supreme Leader is also keen on foods without refined sugar -- you're going to find it even harder to locate anything which isn't preferred by the mass market.
> He arrived in New York city in 1990 and moved into a dorm room at the 92nd Street Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, a sort of Jewish YMCA. Two things shocked him about his new home: the diversity of the people on the streets and the fantastic range of foods in the grocery stores. He took photographs of the rows and rows of sausages in Manhattan and mailed them to his mother in Moscow. "I'd never seen so many sausages," he says. But once he'd marveled at the American cornucopia, he stepped back from it all and wondered just how necessary all of this food was.
> [...]
> In the end he became a finicky vegetarian."
Exactly same argument can be used against Western-style cornucopia-of-false-choices stores, or anything else at all for that matter.
And yet they were found to be price rigging in the UK.
Supermarket choice is a triumph of capitalism and choice should be celebrated. Consumer choice may have even been a major driver in taking down centrally planned economies.
Boris Yeltsin while visiting a supermarket in Houston:
> Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.
“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,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.” [0]
[0] http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...