I am Tupperware, I Contain Multitudes

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Before we begin, this episode contains adult language.

Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Business Week, where she writes a column trying to make sense of consumer culture.

Seeing people's neuroses and emotional lives play out and the way that they choose to spend time and money is fascinating to me.

Amanda is always noticing things.

And last year, she became very curious about a strange kind of video that's all over the internet.

It's time for another drink fridge restock.

It's been a little over a month, so we're gonna get it full again.

You just tell me what a restocking video is.

Restocking videos are usually a few minutes long.

They are generally sort of a close-up on a woman's hands taking a set of containers, usually out of a refrigerator, out of a pantry, out of a laundry room.

And then those hands start filling the containers with stuff.

Food or cleaning products stuffed and stacked and plunked and crunched.

And peeled and chopped and decanted.

Just thing after thing after thing being put inside of all of these crystal clear containers.

The hands are disembodied.

You can't see who they belong to.

And the women rarely talk.

They let the containers speak for themselves.

A lot of people find the sound of things getting sort of crunched and plunked and put into these containers Very satisfying.

And then those containers are put back in the pantry, in the laundry room, wherever.

And we're all stocked up.

It looks so beautiful, nice and full again.

And when you had disarray, you now have order.

Everything is abundant and you have all of your choices in front of you.

And walking into your kitchen or your bathroom or your laundry room is like walking into a store of your very own.

Okay, I love this drawer.

I hope they love it too.

How popular are they?

Incredibly popular.

There are people online who make an entire living out of making these videos.

It's very, very easy to find ones that have millions or tens of millions of views.

I think that to watch something that was like a little bit of a mess go to clean and pristine and organized and perfect is satisfying for a lot of people.

This booming genre of video, of people basically pouring pasta into plastic, is fascinating all on its own.

But over the years, as Amanda has seen more and more of these videos, a particular aspect of them started to jump out to her.

The stars, the storage containers.

Plastic storage containers have never been more popular.

They have never been more ubiquitous.

They have never been more culturally salient.

Amanda's talking about regular, plain, put your leftovers in them containers.

She has some, I have some, I dare say you have some.

They're easy to overlook because the focus is usually on what's inside of them.

Everything from last night's dinner to yes, dried pasta and q-tips and colored pencils.

Still, they have become an absolute staple, not just of online videos, but mainstream home decor.

Or as the headline of a piece Amanda wrote for The Atlantic puts it, home influencers will not rest until everything has been put in a clear plastic storage bin.

There are clear acrylic containers in virtually every size and shape and scale.

They are incredibly widespread, incredibly visible in culture, incredibly visible online.

These containers have crept into every corner of our lives, but it turns out that as modern as some of their uses are, this is not the first time we have lost it over an empty plastic box.

They just used to go by another name.

We're all still living in the world that Tupperware built, and we probably will be for quite some time.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

The storage container is a stealthy star of the modern home.

It's something we use to organize more of our stuff than ever before, and also something other people use to organize their stuff for our viewing pleasure.

Its role as a source of soothing, satisfying, potentially viral clicks is new, but storage container innovations are not.

Something we had occasion to remember when Tupperware, the company, found itself in the news last year.

Tupperware was the original container craze, and in today's episode, we're going to connect it to the contemporary one.

Because as it happens, for a long time now, we've been filling empty boxes with far more than just leftovers.

So today, on Dakota Ring,

how did Tupperware take over our homes?

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Tuppaware is now an old and troubled company, but for years it was a thriving one.

And it owes much of that success to an archetype we tend to think of as very contemporary.

Whether or not today's influencers realize it, they are taking part in a long tradition of women using their charisma to ignite the imaginations of women around them.

And the proto-influencer who started that tradition by turning Tupperware into a household name was Brownie Wise.

Hello, this is Brownie.

You know, Brownie was a minimally educated woman from South Georgia.

Bob Keeling is a historian and the author of Tupperware Unsealed.

