[bherms]

My fil owns a bunch of grocery stores in Russia. The gov't still essentially subsidizes the cost of basic goods to keep prices low for the poor. Because of this, even the poorest have access to what they need, and they worship Putin because of it - "he makes sure we're taken care of". Obviously we could get into the corruption, why they're so poor in the first place, etc, but it is clearly working pretty well.

[halflife]

Also in Israel, stable basic products (like milk) have a government mandated pricing, not even subsidized. It’s a good idea in its simplistic form, and works well most of the times, but once every 2 years you get a crunch where the manufacturers just decline to produce products at a loss, so we don’t have milk or butter for 2 weeks.