Despite Takeover, There’s Still No Sausage in Stores, Shoppers Find : Economy: No change is discernible on the first day after Gorbachev’s ouster.

A bent old woman stood motionless Tuesday in a store on Sretenka Street, staring at a grimy metal cooking oil dispenser that towered over her. When two younger women approached and asked, in the negative manner customary to Soviet shoppers, “No oil?” her only response was to shake her shawl-wrapped head.

As the women walked away, they wondered aloud, “What are we going to do?” The Russian babushka continued her silent communion with the vending machine, as if she could make something happen just by waiting long enough.

In the machine’s drain, a severed fish head stared back.

Muscovites with long memories recall that the last time there was a Kremlin coup--in 1964, when Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev was ousted--the stores suddenly brimmed with merchandise, as a way to make the people forget about politics.

The men who overthrew Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Monday haven’t yet cast such a sop to the people, or perhaps the disastrous state of the national economy makes such generosity now impossible. There has yet been no attempt to drive a bargain with the people: Give up glasnost and get sausage in return.

In another part of the store, one of many in Moscow that bear the bland name produkty, or food, flies hovered around a lone hunk of gristly meat lying on the bloodstained marble counter.

The woman in front of a line of about 15 people shouted at the young man in dirty butcher’s smock: “This piece is no good! Bring out what you have in back!”

But he didn’t budge. Aside from the low-quality beef, which seemed sold out by 2 p.m., the store’s shelves featured mineral water, unmarked cans of fish, baby formula, rusty-lidded jars of thick apple juice and the ever-unpopular Turkish tea.

The State Emergency Committee on the Situation in the U.S.S.R., which grabbed power here Monday, has promised to take vigorous steps to improve the standard of living in the Soviet Union during a six-month period of extraordinary measures.

With an eye to that, the committee on Monday instructed the Soviet Cabinet of Ministers to “take stock, within a week, of all available resources of food and other essentials and report to the people what the country has at its disposal and take under strict control their preservation and distribution.” It also promised to freeze or lower prices on certain categories of consumer goods and foodstuffs.

The first day of the committee’s rule, however, has brought no discernible change to the situation in state stores. At a vegetable and fruit shop down the street from the store called Produkty, a saleswoman stood in front of a display of cabbages, onions, carrots and shriveled apples.

“No, we don’t have more food than yesterday. Less, maybe,” she told someone who asked. She gestured at a pile of prunes on the counter.

“These we always have. Nobody buys them, because they’re too expensive.” At eight rubles, a kilogram or 2.2 pounds of prunes could cost some Soviet workers a day’s wage and more.

Under Moscow’s gray and rainy skies on Tuesday, the consensus on the street seemed to be that the lot of the Soviet consumer will not change under the new government. “I don’t expect anything good,” said Olga, 27, as she waited outside a bread store with her small daughter.

The Soviet Union will remain “fully empty,” said Mikhail Arushanov, 25, who couldn’t find anything he wanted to buy at the Produkty store.

A middle-aged man, expressing the tension and uncertainty now simmering in Moscow, angrily asked, “What there is to expect when we’re about to lose our jobs?”

Some, however, have more faith in the future because of the Emergency Committee. “There will be more goods,” said Yelena Mikhailovna, 60, a Moscow native, “but first we need the the firm control of an iron hand.”

In the meantime, shoppers in this somewhat dazed city, whatever their political persuasion, are going about their business, arguing with cashiers and stalking neighborhoods in search of elusive quarry such as birthday cakes.

In a dairy store off the central Ring Road, a ruddy man approached a tired-looking woman at the front of a long line snaking away from an empty counter. “How much is the sausage?” he asked.

The woman looked at him blankly. “What sausage? There’s no sausage.”

“Then what is everyone waiting for?”