Suburbia, feminism, the Queen’s breakfast: you could tell a history of the 20th century through those plastic lifesavers
What Covid did to various businesses will never make total sense to me. But it appears to have both saved Tupperware, briefly, and now scotched it, the pandemic bounce for the storage container dropping off so precipitously that the Massachusetts firm says it could go bust if it can’t find emergency funding. Competitors are too good at TikTok, is another explanation, though I suspect the slide into obsolescence was a slower burn.
People always talk about the impact of Amazon in terms of its threat to direct retail competitors – what it does to in-real-life shopping and single brands online, when one gargantuan player wants to sell everything to everyone. But it has ripple effects: with utility items, it creates hourglass buying behaviour, where everyone goes to either the cheapest or the big-name brand. You get any old flask or you get a Thermos; any old kid’s scooter or a Microscooter.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