Her marriage fell apart not long after her son was born, so it was up to her to make money to raise him.

Brownie was working as a secretary in the suburbs of Detroit, making ends meet, when one day, opportunity called.

Brownie has a guy for Stanley Home Products who knocks on her door is selling these utilitarian home cleaning products, kind of dowdy brushes, brooms, you know, different things you can use around the house.

And he gives this very fumbling demonstration of all the products.

And she says, oh my God, I could do better than that.

So Brownie started selling Stanley home products herself.

Sometimes we overlook the prospects closest to home, you know.

From the start, she had the thing good salespeople have, where even when they're selling you something, it doesn't feel like they're just trying to sell you something.

She seemed authentic, she was warm and fun, and unlike all those male traveling salesmen, she could recommend products to other women as a peer.

That is just such a meaningfully different sales pitch than going to a store and buying something off a shelf.

Soon she was selling a lot of Stanley, which by the way is not the same company that makes the current very popular big cup.

And she wanted to sell even more.

But she hit a wall, or rather, the man who ran the company.

She wanted to move up in the world and she told him, I'd really like to get into management.

And he said, honey, management's no place for a woman.

And so Brownie decided she was going to find something else to sell.

A colleague had just pointed out a new product available in department stores, a product created by a chemist named Earl Tupper.

Earl Tupper was a Spartan New Englander.

He was a died-in-the-wool inventor who had said, I am going to be a millionaire by the time I'm 30.

Long before he created his namesake product, Earl was constantly jotting down ideas and sketches in a notebook, like for a fish-powered boat and for pants that wouldn't lose their crease.

When the Great Depression hit, he took a job to support his family in a plastics factory in Massachusetts.

By the 1940s, he had his own plastics manufacturing company.

And when World War II ended, the multinational chemical company DuPont reached out and asked if Tupper could figure out what to do with this material they developed, a hard brown slag product they called polyethylene.

It was like a byproduct of what the military would use for helmets, a product no one else would consider even using.

Earl started experimenting with polyethylene, mixing it, processing it, refining it, and eventually he turned it into something brand new.

He was able to make it more malleable and softer, and he could even add certain dye colors to it to make it more attractive.

Earl named this promising new material Poly Tea and set out to find a use for it.

One day, Earl saw a paint can with its resealable lid and he realized something like that would be really useful for food.

At the time, home food storage was very haphazard.

1940s housewives would improvise, sometimes putting leftovers in a bowl and covering them with a shower cap.

Earl saw an opening for something better.

And so using his poly tea material, he set about creating a new kind of storage container, unbreakable, attractive, and with an airtight, resealable lid.

He named the resulting product Tupperware, and by 1946, he was ready to start placing his first products, including the pastel-colored Wonderbowl, in department stores, where they promptly just

sat on the shelf.

It was not doing well.

People didn't really know what to do with it.

They have to be told.

Somebody has to identify the problem in their lives for them and then explain how a product fixes that problem.

And that was the case with Tupperware.

When Brownie Wise saw Tupperware, she immediately knew how to explain it to her customers, how to make it comprehensible and also desirable.

She started bringing it into women's homes and demonstrating its effectiveness in ways that would blow their minds.

She would take the Wonder Bowl, she'd fill it up with grape juice, seal it, and then throw it across the room in somebody's family room, and they'd be aghast, but it wouldn't spill a drip.

And then Brownie would explain how to seal that very same Wonder Bowl.

You burp it just like a baby.

That was one of the things Brownie would say to her prospective customers.

You burp a Tupperware just before sealing it completely by pressing down on the center of the lid while holding up one of the corners, forcing a little burp of air out and ostensibly locking in freshness.

I don't know if it's necessary, but this was like a thing that women were taught to do when they got their first Tupperware.

It was like after a meal, you burp your baby, after a meal, you burp your Tupperware.

It is a small act of care toward your leftovers.

