I did a discussion today on this. You can listen to it here – its about 20 minutes in. At the end the presenter, Jane Garvey, said 
its all a bit gloomy – I was crestfallen. There was time to say ‘its not gloomy at all’. Its about real freedom, real lives and new pleasures. Being truly human. I need to get better at making my case. The other person who was on was Lucia van der Post – she founded the FT’s brilliant consumer magazine How to Spend It. Like many of us she railed against being told she might be on the consumer treadmill too. Like most of us what we do doesn’t count – its everyone else that is caught up in it. Anyway WH is a great programme and I feel humbled to have been on it.
I heard you on WH yesterday and thought you argued your case powerfully. Perfectly encapsulated my own feelings anyway. In fact I’m going to read your book and intend recommending it to everyone I know. Good luck.
Many thanks for the kind words. When you write a book, and this is my first, you get so close it you cant see it. You remind me of the Ben Hogan quote – the US golfer – “golfs a luck game, the more I practice the luckier I get”.
Don’t beat yourself up about it. WH has taken a more insular, plodding, middle-class style in the last year or so. Jane Garvey has radically changed her accent and adopted a somewhat frumpish-but-playfully-censorious-mumsie approach. The voxpop that preceded the discussion may have helped Jane to frame the argument in her favour but it’s far from insurmountable.
Instead of starting from the shopping angle and relaying aspects of the ritual that people normally find as part of the pleasure. The only way to circumvent this is to take it from the other end of the arguement and be constructively polemical. Get the costs in quickly and follow on from there. It seems you are trying to avoid the usual anticapitalist tropes but there is no problem in drawing from Noreena Hertz work on the downside of credit. Or researching the environmental costs of a consumer lifestyle. The FT is very good at this.
Perhaps you could augment this by learning how to affectionately take the piss out of your opponents world view?
I agree. Head on confrontation doesn’t work. Its just sanctimonious. But people dont like being told they are on the treadmill too. They claim to be anti-fashion despite carefully selecting their own particular fashion.