It’s related to a common bit of culture shock that occurred whenever Soviets visited America. In the USSR grocery stores would stock goods according to the population of an area, and put out about as much product as they expected to sell that day, leading to far less waste but also making them vulnerable to supply shocks and teaching everybody that if you wanted the best cut of meat you had to plan to be there when it was delivered. People with that mentality seeing overstocked US shelves for the first time naturally thought it was wild, including government higher ups who had access to private grocery stores as a privilege of their rank in the party.

This is often spun in Western media as an exclusively communist thing, an indicator of how everything in the soviet world was scarce and rationed, but it’s a bit of culture shock that people from just about every non-Western country has when encountering Western excess for the first time - hell, even in modern day Europe the grocery stores are a lot more modest than American ones, simply because their culture hasn’t embraced the excess to the same degrees as ours has.

I’m sure it’s ingrained in me too just as much as everyone else, even though I think the more rational way to run a grocery store is the one that reduces waste while still ensuring ample access to food (insert FBI study on American vs Soviet calories and nutrition here). tldr