A customer checks out shoes in a mall in downtown Nanjing, Jiangsu province. Middle-class consumers are getting more price-conscious with the cost of food and other necessities rising since early last year.
Tang Tian, a 29-year-old executive at a US management consultant firm, is the poster girl of the burgeoning middle class in Shanghai.
Her career is assured and her salary has been rising at double-digit rates in the past several years. She bought an apartment two years ago, just before prices surged. Her apartment has already doubled in value, at least on paper.
But Tang is not happy.
Like many other young professionals of her age, Tang has caught the inflation blues.
To be sure, there is no sign of a massive cutback in consumer spending that could make a dent on the GDP. Being the favorite sons and daughters of the country's rapid economic development, the upwardly mobile urbanites in Shanghai and most other major cities are taking home incomes that are, on average, rising considerably faster than inflation.
But what these city-dwellers worry about is not so much an immediate erosion of living standards, as faced by many urban poor, but rather a nagging concern about the longer-term impact that surging global inflation may have on the country's increasingly internationalized economy.
So far, their worries have remained vague. Nobody can pinpoint at this time how the unfolding economic troubles are going to hit their pockets and affect their lives. As the adage goes, it is all in the mind.
"I really don't know why I don't feel as carefree as before," Tang said.
"But I just keep telling myself that things are getting more and more expensive and I must be more careful about how I spend my money."
As if to illustrate her point, Tang asked the waitress to pack all the leftovers at a dinner for her to take home. "I never used to do this until a few months ago," she said.
"Now it has become almost a habit."
To many white-collar workers with a monthly salary ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 yuan ($1,030), the continuous increase of food prices is weighing heavily in their minds, making them feel obliged to change their free-spending lifestyle.
In the first half of this year, the average disposable personal income in urban areas hit 8,065 yuan. After adjusting for inflation, it increased by 6.3 percent from a year earlier.
Meanwhile, the average personal expenditure for the first six months reached 5,490 yuan, rising by 5.7 percent after adjusting for inflation.
"The price increase hasn't really made much of a real impact on my life, there is no need for me to economize," said Yang Mei, a 30-year-old lawyer in Beijing.
"But the price increase is really having a large mental impact on me."
The price indices compiled in different categories by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that food prices in June rose by 17.3 percent, with meat and poultry products up by 27.3 percent, vegetables by 8.3 percent, edible oil by 43 percent and grains by 8.7 percent. The prices of home appliances and services rose by 2.9 percent, while the prices of clothing dropped by 1.5 percent.
Yang had seldom bothered to check out price tags when she shopped in supermarkets or department stores. But now, she scrutinizes prices and makes comparisons between different brands before deciding on what to buy, or to buy at all.
The change in customers' shopping habits, though subtle, has not gone unnoticed by retailers, restaurateurs and manufacturers. They have to decode the tastes of picky middle-class consumers, who account for a large part of their target clientele.
