This is a splendidly vulgar story of conspicuous consumption, brought to us by Neil Chatterjee of Reuters, which I saw in the NYT and IHT. Here is a section:


"All premium cars are already comfortable. I'm buying for prestige," Parlin Sinaga, a 38-year-old Jakarta lawyer, said as he bought a canary-yellow Ford sports car to go with his BMW.

Long traffic jams of Japanese four-wheel-drive vehicles clog the entrances to Jakarta's glossy malls, while inside, luxury automakers have started setting up showrooms to tempt shoppers to upgrade their vehicles.

"It's a unique concept that we started first in Indonesia," Ramesh Divyanathan, the head of BMW in Indonesia said of the shopping center showrooms. "Jakarta has become a mall city."

"Due to the traffic situation, it is easier for customers and the public to see our products at the malls rather than visiting our dealers," he said, adding that sales were being driven by people in their 20s and 30s, and aspirational "social climbers."

BMW has a showroom featuring a sport utility vehicle, a sedan, a bicycle and toy cars to lure the groups of grandparents, parents and children that take family promenades along the aisles of Plaza Indonesia, the traditional shopping destination for the country's elite.

Nearby, in the wealthy suburb of Menteng, tall gates at the bottoms of driveways often guard four or more cars, typically Toyotas and at least one Mercedes-Benz, whose Indonesian sales have grown five times as fast this year as in 2011.

Indonesia, with Southeast Asia's biggest economy, where coal mining, palm oil plantations and retail businesses are the major growth industries, is producing millionaires faster than anywhere else, according to the wealth management firm Julius Baer.

In the Pacific Place mall across the road from the stock exchange, it is this new money that the Jaguar and Bentley showroom, complete with a wine bar and leatherbound books to accentuate the cars' English heritage, is focusing on. The mall's aisles are lined with Volkswagen's Audis.

At a dealership named Glamour Auto Sport, stocked with $100,000 Jeeps and $150,000 Range Rovers, a salesman reveled in the status-driven spending spree.

"Customers already have other cars. They are buying them for the prestige," he said. "The rich are buying them like candy."

My view - Thank heavens for conspicuous consumption; it keeps the often-forecast economic depression at bay.

David Fuller's view Thank heavens for conspicuous consumption; it keeps the often-forecast economic depression at bay.

This article underscores the incredible value of fashionable brands in an era of globalisation and the Asian-led growth of middleclass consumerism. It also explains the phenomenal success of Autonomies - Fullermoney's name for leading multinational companies which ride the crest of this wave.

In Indonesia and every other growth economy, the financially arrived steer their shiny four-wheel sex symbols through the parking lots of crowded shopping malls, pausing just long enough to acquire the latest smart phone or tablet, before grabbing a Big Mac or bucket of KFC at the drive-through, and swilling it down with vintage brandy.

(See Eoin's latest review of Autonomies, below.)