THE TUPPERWARE PARTY WAS GOOD WHILE IT LASTED

The Washington Post

 

Opinion  The Tupperware party was good while it lasted

The iconic container brand could not keep pace with an evolving industry.

By Megan McArdle

September 19, 2024 at 10:23 a.m. EDT

 

My mother was a confirmed Luddite who approached the adoption of new kitchen technology in much the way you might approach the adoption of a baby shark. Suspicious of plastic, my mom kept our leftovers on foil-covered plates rather than the brightly colored Tupperware I saw in every other home.

 

But the rest of her generation was wild for the stuff.

 

Introduced in 1946, Tupperware had by the 1970s become the ubiquitous furniture of a modern kitchen: So neat! So sanitary! So cool! Seemingly every mom kept juice in the same iconic cylindrical pitchers, poured it into the same Bell tumblers and spooned tuna onto sandwich bread from one of the classic pleated-lid Wonderlier bowls.

 

But time marches on, no matter how hard we drag our feet. Tupperware is no longer modern or cool, and soon it might be a relic. The company’s annual sales have been falling for a decade, from $2.7 billion in 2013 to $1.2 billion in 2023. A new chief executive was brought in last year to attempt a turnaround, but it seems her efforts came too late: On Tuesday, Tupperware Brands filed for bankruptcy protection.

 

There are many answers to that last question. But before we answer them, we should acknowledge what a pioneering company Tupperware was, once upon a time.

 

Okay, maybe Tupperware wasn’t quite as revolutionary for the home cook as the refrigerator or the stove was — but most innovations aren’t great leaps forward. They’re small, incremental improvements that collectively add up to a much better life. We don’t look around every day and think, “Gee, I’m glad I don’t have to shell nuts by hand,” or “Boy, it’s sure nice to grind fresh pepper instead of using stale stuff from a can,” or “Wow, standardized measures really take the guesswork out of cooking!”

 

But you know, maybe we should.

 

Tupperware is arguably the king of those big little inventions, or at least some kind of minor noble. My 1950 Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book contains elaborate instructions for storing things covered in towels or wax paper, which was time-consuming, didn’t work very well and left the contents vulnerable to crushing. Tupperware made it possible to pack your fridge and pantry with fresh, intact food. The containers were so good at this that the Tupperware brand became synonymous with its function, like Xerox and Kleenex.

 

The company also pioneered the Tupperware party. Those parties are almost a joke nowadays, in part because so many other companies copied the concept. But at the time, the idea was — pardon the pun — remarkably fresh. This kind of direct sales can be smart when you have a new product that needs explaining, and it leveraged a vast, untapped labor pool: America’s housewives. The housewife brought with her a network of friends and neighbors who could be turned into customers — and in exchange, the company gave her a job that could be fit in around breakfast and her kids’ bandaged knees.

 

But like many pioneering companies, Tupperware got trapped by the very model it pioneered. As market conditions changed, the company didn’t — perhaps because it couldn’t.

 

It turned out that my Luddite mother was ahead of her time, as affluent consumers started coming around to her wariness of plastic. (Hilariously, just as my mother finally relented and started using containers instead of foil.) Meanwhile, the market for plastic containers became crowded with competitors. As pantries and refrigerators got bigger, and women started spending less time in the kitchen, families gravitated toward clear containers so they didn’t have to remember what was in them.

 

The movement of women from home to work also made “selling stuff to your friends” a less viable distribution model, especially as more consumers went online. Why make an effort to buy something from a person when you can click a button and send it back if you don’t like it?

 

It’s easy in hindsight to say Tupperware should have evolved with the times. And, yes, it should have updated its product lines earlier. But it’s risky to do brand expansions when your product is as iconic as Tupperware. It’s harder still to pivot from an affiliate distribution system, because if you start selling your products in stores, you risk backlash from a sales force that doesn’t want to compete with Target and Walmart. It’s hardest of all to convince a once-successful company that radical change is needed. After all, the things it’s doing right now worked really well before, so obviously those things ought to be a recipe for success.

 

As with so much in life, the strategies that made Tupperware a success in the 20th century also made it hard for the company to adapt to the 21st. As I pass my 50th birthday, and stare old age in the face, I find myself sympathetic to the dilemma. Maybe at some point, the only thing we can do is raise our Bell tumblers and offer a wistful cheers to the good ol’ days. They couldn’t last forever, but darn if it wasn’t a pretty good run.