Retro column: How much Tupperware did you really need?

It was quite a shock to hear Argos had discontinued their catalogues, also known as ‘the book of dreams’ after 47 years. The last nail in the catalogue coffin!
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The 1960s and 70s were a boom time for catalogue selling. Almost everyone had a ‘club book’.

The big five were Grattan, Kays, Freeman, Littlewood, and Trafford’s. Not only did ‘running a club’ provide a bit of pin money for housewives, who also enjoyed the social aspect of it.

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Certainly here in Sheffield, Freemans proved a good place to work, offering shifts, enabling women to plan their working days round childcare, and giving benefits like a gym and swimming pool.

Argos vintage catalogue pagesArgos vintage catalogue pages
Argos vintage catalogue pages

Many of us can remember the excitement when the Autumn/Winter book of whichever company you favoured was delivered with pages full of toys for Christmas.

Party plan was also big business then. It’s a fact that you did not realise just how much Tupperware you needed until you took stock of the amount in your cupboards. There always seemed to be something that you could place into one of the handy containers.

How many of us have looked at our ‘Party Susan’ and wondered what we would use it for and when?

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Few weeks passed without you being asked to a party in someone’s home.

Then you hosted a party, introducing the delights of the plastic containers to your friends, encouraging some of them to also host a party with promise of a gift, then you attended their parties and hey bingo! You had bought enough Tupperware to last a lifetime!

Tupperware, one of the iconic images of a time when many women were Stepford wives, wore pinnies, waved their children off to school and their husbands off to work. A time when men did what men were meant to do and bring home the bacon (and the containers were good for keeping that fresh!).

Although most popular in America where it was invented by Earl Tupper, from New Hampshire, it caught on in England as a must-have kitchen accessory in the early 1960s.

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An enterprising and hard-up single mum called Brownie Wise began hosting Tupperware parties for Earl in her home and was so successful that she became his head of home sales.

The parties were great fun and included games and refreshments. The bored suburban housewives loved playing games like ‘Write an honest advert to sell your husband!’

At first it was slow to attract custom. Women were not familiar with plastic and had trouble working the ‘burp’ seal, but the empire grew.

By the end of the 1950s they were ready to conquer Britain where increasing consumer wealth, an upwardly mobile society and the creation of suburbia, together with the desire of young housewives to show off their new fashions and hairstyles, made Tupperware parties an instant success.

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Tupperware never lost its appeal but suffered a slump in sales in the late 1970s when Ann Summers parties gained popularity. These were something different and just what women had been waiting for.

Without the interference of men, who for the most part had been dispatched to the pub, women could have a glass of wine, look at sexy lingerie and marvel over sex toys.

How many of those they actually bought, and whether the Rampant Rabbits were relegated to a place in the cupboard, unused, rather like Tupperware’s Party Susan, is not known, but they were certainly more fun than the parties to sell little plastic boxes (so I’m told!).

When some years ago it was revealed that the Queen used Tupperware in Buckingham Palace to store her breakfast cereals, it made a renaissance, although I think the likelihood of Her Majesty hosting a Tupperware party is slim!

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Today, Tupperware parties are particularly popular in Russia, and there are vast amounts of money to be made by party organisers.

Another name from the 1970s in the UK is Pippa Dee. Also party plan, its clothes sales were so successful that organisers often hired local church halls to cope with the demand for tickets.

I can’t remember much about the clothes. I think that they were instantly forgettable to include ‘baby doll’ static nylon nighties, but the parties were extremely popular for a period of time and gave women a night out.

The parties weren’t quite so risqué as the Ann Summers ones, but it seems a certain Jacqueline Gold was so motivated by a visit to a Pippa Dee party that she encouraged her father to consider party plans, as he was the owner of the Ann Summers empire, of which she became chief executive!

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Of recent years the party plan has branched out into all sorts of different areas with the type of sales that don’t involve actually visiting a shop being ever popular as easy, convenient, and very often home based.

Strangely enough in these strange times, the face-to-face retail business has once again suffered, this time through internet shopping.

The Betterware man was a frequent caller when I was young. My mother would buy useful household items to include things like little cups to put on the top of milk bottles to stop the birds from pecking the silver foil. Milk bottles, that’s ‘a blast from the past’!

He would often give a gift like the Miracle Needle Threader, ladder stoppers for stockings, egg yolk separators or small tins of lavender furniture polish which we used to polish our toys.

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Surprisingly, Betterware has stood the test of time and is still going strong after celebrating its 80th birthday.

With more than 5,000 door-to-door agents in the UK, it has also realised that the Internet is its future and now has a strong online customer base.

Avon has also embraced technology with agents advertising on social media sites like Facebook. But nothing beats the feeling when you realised that there was a piece of Tupperware you hadn’t got!

And wondered what on earth you could put in it!

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