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Quibbles & Bits: Tupperware’s Out; So’s Civil Discourse
On fiscal and conversational bankruptcy
By Ed Goldman
WORKING ON A CONTAINER —When I heard that the Tupperware company had declared bankruptcy, I tried to react appropriately. I burped.
This is what you do with Tupperware products to make sure the container won’t leak once full. This is also what you do with babies, for pretty much the same reason.
Ware’s Tupper
Because the prospect of Tupperware’s imminent demise surprised me, I skimmed through my calendar and crossed off all the Tupperware parties on my schedule. This went surprisingly fast since I hadn’t scheduled any Tupperware parties for the rest of the year. Nor for any year prior. Nor any year yet to come.
In fact, I’ve never really been sure what transpires at Tupperware parties, which began in the 1950s. I know that at pajama parties of the same era, college co-eds used to wear their cutest nighties but I just don’t picture them, a few years after graduation, heading to a gals’-night-out wearing salad crispers.
Tupperware is one of those rare businesses that thrived during the COVID years. No, people didn’t mask-up and throw container parties. They just stayed in, cooked more and now had a need (and the means) to store their leftovers.
“In its filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware,” CBS News reports, “Tupperware listed assets of between $500 million and $1 billion and liabilities of between $1 billion and $10 billion. The filing also said it had between 50,000 and 100,000 creditors”—or, roughly, between 49,000 and 99,000 more than I do.
Though the company was born four years before I was, its products have remained more youthful looking than mine (me). A chemist named Earl Tupper thought it all up, hoping to create an airtight way of storing food short of having someone scarf it all up from the table after dinner then tell his mom there was no need to wash the dishes because all the plates had been licked clean.
Oh, wait. That wasn’t Earl Tupper who said that. O Lord, was it I?
Throughout the past 78 years, competitors have abounded—Newell Brands, Acqua Di Parma, Armani and Youngevity immediately spring to Google, I mean to mind. But Tupperware was always the best, in my opinion. The difference between storing celery in a freezer bag or in a Tupperware container is the difference between (how shall I put this?) Limp Bizkit and Tower of Power. Spelling it out, no one prefers flaccid to tumescent celery stalks.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tupperware’s nearly 200 wares, they started with the Wonderlier Bowls of 1946, and have included such items as the Cake Taker, Astro Bowls, Carousel Caddy, Bell Tumbler and my fave from 1960, the Millionaire Collections Salt and Pepper Shakers.
Why do I have trouble envisioning young millionaires storing in the fridge their leftover caviar, sturgeon and canary diamond rings in plastic receptacles right next to their baby’s teething ring?
The company says it’s going to keep producing products as it works through its bankruptcy, to which I say both “Bravo!” and [burp].
CHAT’S THE WAY IT GOES—What creature moves on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening? Spoiler alert: the answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx is “man.” The idea is that in the beginning (morning) man is a crawling baby. By adulthood (noon) he’s walking, and when he’s old (evening)he uses a cane as a third leg.
I’m finding a correlation between that riddle and how I’ve consumed political commentary over the years. When I was a young man (morning), all conservative commentators struck me as fascists. By the time I was in my 50s and 60s (noon) I discovered that somewhere in their midst were conservative commentators simply urging sanity. Then I slipped into my 70s and all bets were off. Ultra-conservative and ultra-liberal commentators were bloviating psychopaths.
Let me go back to a time when William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, hosted a weekly gasbag fest called “Firing Line” on PBS. It had a run of more than 1,400 episodes, the longest talk show on record hosted by one man with an impenetrable but highly imitable transatlantic accent.
Depending on your point of view, Buckley was charming, articulate, shallow, snakelike and capable of occasional brilliance. How is it that I was a liberal who loved and loathed him, often when he was in the middle of uttering the same eternal sentence?
It’s enough of a mystery to bring me back to who solved the riddle of the sphinx. It was apparently a Greek guy who moved with his mom into an apartment development called The Oedipus Complex. God only knows what they were storing in their Tupperware.
Don’t forget! A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).