If the lid snaps shut on Tupperware, we’ll all be sorry

theguardian.com:

W hat 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