This turn of phrase was beyond Cammy.

Brownie knew her audience, wives and mothers in the post-war era who could afford to spend a little more, but felt more virtuous doing so when the exciting new product they were splurging on promised it was also the latest way to take care of their families.

Soon Brownie was selling $2 million worth of Tupperware in today's money, and she wasn't even officially affiliated with the company.

But when Tupperware saw her sales figures, that changed.

They offered her distribution rights for the entire state of Florida.

It took about 15 seconds for her to say, oh, it's warm down there.

Yeah, we'll go.

Brownie quickly set up a shop in Fort Lauderdale called Patio Parties.

Not only was she selling Tupperware herself, but she was also recruiting other women, teaching them her winning sales pitches, and then sending them off to sell Tupperware too.

But no one was just knocking on doors.

Brownie had developed a more compelling method, one she'd first learned about from her old company, Stanley, and then honed and improved.

She had the Tupperware Party.

Now let's go to a little town in New Jersey where things are really popping.

Yes, there's a party going on at Mrs.

Betty Martin's house.

It's a Tupperware party, and it's really fun.

You get somebody who would be willing to host the party.

It turns into a social gathering.

The girls get together and meet their old friends and make some new ones.

Women would come over and have hors d'oeuvres and maybe cocktails and chat and gossip.

And they would give their demonstration.

Watch her show the way to use Tupperware's patented seat.

See?

A Tupperware party was such a good time, it could obscure that it was also, for at least the women doing the demonstrations,

work.

In the late 40s and early 50s, selling Tupperware, something that happened almost entirely in the female sphere, was a socially sanctioned way for women to bring in money.

to be a part of the working world, but one in which business degrees and special training were less valuable than a wide social circle, an eye for presentation, and the personal experience, charm, and authority to recommend a product.

Tupperware Parties sort of pioneered this concept of like women selling to women.

It is a completely different selling experience to hear somebody say, oh, you've got to try these.

They're so cute.

They're so useful.

I can order you a set if you're interested.

This kind of direct sales method, which is now everywhere and not always for the good, worked incredibly well.

In 1951, Tupperware's owner, Earl Tupper, arranged to meet with Brownie face to face for the first time.

Soon after, he decided that her sales strategy, the Tupperware party, would be Tupperware's only sales strategy.

Goodbye department stores, goodbye any stores at all.

He also moved Tupperware headquarters down to Kissimmee, Florida, the state in which Brownie was already located, and gave her a promotion.

He told her, you know, when you talk, people listen.

And he made her the head of sales for the brand new home party division that he created at her encouragement to sell the product exclusively through home parties.

The national scaling of these home parties changed everything for Tupperware.

This is Tupperware.

It became an an it product, a modern Marvel that was the must-have item of the day.

Something I initially, anyway, found a little hard to understand.

It's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around the status symbolness of Tupperware because it's pedestrian and plastic and it stores food.

Like it is just this plastic container, you know, like what made it so revered?

Humans love to take objects and imbue them with meaning.

And sometimes it doesn't really matter what the object is.

If it's in the right place at the right time, it can be an incredibly meaningful thing.

And that is what you got with Tupperware.

And I think it makes a lot of sense if you think about how Tupperware spread.

You couldn't just go into a store and if you had the money, you could buy it.

You had to be invited to a Tupperware party.

You had to have social ties to people who could get it for you.

You had to have enough money to actually buy it.

And then when you had it, it was this indicator that you were

up on the latest things and also that you were a fastidious and reasonable steward of your family's domestic life.

Tupperware had the release model cachet of a streetwear brand and the trendiness of, yes, a Stanley cop, all while making wives and mothers feel good about how they were being wives and mothers.

And so it became a behemoth.

Tupperware amassed 20,000 dealers across the country, women who worship Brownie as a sales god and aspirational lifestyle guru, and who flogged enough Tupperware that the company soon reached $25 million in retail sales, almost $300 million in today's money.

