Tupperware got Pilar Simms out of her house and put some pin money in her pocket. Now, 26 years later, she's tooling around her San Bruno neighborhood in a company-bought Pontiac Montana minivan, and all she has to pay for is the gas.
"It has given me the freedom,'' Simms says of her Tupperware career. "You can make your money in your own time."
Selling Tupperware—as a senior executive manager she's responsible for scoring at least $7,000 in sales every month—has meant being able to remodel the house and help pay for a vacation home and boat at Lake Shasta while allowing her to keep her own schedule. She can vacation when she wants to, she says.
Who would have thought? Tupperware—a tool for liberation and recreation.
Plastic bowls with "burpable" lids may not be as flashy as burning bras, but they've paved an unlikely road to freedom for thousands upon thousands of women like Simms—homemakers who had never worked before.
That's the thrust of a likable if earnest documentary called "Tupperware! ," to be presented Monday night on KQED-TV's "American Experience.'' It's the story of what happened when a reclusive inventor named Earl Tupper, a "cranky Yankee" if there ever was one, met up in 1951 with young Brownie Wise, a divorced mother and natural marketing genius. He made the plastic bowls. She sold them.
Wise's strategy was to sell Tupperware woman-to-woman. It was more than just keeping food fresher longer, although that did matter to 1950s housewives. Wise's genius held the promise of cash-fueled independence to a nation of women—some bored, some broke, some saddled with kids, all subject to an American expectation that their place was the kitchen or the bedroom.
In this PBS documentary, viewers see how something as humble as Tupperware grows into something larger, transforming itself not only into an agent of change but also into a durable cultural symbol.
Filmmaker Laurie Kahn-Leavitt plays it straight—perhaps too straight. The kitschy iconography of Tupperware is sacrificed for the empowerment story line that traces the rise and fall of Brownie Wise in a man's corporate world. (Wise died in 1992 and she is not mentioned in the Tupperware corporate history online. A New York publicist for Tupperware says the company has seen the documentary but has not commented on it.)
There are some deliciously surreal moments when the natural enthusiasm of the 1950s just bubbles over. You see this most in clips of the annual "jubilee, '' the sales convention/extravaganza Wise would hold at Tupperware's Florida headquarters. Under the benign gaze of the Wish Fairy, a winged, wand-waving woman in a golden tutu who "granted" the wishes of star sellers, these outings are a vivid mix of consumer greed, college pep rally and the gee-whiz gaiety of summer camp.
There's a zany innocence to these sequences not found on Tupperware's Web site.
The old-time zest conjured up in the documentary is kept alive through the postmodern irony of Phranc, a self-described "all-American Jewish lesbian folksinger" who sells Tupperware as a sideline. Her passion for and prowess at selling Tupperware is such that she was the subject of a 2001 documentary: "Lifetime Guarantee: Phranc's Adventures in Plastic.''
Phranc must be too busy to answer an e-mail about the biz, even though Tupperware's software programs have made her my Tupperware Lady. The half- dozen Bay Area Tupperware reps listed on the company Web site didn't return e- mails either. I've got to ask: What if I really needed that Forget Me Not Cheese Keeper set?
Even the folks at the company headquarters in Orlando, Fla., are unreachable; perhaps they're too busy absorbing a 21 percent drop in fourth- quarter profits caused—hello, return those e-mails—by weaker U.S. sales.
Thank goodness Simms is overseeing her distributor's Tupperware kiosk at San Francisco's Stonestown Mall. She has time for me; answering questions, walking me around the cart to show off the various products.
Although a Pyrex boy myself, I still feel drawn by these extrusions in plastic. I feel the party vibes of the hot, tropical-hued drink ware. The true- blue lids on the storage containers speak of reliability. More sophisticated is the signal given off by Tupperware's new assortment of serving ware cast in bone, nutmeg and cinnamon.
It's all I can do to keep from walking off with the two-tiered all-white " deviled-egg stand, which is made to fit inside Tupperware's signature Cake Taker, a domed cake carryall. Simms says the most popular product is a line of food storage containers that go from freezer to microwave to table. They're called Rock 'N Serve because the steam vent in the lid is opened with a rocking motion.
Second in popularity is a Microsteamer. Not only does this round covered casserole with a perforated insert steam vegetables and other foods in the microwave, it also makes a great pineapple upside-down cake in just 12 minutes, she says, promising to fax me the recipe later. I buy the steamer and, true to her word, she sends the recipe. It's a Tupperware recipe but Simms has customized it. She's crossed off the Duncan Hines Yellow Cake Mix and replaced it with Betty Crocker's.
"The Betty Crocker is moister than Duncan Hines,'' she says.
Talk about Tupperware with Simms and she'll tell you it's a good life with fun opportunities to meet "so many wonderful people." But it's hard work, too.
"I have to do most of it,'' she says of meeting her monthly sales quota. "You can't depend on the people under you to keep you in that car. They're working to make their own money.''
Unlike other Tupperware reps, Simms isn't interested in moving up the sales ladder. To do that, she says, would mean making Tupperware more of a full-time, seven-day-a-week job.
"I like my freedom,'' she says repeatedly. "I'm my own boss.''
Surely, that's the kind of talk that has Brownie Wise smiling at that big Tupperware party in the sky.
source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/02/07/DDGUL4QGNP1.DTL&type=printable 8feb04
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