Tupperware’s bankruptcy unleashes the plastic memories

The swish of air as the seal sticks fast.
The multi-coloured, stackable storage in a fabulous new product – plastic!
Gadgets made very much for specific purposes – the celery keeper, the lettuce drainer, the orange bowl that mum always used as a container beside the bed of a sick child.
That last one is not such a good example perhaps but you’ve probably realised by now we are talking about Tupperware, the 75-year-old company that invaded kitchens via parties where these wares were demonstrated over cheese and pineapple sticks.
Now, Tupperware is bankrupt.
Who has the time anymore to go to a party where the shock of the high price only comes at the end? How do you compete with cheaper products online?
Massey University marketing expert Bodo Lang says over-consumption and a preference for cheap goods over quality is killing ‘made to last’ brands.
Even Tupperware’s lifetime guarantee hasn’t been able to compete with less pricey goods made in countries where labour laws may be more lax, or where environmental rules don’t apply.
And Lang says there’s another reason for Tupperware’s demise – the novelty has worn off.
Today on The Detail we speak to Lang as well as a former Tupperware party host, a party guest, and a Tupperware super-fan who has tattooed her love of the product onto her hand.
Tupperware was founded in 1946 by Earl Tupper who created what was a breakthrough in its time, plastic storage containers with a flexible airtight seal.
In following years, the brand’s popularity sky-rocketed with the in-house marketing strategy of Tupperware parties.
Lang says the reality is Tupperware was swimming against the tide of convenience-driven ecommerce shopping.
“Buying Tupperware, so basically plastic products for storage purposes, through a Tupperware party is an extremely inconvenient way to buy a very mundane product, the time cost is really high. It’s a really tough sell to get people together when they can just open up a web browser and pretty quickly buy a whole bunch of plastic storage containers online,” he says.
Tupperware as a company obviously knows this, it’s made attempts to modernise the brand. But those efforts haven’t been successful. Lang says Tupperware’s marketing strength, which was a novelty in the 50s, is also its weakness.
“If you are in a Tupperware party environment the price is being disclosed relatively late in the piece and you can feel the quality, you’ve probably heard people rhapsodising about the quality. But in an online environment to assess the quality of a plastic storage container is basically impossible… price is very easy to assess so it becomes very obvious very quickly to potential consumers that these are premium priced products and they’re multiple times the cost of a normal plastic storage container,” he says.
Lang adds that this attitude is particularly apparent in New Zealand. He says as a culture Kiwis aren’t aware of the long-term consequences of such shopping.
“New Zealand consumers think first and foremost of price, and it’s always been like this even before we had our cost of living crisis and I think it’s a cultural aspect of the country and we can see it in infrastructure projects or in building houses where we build cheap and we maintain expensive,” he says.
But if you are a fan of Tupperware and want to grab some before it melts away, our guests on the podcast have some useful tips on where to find some.
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