How Tupperware took over our homes, with Decoder Ring

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Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Guo.
And today I am joined by Willa Paskin. Hey, Willa.
Hi, Jeff. Hi, Planet Money.
Willa, you are the host of the Decoder Ring podcast from Slate and you guys are like professional rabbit hole finders, right? You guys are so good at just finding these things in the world that we think we all understand, but you're like, no, no, no, no. We're taking you on this whole improbable journey saga that's delightful, but often kind of weird.
And we always end up learning something new. Thank you so much.
That's very nice. I do consider myself a professional rabbit hole.
What is that? Digger? Binder digger. Professional rabbit hole rabbit.
A professional rabbit hole rabbit. Yeah.
No, we really like love to find things that are sort of hiding in plain sight and then go figure out why they've been hiding in plain sight the whole time. Yeah.
My favorite is when you guys decode something that I never thought needed decoding, like lawn ornaments. Oh, yeah.
Or jalapenos. Not as spicy as they used to be, it turns out.
But there's one episode lately that all of us here at Planet Money cannot stop thinking about, and it is your episode about Tupperware. Oh, talkwrestling hiding in your refrigerator right now.
Yes, encrusted in mold. Exactly.

No, I mean, Tupperware is such an amazing and interesting subject because it is really this totally everyday object like we all have. Yeah.
And it feels like it's always existed and it feels like it's maybe old fashioned. Yeah.
But like in this story is so much stuff that's just really alive and still kicking and just really still with us. Yeah.
I think what's so interesting about the story that you tell about Tupperware is how it was so revolutionary in so many ways, like not just the product, but also the sales strategy.

And also it is a story about class and gender and told through this thing that we all buy

and don't give any second thought to.

Absolutely.

So Willa, will you take it away?

Oh, my God.

It's my honor.

Today on the show, the tale of Tupperware.

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

But where did Tupperware come from?

And how did it wind up taking over our lives?

It's the story of the product's success and the company's demise. That's all coming up after the break.
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Details at CapitalOne.com. Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, 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 going to get it full again. Can 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. Tupperware 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 and 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 dyed-in-the-wool inventor who had said, I'm 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-T 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 Wonderable, 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.
And 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 canny. 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. 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 them 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 seal. See? A Tupperware party was such a good time, it could obscure that it was also for at least 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 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 symbol-ness of Tupperware because it's pedestrian and plastic and 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 Cup, 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 salesmen.
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 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.
After the break, how Tupperware the company started to crack, and how its descendants lived on. This message comes from Odoo.
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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. Oh, they wear costumes.
They'd sing their songs. I got that Tupper feeling down in my heart.
I mean, they were into it. I got that Tupper feeling all over me, all over me to say.
So 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 in Kissimmee, right near Tupperware headquarters.

And Brownie had decided she was going to have a luau 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.
Wait, 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 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 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 70s and 80s, you get avocado green and citrus and orange. And it's all very like 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 challenges. Tupperware, the brand, still exists, even in a diminished state.
It's actually even sold in stores where it competes with its own descendants who are thriving. We're still living in the world that Tupperware built.
We are also inhabiting it a little differently. You know, Willa, listening to this episode, one thing that really jumps out at me is how much the Tupperware story sounds familiar.
Like, it seemed to prefigure all of these things that we see in the economy today, right? Yeah. I mean, Brownie Wise was, like, this really we say, a proto-influencer and this sort of like direct sales appeal.
And the power of just like someone you know, or maybe you follow on TikTok and feel like you know has not abated. All of those things are still a huge part of what's driving sales and what we buy.
And she figured that all out a really long time ago. Yeah, I'd be terrified if she had had a TikTok back then.
She could have taken over the world. Oh my God, I know.
What would she have done? I mean, maybe she would have sold less Tupperware or she would have taken over the world. Those are the choices.
Those are the only two choices. For even more about Tupperware and storage containers, this was just part of the full Decoder Ring episode.
The full episode is linked in our show notes. Our original episode of Decoder Ring was reported and produced by Olivia Briley.
Decoder Ring is also produced by me, Evan Chung, Max Friedman, and Katie Shepard. Derek John was executive producer.
Merit Jacob is senior technical director. The Planet Money edition of this episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by our executive producer, Alex Goldmark.
I'm Jeff Guo. And I'm Willa Paskin.
This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
I actually am so surprised that they could just chuck like a Tupperware full of grape juice across the room because I can't do that. I know, isn't it insane? Did they have some secret technology that we like is lost to time now that we don't have? We'd have to like, we're like fact check, Brownie.
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