What Covid did to various businesses will never make total sense to me. But it appears to have both saved Tupperware, briefly, and now scotched it, the pandemic bounce for the storage container dropping off so precipitously that the Massachusetts firm says it could go bust if it can’t find emergency funding. Competitors are too good at TikTok, is another explanation, though I suspect the slide into obsolescence was a slower burn.
People always talk about the impact of Amazon in terms of its threat to direct retail competitors – what it does to in-real-life shopping and single brands online, when one gargantuan player wants to sell everything to everyone. But it has ripple effects: with utility items, it creates hourglass buying behaviour, where everyone goes to either the cheapest or the big-name brand. You get any old flask or you get a Thermos; any old kid’s scooter or a Microscooter.
And for a long time, that was fine, as Tupperware was the name. It had heritage, a creator genuinely called Tupper. It had a USP, its burping seal, that got rid of excess air. It was good, and it worked. It was global – at least since the 1960s, having been invented in the 1940s – and it had hinterland. It existed as part of the cultural ecosystem, having spawned not just the sales empire of the Tupperware party but punchlines, vignettes.
Victoria Wood made jokes about it, where it fell into an axis between the hostess trolley and Women’s Weekly, conveying something affectionate and self-mocking about the realities, insufficiencies and satisfactions of suburbia. It was too true not to be poetic – just the way it locks and is so very airtight, Tupperware is tremendously satisfying, and yet at the same time, in the quest for meaning, so very insufficient.
When a journalist went undercover as a footman in Buckingham Palace, he discovered that the Queen stored her breakfast cereals in Tupperware, and that was the splash. It wasn’t unlike Wood’s paradox – on the one hand, how incredibly incongruous to have everyday and readily available plastic nestled among all the silverware, but how on earth else do you keep your cornflakes fresh? She is only queen; she hasn’t got superpowers.
People referenced Tupperware in PhDs about emancipation from domesticity via entrepreneurship. Following the second world war, when men returned and women were forced out of their factory jobs and back into the kitchen, Tupperware parties were an inventive, even subversive route back into the world of commerce from which they had been so rudely ejected.
A lot of the details of the parties are endearing: when they hit the UK in 1960, started by Mila Pond in Weybridge, they called it “carrot calling”. Sales reps would go door to door, ask women to stash some carrots in Tupperware, and some others in literally anything else, and see which stayed fresh for longer. No earthly material was any match for Earl Tupper’s discovery, and really, what better excuse was there for a party?
These fem-wash narratives, where corporations need a mission and find it by situating themselves within an arc of progress – women empowered by flogging storage solutions to one another – are always a bit overblown. Direct sales has been a mixed bag for the female workforce, and women generally. There were niche success stories – the Ann Summers party, which found its prototype in the Tupperware party, fostered more sex-positive frankness; or, at least, it was sex-toy positive.
Some brands delivered on the profit and flexibility they promised to reps, but, equally, individuals were often left trying to bridge the gulf between supply and demand by just begging their friends to buy more eyeshadow. To the generation coming of age that finds shopping in the meat world rather primitive, the idea of buying something off an acquaintance in an actual house must seem bizarre.
Blame e-commerce, or blame food-storage technology, which is arguably quite a simple business, in which the frontier innovations were reached quite fast, easy to mimic, hard to improve upon. It’s not the clippable, stackable containers that you’ll miss if Tupperware goes under, any more than it’s the “never knowingly undersold” sloganeering or comfortable sandals you think of when John Lewis is in peril. Rather, these are the emblems of a suburbia that could laugh at itself but never quite enough for a parody video on TikTok; that did a good, solid job but only in inconsequential, carrot-related spheres.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