I mean, Earl Tupper's over the moon.

He's finally found somebody to burp his baby.

Soon, Brownie, with her incredible story, became the face of the brand, heralded as a single mom, revealed to be a sales genius, now leading an army of saleswomen.

I hadn't realized there were so many people in the Tupperware family and to think there are more than 10,000 others who could not be here.

Brownie was the communicator.

Brownie was the motivator.

Brownie loved to get out among the public and have her picture taken.

And so Brownie started becoming famous as the Tupperware lady.

Brownie went on talk shows and did interviews for countless magazines.

She became the very first woman to appear on the cover of Business Business Week.

She wrote an entire memoir/slash business manual, and the press often credited her with the success of Tupperware.

Nominally, Earl Tupper is the president of the company, but she's the genius behind this.

It was good advertising.

It spread the message.

But ultimately, that's what started to cause the friction with Tupper and Brownie.

As the 50s wore on, Earl became increasingly aggravated by Brownie's popularity.

Brownie became increasingly aggravated by Earl's micromanaging.

They were both trying to grow the company, but they were often at odds, a situation that became prickly and tense over time.

And then the big thing was the annual Jubilee in Kissimmee in July of 1957.

Yes, this is Jubilee 1957, the Tupperware Homecoming Jubilee, called by many the most unusual sales convention in the world.

The Tupperware Jubilee was an annual over-the-top themed celebration and team-building exercise Brownie had started in the early 1950s.

Tupperware dealers and managers would come to Tupperware headquarters on their own dime for an elaborate four-day show of appreciation and indoctrination.

They wear costumes, they'd sing their songs.

I got the Tupper feeling down in my heart.

I mean, they were into it.

For the 1957 Jubilee, the theme was around the world in 80 days.

And the highlight was a massive excursion organized by Brownie.

Brownie had bought her own island.

in the middle of Lake Toho, which is Kinkasimi, right near Tupperware headquarters.

And Brownie had decided she was going to have a luwow on her private island.

So the thousand-plus attendees all headed off to Brownie's island in boats, ready to party.

But the weather had something else in mind.

If you're ever in Central Florida in the summer, in the evening, you can almost set your watch by the thunderstorms that are going to brew up.

And sure enough, they did.

And there was no cover for anybody on the island.

The boat drivers were struggling to get people back on dry land, and there were a bunch of boat accidents and there were people injured and it was a disaster and Brownie left and went home.

Sorry.

So she gets off.

Brownie left.

She saved her own skin, let's say, you know?

By the end of the evening, 21 people were in the hospital with serious injuries.

Some of the people who were injured ended up filing lawsuits.

And Earl Tupper wanted no part of that.

And he was livid.

Earl had also already started thinking about cashing out and selling the company.

And he did not want a headstrong, self-interested female executive with a lot of pull internally and externally to get in the way.

He felt she would be a liability.

He was just going to go out there and say, you're done.

Earl Tupper fired Brownie Wise in January of 1958.

She didn't own any stock or have any stake in the company.

She didn't even own the house she lived in.

And she she never again achieved the kind of success she'd had at Tupperware.

Meanwhile, at the end of the year, Earl sold Tupperware to Rexall Drug for $16 million,

divorced his wife, and bought his own island off the coast of Panama.

He also renounced his American citizenship to avoid paying taxes.

All this means that by 1959, the two people most responsible for making Tupperware, Tupperware, were no longer at the company.

But they had done such a good job establishing the brand that even without them, Tupperware entered a golden age that lasted for decades.

She told me, hon,

we're having a party,

a Tupperware party.

It's Tupperware's 10th birthday and you're getting the present.

For over over 30 years, Tupperware has revolutionized food storage.

Now we've revolutionized food preparation.

Tupperware, now you're cooking.

It's in the 60s and 70s that Tupperware became a fact of American life.

