"During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”"(1)
Capitalism has many evils - most notably the tendency to eat its own young - but it does do most things very very well.
(1)- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/23/world/europe/23cnd-yeltsin...
https://www.amazon.com/Steeltown-USSR-Soviet-Society-Gorbach...
The factory was producing substandard steel. Often they'd ship it to customers and it would arrive in an unusable condition because it had been stored outside and was more rust than steel. But they'd try and use it anyway, because if they complained the bureaucrats in Moscow would brand them troublemakers and route the next shipment to someone else and then they wouldn't meet their production goals, which meant their pay would be drastically cut, and their family would starve.
Your "blue shirt vs. tan shirt" is absurdly simplistic, and makes enormous incorrect assumptions, like "Is there even a shirt there to buy that day?"
Some other reading for you would be about Krushchev's visit to the US in the 1950's. He visited a few supermarkets and assumed that they had been set up just for his visit (Potemkin villages) as that was what the Soviet Union would have done. Because having that much product on the shelves was absurd.
http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/gallery/090611...