One of the barometers that I'm using is to try and sell goods here on the forum. Afterall, everyone here understands Bitcoin so if I can't sell here, then the rest of the world surely isn't ready yet.
IMHO the forum is an awful place for buying and selling goods - I spend Bitcoins nearly every day but I have not looked here in the respective forum-sections for a long time. It is just not the right interface for finding stuff. Also the audience at amazon.com is orders of magnitudes larger than in our forums here - add one additional order of magnitude for everybody who, like me, simply doesn't bother to wade through tons of forum posts in order to find something they want to buy. So you would really have to offer a _lot_ here to be able to compare it to Amazon. Anyway - you could probably deduce something useful from the total number of successful trades here on the forum. Anybody has statistics about that?
The Bitcoin economy is still young - good trading sites are rare and we don't have anything close to Amazon.com in terms of usability. Give it some time - it will develop. People are spending their coins, even though many just don't really know how to deal with this new things just yet. Eventually it will be just money to them and they will spend it accordingly.
Don't worry - everything's gonna be alright
Oh and I agree: this thread has probably turned into a worthy candidate for the Speculation section. Apologies to the OP for this obviously unintended development.