What sealed the lid on the Tupperware party?
Covid & online sales? Or longer-term social & labour market trends?
You might not be aware — much less care — that New Zealand’s sole importer of Tupperware is set to close its business at the end of October. According to media reports, Covid-19 has caused a decline in sales via Tupperware parties, and even as restrictions have eased, many customers are reluctant to attend in-home events. What’s more, online sales allow aficionadas to buy the product directly.
The phenomenon that is Tupperware
Tupperware has been around since the 1940s. Earl Tupper, who’d worked for Du Pont, formed his own plastics company in 1938 and soon after patented the generic Tupperware container. By 1947 he’d patented the snugly fitting lid — the famous “Tupper Seal”.
The Tupperware party
In the United States, Tupperware was initially sold through department stores like Bloomingdales and through mail order catalogues, but was not very successful. The formation of Tupperware Home Parties Incorporated in 1951 established the Tupperware Party as the sole means of product distribution. The Tupperware Party expanded on traditional door-to-door sales techniques by hosting party games, offering refreshments and giving sophisticated product demonstrations.
According to Alison Clarke, in Parties are the answer: Gender, modernity and material culture this highly rarefied form of selling blurred the boundaries between domesticity and commerce; work and leisure; friend and colleague; consumer and employee; and commodity and gift. The party’s "hostess" offered a Tupperware “demonstrator” the intimacy of her home and her social relationships with other women — her relatives, friends and neighbours — in exchange for a non-monetary gift. The demonstrator, supplied by an area distributor, used the hostess’s home to set up a display of products and recruit further parties from amongst the hostess's guests. The demonstrator benefited from a commission on sales and the potential for further party reservations. Former Tupperware demonstrator Jillian Earle explains how it worked in a recent RNZ interview.
Sociologists (see for example Susan Williams’ and Michelle Bemiller’s Women at Work: Tupperware, Passion Parties, and Beyond) have debated whether Tupperware parties empowered individual women or exploited personal relationships for corporate gain.
Empowering individual women
We come down squarely on the side of empowerment. In the United States the drive to get women back into the home after the Second World War is well documented. There was no place in the post-war economy for women with fears of (male) unemployment and all those baby boomers to raise. Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique observed that over the 1950s, the average age of marriage in the United States decreased, the proportion of women attending college decreased, while the birthrate increased. Although now widely criticized for its focus on relatively well-off white middle-class women, Friedan’s work illustrated the environment that made the Tupperware Party a lifeline, providing both social interaction for women at home, and opportunities for women to make money from home.
To quote Alison Clarke:
Parties provided sanctioned all-female gatherings outside the family…. some informants even recalled budgeting within the monthly housekeeping for attendance at Tupperware Parties… but for numerous women it was an opportunity to socialize outside the home at little expense…. Becoming a [Tupperware] dealer or manager meant having a large network of social relations, extra money and a standing in the community.
There is much to celebrate about the Tupperware Party, quite apart from its success as a business model.
The network breaks down
In New Zealand, the Tupperware Party had its heyday in the 1970s. But as in the United States, women’s increasing participation in the labour market and in higher education over following decades led to the breakdown of the networks that the business model relied on. Fewer women were at home during the day, and Tupperware demonstrators had other options for earning income.
The graph below shows how women’s labour market participation in New Zealand has increased over four decades in all age cohorts from age 20.1 2
Has the Tupperware Party’s time come?
Absolutely. But while it might have been Covid-19 and online sales that finally sealed the lid on the Tupperware Party, the decline of the business model is the flipside of a longer run trend in women’s participation in education and the economy. And that too, is worthy of celebration.
By Judy Kavanagh & Dave Heatley
Data sources for graph: NZ.Stat (for years 2001-2018) and Grant Johnston (2005) Women’s Labour Force Participation in New Zealand and the OECD (for years 1976-2001). Johnston did not report participation for ages 65+.
Younger women — those aged 15-19 in this dataset — don’t match this pattern, reflecting their increasing participation in education over time.