Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [200]

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the ‘free’ market. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 200

Note

The defining rhythm of the Party’s economic system — at any moment some article is missing, and the scarcity rotates — establishes scarcity as systemic rather than accidental. The litany of buttons, darning wool, shoelaces gives it a mundane, bureaucratic banality.