I was born in the early 1980s in communist Poland and I have vague memories of the last years of communism. But there is one thing that I remember the most, namely queues everywhere. Also in the mid 1980s, the ration cards were introduced because many goods (meat, petrol etc.) were in short supply. I remember one day, I was five or six then, and my mother put me in the queue for coffee in the district where we lived, a typical communist-style cluster of apartment blocks built of prefabricated housing units in a small town in south-western Poland. I was waiting in this queue to buy a pack of coffee. I bought one and then I was surprised that my mother put me in that queue again. I bought another one. And again. I think that I made it six times and bought six packs of coffee. My mother did the same. They sold only one pack per person, but they didn't mind it when you returned to the queue. Only later did I realize that my mother swapped a few of those packs for other goods or foodstuffs that were in short supply and that we didn't have a chance to buy.