This paper draws on feminist research that has considered shame, guilt and anxiety as inter-related social emotions. It explores how these feelings are exacerbated especially for working class women living in advanced consumer economies. The paper will explore the potentials for extending sociological and feminist accounts of exclusion, austerity and inequality so that they incorporate normative, familial consumer practices. The paper will draw on my previous and current work which has drawn on shifting consumption practices as they parallel wider political and social change as being integral to the production and re-appropriation of intimate personal life and particularly inter-personal relationships (see Casey and Taylor, 2015). Central to the paper is the articulation of shame in accounts of normative consumer practice. I show how feelings of shame are commonly articulated in women’s accounts of their everyday consumption practices, but also demonstrate how working class women appropriate their consumer decision making practices in order to make sense of and address shameful feelings. Drawing on the findings of my ESRC funded project Gambling and Households, I discuss extracts taken from my Mass Observation data where shame is not only connected with emotional retellings of the past, but is also manifest in melancholic reflections of the present and dreams for the future. I use gambling as a way of exemplifying these ideas; as a morally framed but highly normative consumer practice where the telling and re-telling of gambling ‘practice’ is framed by working class women consumers within discourses and narratives of shame.