It was a useful and popular product, but also an iconic and intimate one that almost everyone had a personal connection to.

My mom still uses the cake keeper and like I don't know what else she would put a cake in.

Like it has to be the old Tupperware thing.

And you can also tell what the big, like, aesthetic color palette of a particular decade was in America by what colors Tupperware came in during those years.

You know, in the 60s, it was like pastels, it was very girly, it was very feminine.

In the 70s and 80s, you get avocado green and citrus and orange, and it's all very warm and deep and sort of looks like you've smoked around it for a long time.

And more, more, more delicious colors.

Go to a party soon.

Tupperware got so big and so dominant that it was one of these sort of rare American brands where the name of the brand becomes synonymous with an entire type of product, no matter who it's made by.

Your Tupperware lady has the freshest ideas for locking in

freshness.

But in the 1980s, Tupperware's fortunes slowly started to turn.

With more and more women in the workforce, the Tupperware party started to seem like a lot of effort just to get something to hold leftover mashed potatoes.

And in the years to come, the plastic holding those potatoes became a known health hazard.

The very things that had once been so innovative about Tupperware were starting to hold it back.

Still, Tupperware might have been able to survive if not for the competition.

But when Earl Tupper's patents ran out, you could buy other perfectly functional food storage containers, often for less at any store.

You might call whatever container you were buying Tupperware, but strictly speaking, it was not.

For years, things were obviously trending in the wrong direction, but it all came to a head in September of 2024.

For Tupperware, the party is over.

The iconic brand once a staple of American kitchens filed this week for bankruptcy, citing what it called macroeconomic macroeconomic challenges.

Tupperware, the brand, still exists in a diminished state.

It's actually even sold in stores where it competes with its own descendants who are thriving.

As Amanda said earlier, we're still living in the world that Tupperware built, if we are also inhabiting it a little differently.

So, after the break, we dive into the brave new world of modern storage.

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So Tupperware, the brand is troubled, but storage containers in general are as great an obsession as they ever have been.

I get so many questions on my videos about these acrylic organizers, and I actually just bought a second set.

It comes in so many different ways.

Remember those restocking videos?

That's just barely scratching the surface.

Storage containers are all over stores and not just the container store.

They're on social media, TV shows, magazines.

They're the subject of books.

And it's not just some top-down phenomenon.

They're in our homes.

The things you buy to help organize and declutter the things you already have.

The contemporary passion for storage has a lot of connections to the craze for Tupperware.

It too is trendy, influencer-driven, feminine-coded, and all tangled up with our ideals about domesticity.

But it also has some differences.

And I wanted to talk with Amanda Moll to try to make sense of them.

I feel like in the last couple of years, I genuinely have become aware of like trends in storage, like trends in other people's habits about storing the private stuff in their house, which I guess is just to say like this whole sphere has moved online and has therefore become public in just a way like it was not.

Yeah, I think Tupperware had like some public elements to it because if you brought food in for the class at your kids' school, if you brought something to a potluck, there were elements of public performance that you could do with Tupperware.

But I think what's happened is that we have sort of taken that to its logical extreme with all these like acrylic and glass containers.

And first, Instagram and then TikTok have created a sense that different parts of our home are actually opportunities for public performance in a way that they wouldn't necessarily have been in the past.

Like how you organize your bathroom, how you organize your refrigerator, your pantry, things like that are now like genres of content unto themselves.

We've been wanting to stock our guest bathroom up with a bunch of toiletry items for whenever guests are staying with us and may have forgotten some items.

I've actually seen a few people on TikTok do this and thought it was such a great idea.

So how did this all happen?

Like what is the chronology here?

Yeah, so American homes are sort of like stuffed to the brim with things.

The American single-family home has gotten a lot bigger.

The closets within it have gotten a lot bigger over the past several decades.

And people feel, I think, generally a sense of overwhelm with trying to figure out what to do with all their stuff.

