One obvious solution was to limit the variety of products, but that created huge consumer dissatisfaction.
Moreover, even with reduced varieties, the economy was still too complex to plan.
Many unwanted things were produced and remained unsold, while there were shortages of other things, resulting in the ubiquitous queues.
By the time communism started unravelling in the 1980s, there was so much cynicism about the system that was increasingly incapable of delivering its promises that the joke was that in the communist countries, ‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’.