Tupperware

The Kitchen Sisters Present

Today, The Kitchen Sisters Present: “Tupperware” — an homage and a eulogy.

It was 1980. Nikki and I had just met. We had just named ourselves The Kitchen Sisters. And we had just bought our first cassette recorder, a Sony TC-D5M. We hadn’t even taken it out of the box or been trained on it when we were invited to a Tupperware party our friend Kirsten was hosting. This was 1980 in Santa Cruz, a stronghold of the women’s movement. You just didn’t get invited to too many Tupperware parties back then.

It seemed the perfect moment to break out the Sony and tape the party. The party was such a bonanza of story and plastic we went to another and taped that too. This time the Tupperware lady invited us and our new tape recorder to Tupperware headquarters in Salinas where Tupperware ladies were trained and where sales rallies were held.

We went back to the studio at our local community radio station with a ton of tape and no real idea of what to do with it. These were analog days, days of cassettes and reel-to-reels, of razor blades and splicing tape.

The story you’re about to hear includes every mistake in the book. We mixed using two reel-to-reel tape recorders, two cassette recorders running through a mixing board we had no real idea how to use, onto a third reel-to-reel. We also had no idea you could splice takes of the mix together, we thought you had to do one complete running mix of the whole thing from start to finish. It probably took us 50 takes to do it. Nikki thinks this is Take 47, when all the levels were up at the same time and the sound started cascading and coming out of every machine at once, all at full volume. But out of that cacophony came our signature sound, a way of telling stories that holds with us to this day.

Tupperware. What began shortly after World War II as a use for the plastic resins invented for the war, was sold like Avon lipstick using direct sales and home parties, gave generations of women a chance to make their own money outside the home and kept our leftovers fresh, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 17, 2024.

Mergers and acquisitions, fewer parties and get togethers during covid, changes in the culture of selling, the work opportunities available to women, concerns about the eco-disaster that is plastic — so many factors seem to have been part of this collapse.

Tupperware shuttered its only remaining plant in the United States in South Carolina this year, resulting in 148 layoffs. The plastic is no longer fantastic.

Today on the podcast, the third story The Kitchen Sisters ever produced for NPR, “Tupperware.”