The average size of a new home when Tupperware came on the market in the late 1940s was less than a thousand square feet.

Now it's two and a half times as large.

Nearly one in five Americans rent an additional storage unit on top of that, and pantries bulge with bulk purchases from warehouse clubs like Costco, where memberships have soared.

And so, in the late 2010s, early 2020s, you got this uptick in content that was about how to deal with that.

Hello, I'm Maria Kondo.

One of the more famous versions of that is Marie Kondo's Netflix show, Tidying Up.

And then you have a lot of creators who run organizational businesses in their own lives that like actually do this in people's homes.

And the sort of granddaddy of of them all is the Home Edit, which is a Nashville-based business run at its outset by two women who would just go into your house and make everything look nice in your organizational areas.

We love organizing by color for any space.

We really do like to rainbow-fy everything.

There are four steps.

Their method in doing this requires a lot of clear acrylic to store all of this stuff in a visually appealing way.

So unhealthy snacks in the basket so that they're concealed?

Yes.

Okay, but healthy snacks and clear?

Yes.

So like, all the pouches and it was this way of thinking about storing your own things that didn't really require you to get rid of a whole lot of stuff.

It sort of was like, you know, what if your stuff is actually gorgeous and beautiful, and we could display it like you're in a museum or in a store?

If Marie Kondo successfully pointed out that we have too much stuff, the owners of the home edit and plenty of other influencers besides, did like brownie wise before them.

They helped consumers identify a problem that they didn't quite know storage containers could solve.

This time, the problem isn't about food and food waste.

It's about organizing the vast quantity of stuff that has accumulated in our homes since Tupperware first appeared.

And that really caught on with people.

The idea that you could take all of that clutter and turn it into this beautiful display of abundance if you had the right containers and tools and methods is really, really tempting to people.

Is it just about abundance?

Like it seems so tied up with what's going on with storage now, but that's not what was going on with Tupperware, right?

Yeah.

So when Tupperware became popular, it was being bought by people who had experienced real scarcity, who had lived through the Great Depression or rationing during World War II.

So you still had this sort of like leftover cultural understanding of like waste not, want not, eat the leftovers, use everything you have.

Like this was a middle class or upper middle class value that stuck around.

That has changed over time in the US.

We have incredible consumer abundance in the US if you have resources.

And to fail to take advantage of that for the benefit of your family in a lot of these affluent spaces is indicative that you are disorganized or lazy or not focused on the right things or whatever.

We used to use Tupperware to demonstrate our frugality, but now we aren't even frugal about how much Tuppware we have.

So now the correct way to run a household is to never run out of anything, to never hit the bottom of a container and be like, ah, I got to go to the store.

And displaying your incredible, huge, fully stocked pantry that's like walking into a small grocery store is a demonstration that you are making things as comfortable as possible for everyone around you and for yourself.

This is all making me think of Chloe Kardashian's pantry.

Totally.

I am taking you in my pantry, literally.

In the annals of online status organization, Chloe Kardashian is a legend.

Put her in the Hall of Fame.

As you could tell, I like containers.

I like things to all kind of look the same and have some fluid flow to it.

There are some really famous photos online of what is putatively a pantry, but looks like just a whole separate room unto itself that just includes a ton of packaged foods, sort of all lined up in either these white wire containers or clear acrylic containers.

And some of them are on like clear acrylic Lazy Susan's so that you can spin them and see all the different bottles on the different sides.

And then pasta has all been taken out of its container and loaded into these cylinders of either glass or acrylic.

And I like to kind of organize by category.

Like these are all my crackers or cookies on this side.

And also these are the things that I think I would grab the fastest, which is the junk food.

And everything is really spaced far apart.

It looks like it is a boutique, sort of.

There is a lot of custom lighting installed under shelves and everything is sort of like warm and glowing.

Also, there is this sense where you're like, you must have a whole other storage room

to restock this storage room every time one thing is used.

