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Slideshow: When Capitalism Returned to Vietnam

When Vietnam opened it's doors to capitalism and the free market in the mid 90s, almost overnight, multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola, Visa, Kodak and Pepsi rushed to exploit the country's untapped market.

Huge billboards and advertisements began to appear throughout Vietnamese cities and people were exposed to products such as laptops, American cereal, and brands like Samsung and Mercedes. 

The gallery below, courtesy of Reuters, illustrates whose awkward moments in 1994 and 1995 when Vietnamese were exposed to products that the rest of the world had taken for granted for decades. 

It's easy to imagine a similar scene playing out in North Korea sometime in the next 100 years. 

[TheAtlanticCities

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