Most people in developing countries want the Western luxury goods that you'd consider a frivolous expense. And, they're more willing to pay for these "luxury goods" than Western basics like indoor plumbing and sanitation services.
I spent a year living in a village in a poor, former Soviet block country where despite the lack of indoor plumbing, clean water, and sanitation services (there was nowhere to dump trash but in your yard or the street), villagers owned cell phones, DVD players, and the occasional mp3 player. It was frustrating to see what people spent their money on given the poverty they lived in.
Life in developing countries can be absurdly wasteful. In Turkmenistan, people left their gas stoves on all day to save on the cost of matches (which cost a few cents for a box).
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Want to know what the locals did consider to be an "absurd Western luxury"? Toilets. Not long before I arrived, a group of Western travel writers had toured the country and given a press conference. Apparently, one of their suggestions for how to attract more foreign tourists was to build more indoor toilet facilities. It became a national joke. Indoor, flush toilets didn't seem like something worth spending money on.
This in a country where diseases of the fecal-oral transmission route were endemic.
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