Like it doesn't have the feeling like there's a lot of turnover here.

Yeah, it's a display space, totally.

It is not a functional space.

Everything is just available.

Everything is just at your fingertips.

There's no sense of, oh, I wish I had that.

Or like, ugh, we're out of that.

There's never any gap between having a thought and getting what you want.

You're always prepared.

Which is probably great.

I, a person who is prepared for nothing.

This kind of superstocked pantry can seem like a bulwark against momentary irritation, toddler tantrums, and being without crackers when you're really craving one.

But it's about something bigger, too.

It's all getting a little doomsday prepper, isn't it?

Just like anybody else, I prioritize what's important to me.

I keep a stocked pantry at all times, so if I pull from that stock, I need to replace it.

We are all pushing toward the idea of this totally sort of like self-contained at-home life.

You need less and less from the outside world.

The shit could hit the fan tomorrow and Chloe Kardashian could close off that compound and she and her kids could live off canned goods for

years.

What do you think is going to happen with this trend?

Like, do you think we're at the outer limit of storage?

It does feel to me like we are sort of at or nearing a logical extreme of what you can do with clear acrylic.

There's just so many videos of people using their storage containers for all kinds of purposes that probably some of them shouldn't even be used for.

I've seen videos online of people decanting their orange juice and milk into these containers and putting them in their fridge.

And in my mind, I'm like, I don't,

I don't think that's necessarily like a good idea.

Like, it just seems like we are bumping up against the far extreme of what we can really do with this type of stuff.

To Amanda's point, there was a recent viral craze that involved people beautifully organizing their stuff in order to get through the security line at the airport.

Like, think extremely artful and clever displays of a computer and a coat and a pair of shoes and a phone and a carry-on, all in the spatial constraints of the storage bins provided by TSA.

Okay, to the girlies, these photos look so fucking cool.

If I'm at LAX and I try to fucking curate and take a photo,

the way that those TSA agents are going to cook me to a crisp and eat me alive.

Like so much viral organizing content, these photos are weirdly satisfying, but they are also clever in a way that makes me feel like the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked when we're talking about organization.

Do you think you have been influenced by the storage container craze?

Yeah, absolutely.

The only time that I've really sat down and looked for and bought these clear acrylic storage containers was I came back to New York from Atlanta after my dad died somewhat unexpectedly.

And, you know, I had several more weeks off from work and I didn't really know what to do.

And like, I felt like my brain wasn't working and my life had been tipped upside down.

And I ordered some clear acrylic storage containers off of Amazon and I reorganized the shelves in my bathroom.

And I was like, you know what?

I am overcome with grief.

I do not know where to point myself in the morning.

Like I don't know what I'm doing.

It was a time of incredible

chaos in my life that was so far beyond the bounds of my ability to set it right.

But like, you know what I can set right?

The shelves in my bathroom.

Storage containers are cheap, plastic, and pedestrian.

But for decades now, we have been asking them to hold not just our physical stuff.

but our emotional stuff too.

And it's hard to imagine we're going to stop anytime soon.

There's always something that needs to be filled and always something that you can go ahead and fill it with.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was reported and produced by Olivia Breilly.

Decodering is also produced by me, Avin Chung, Max Friedman, and Katie Shepard.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merrick Jacob is senior technical director.

If you'd like to know more about Tupperware, I recommend Bob Keeling's book, Tupperware Unsealed, Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers, and also the PBS documentary, Tupperware.

We'll link to them on our show page, as well as to Amanda Mull's great articles about both Tupperware and today's storage containers.

If you aren't already a Slate Plus member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page, or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to get access wherever you listen.

We're going to be releasing bonus episodes regularly, so please sign up now.

Don't forget, Slate Plus members also get to listen to our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads.

And you'll get unlimited access to our website.

Again, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking try free or visit slate.com slash decoder plus to sign up.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you in two weeks.

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