Fair enough. My experience is probably pretty colored by coming here directly after two years in an African village where most of neighbors owned a single set of clothes and were just beginning to afford luxury goods like plastic drinking cups and laundry soap- a place where my town of 50,000 people could support two restaurants. So even my rather backwoods Chinese city seems like a consumer orgy.
Your article seems a little suspect though. It complains about the low threshold of “middle class.” I make a little less than the lowest threshold of $3,200 (though with some perks- I get housing and health care) and I am definitely in the consuming class- I shop at the supermarket as often as at the open market, I eat at restaurants, I drink soda and beer and buy packaged snack food, I can buy home furnishings and new clothing as long as I keep things modest (I’m saving for a toaster oven), I can travel locally and I have money left for treats like DVDs or the occasional trip to KFC.
To me this is what you expect from an emerging middle class. It’s certainly a lifestyle most people in Cameroon could never expect to live- a bottle of Pepsi there costs what most people make in a day.