My Surprising Discovery in Saudi Arabia

“This looks just like Vegas.” 

Hadi looked at me, shocked.  

“Really?” he said, disbelieving. 

This Vegas doppelgänger I speak of is…Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. 

Now, to be clear, the entire city is not like Vegas. But there are flamboyant, over-the-top stretches of six-lane roadways and uber-high-end retailers that are such a close approximation of Las Vegas that if you randomly showed a photo of this to someone who has traveled to Sin City and then asked them to identify the location, my bet is that they’d guess “Vegas.” 

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia could be mistaken for Las Vegas from the right angle. 

The point that I am too slowly getting at is this: We are not alone. 

By “we,” I mean the Western middle class. 

I have conversations regularly with friends who’ve never traveled farther than, maybe, Toronto or some Caribbean all-inclusive resort, and their impression is that, outside of Canada and some parts of Europe, the rest of the world is an impoverished desert of wannabe Americans who look upon Uncle Sam’s golden shores and marvel at all that wealth. 

Truth is…not so much. 

Yes, lots of people want to immigrate to America for certain opportunities. But far more are already living well-to-do, middle-class lives. That’s what I mean when I say “We are not alone.” 

For the last half of the 20th century, the U.S.—and to a lesser degree Europe, Japan, and Australia/New Zealand—had a stranglehold on the Western lifestyle.  

Now, that’s no longer the case. 

The middle class, and a great deal of wealth, has been popping up in the last two decades in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, India, China, parts of Africa.  

I was in Accra, Ghana a few years ago, meeting with a Ghanaian who grew up in Los Angeles and returned to the motherland to open a Western bridal boutique because, as she told me, “there’s a lot of middle-class demand here now.” 

Same in Jeddah, part of my recent tour of Oman and Saudi Arabia. 

Hadi, a friend I met through my global crypto activities, showed me around. I cannot put too fine a point on this: It was a lovely place with 10x the stores and restaurants you’d find in most Western cities. 

Jeddah’s streets are lined with modern stores and restaurants to serve the growing middle class. 

I could run through the list of brand names from literally all over the world that I saw, but that would take too long. I’ll just say that there are even several Raising Cane’s outlets here, the chicken-finger chain that started in my hometown in south Louisiana.  

That’s mind-blowing to me. 

The malls are ginormous, all over the place, and clearly of a quality that attracts middle-class shoppers and above. The cars are late-model. The entertainment options are first-rate. People are hanging out in upscale restaurants and coffee shops all day with friends or working on laptops.  

And the supermarkets! The selection exceeds those in my adopted hometown of Prague to such a degree that I had to text my wife and show her all the things we could buy that we can never find at home. 

“Dude, like, I really could live here,” I told Hadi. “This is a great city.” 

“You should move here, Jeff.” 

Thing is, I’m probably not going to move to Saudi Arabia, primarily for family reasons. But the fact that I know I would be comfortable living here and not wanting for a single thing—including Tim Hortons and Dunkin’ Donuts—is one of my measures of how far up the middle-class ladder a city/country has progressed.  

This is the reality for the rest of this century: The emerging-market middle class is going to far exceed the number of middle-class consumers that exist in the West.  

They are going to dictate global trends in fashion, entertainment, food, etc. 

In that progression, a lot of wealth will accrue to investors who look beyond traditional stock markets in New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris. 

The wealth is going to be found owning consumer companies that are serving the middle class in Indonesia, China, India, the Middle East, and Africa.  

What I saw and experienced in Jeddah is just a hint of what’s happening all over the non-Western world right now.