The Tupperware Trap

In the 1940s, a man named Earl Tupper invented a product that would transform how Americans store their food. Women started selling his airtight plastic containers, dubbed “Tupperware,” to their friends and neighbors. Soon, the product was everywhere—but by the 1980s, once Tupperware’s patents started to expire, so were the copycats. This week, after years of struggling to keep up with competitors, the company behind Tupperware filed for bankruptcy.

For Tupperware—a product once so successful that its name has become a generic term, as with Band-Aids and Kleenex—being first wasn’t enough. It makes intuitive sense that being the first to bring a product to a market would give a brand the advantage. But being the “first mover,” as it’s called in business parlance, isn’t a guarantee of being the most profitable. Tupperware is one of a batch of 20th-century brands, including Xerox and Polaroid, that created a product that defined their field but then struggled to compete with imitators. As the late billionaire businessman Eli Broad (himself a proud “second mover”) wrote in his 2012 book, The Art of Being Unreasonable, the companies that follow an innovator get to benefit from the customer base that the innovator has identified, and can learn from their predecessor’s mistakes.

“A first mover,” meanwhile, “can sometimes fall in love with its product and fail to realize when technology evolves and consumers want something different,” Broad wrote. Toyota, for example, saw great success as the “first mover” in modern hybrid cars, but it has been slower than its competitors to make a fully electric vehicle, Fernando Suarez, a business professor at Northeastern, told me: “The pride of being first, the pride of having invented the category,” sometimes makes companies reluctant to change. Advantages do come to those that enter a market first, but the so-called “first-mover advantage” comes with a shelf life, Suarez said: Once the novelty of a product wears off, consumers tend to look for the cheapest version, brand name notwithstanding.

Even as America entered a “golden age for food storage,” as Amanda Mull put it in The Atlantic earlier this year, Tupperware fell into some of these traps. Tupperware’s competitors have pulled ahead by making either higher-priced glass containers that appeal to sustainability-minded consumers—and look chicer in the modern fridge than old-school Tupperware—or cheaper, lighter alternatives, Amanda noted. Tupperware, it seems, got stuck in the middle: It didn’t meaningfully modernize its design, but it also wasn’t all that cheap.

Tupperware also didn’t sell products at traditional retailers such as Target or on Amazon until 2022, instead sticking with the direct-sales approach that first put it on the map. Now, though, the “Tupperware parties” that made sense when fewer American women worked outside the home aren’t as appealing to potential customers—and, at worst, can inspire fear of the dreaded multilevel-marketing scheme. The Tupperware direct-sales model has proved more successful abroad in recent years, notably in Indonesia. In a statement this week, the company said that it planned to seek the bankruptcy court’s permission to continue operating during proceedings and that it recently “implemented a strategic plan to modernize its operations, bolster omnichannel capabilities and drive efficiencies to ignite growth.” In other words: The company is going to try to get with the times.

The world of business loves an inventor—and stigmatizes a follower, Oded Shenkar, a business professor at Ohio State and the author of a book on imitators, told me. But, he said, most leading businesses today are not actually pioneers. Consider Facebook, which didn’t invent the idea of a social-networking site but rather found spectacular success with its own version. Walmart’s founder has openly said that he “borrowed” ideas from other stores, and the head of Ryanair admitted to taking cues from Southwest, Shenkar noted.

If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you have cabinets full of something you call Tupperware—whether it’s from the actual company or a copycat brand. For all of Tupperware’s influence on the American kitchen, if it collapses for good, many people may not even notice that it’s missing. In the end, the verbal shorthand that Tupperware gave Americans may outlast the actual containers.

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P.S.

I rewatched a childhood favorite, Napoleon Dynamite, earlier this week, and was reminded that one of the movie’s many goofy subplots involves two characters, Kip and Uncle Rico, selling Tupperware-like containers door to door in a somewhat harebrained scheme to raise cash. Trying to make the sell to a local couple, Uncle Rico pulls out a model boat and offers to throw it in with the 24-piece set of containers. In another scene, seeking to impress a potential client, Kip drives over a bowl to show how durable it is, and it (predictably) shatters. Kip and Uncle Rico don’t seem to achieve great financial success with the bowls, but the scenes are an amusing testament to the rich American tradition of peddling food-storage containers in the neighborhood.

— Lora

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