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One hundred years ago, I sold Tupperware to help supplement an alarmingly low-family income. I got into the gig because my ex-husband and I were transforming a dilapidated commercial space in east Atlanta into a coffee shop nestled in a neighborhood on the scary side of gentrification.
To offer a gauge on the Scary Richter Scale, a year after we opened, two customers had their purses snatched out front. My husband ran after the thief, believing he was the same kid who kept smashing our front door to steal the tip jar.
My husband was nearly dead wrong. The purse snatcher was grown-up with a gun, and by the time it was all over – just a couple of blinks, really – my husband had been shot in the back. The gun wielder fled into a dark cat hole and would never see the inside of police car, much less a jail cell.
It took a long time, but my husband recovered. He went from a wheelchair to a walker to an I-can-tell-it’s-going-to-rain kind of pain down his left side. The bullet remains embedded in his spinal cord, a whisper away from a central nerve.
During his yearlong recovery, he couldn’t work at the coffee shop. So, after my morning shifts – one baby strapped to my back, the other in a carrier at my feet behind the counter – I started selling Tupperware.
I loved it. Back then, parties didn’t happen on a computer screen, but rather in Tammy’s living room after she put the baby down, or Becky’s den after her kids’ baseball game. I think one of the reasons Tupperware was such a success in the early days was because the target audience was lonely. Guests and hostess alike, we were eager for adult contact and meaningful interaction.
I trained under a slick husband/wife team, who intrinsically understood their position in a pyramid scheme was at the pointy top. Once a month, all the Tupperware hostesses would gather at their conference center to learn the new products and sales techniques.
The top five in the district were always invited to their house for a cocktail hour before the meeting. The house was an impressive testimony to their business acumen and left the lucky five breaking the 10th Commandment before the sales gathering.
That was, of course, their intention. Stoking hunger.
They taught me a great deal about human nature. They were skilled at inventing an ache in one’s belly and then providing products to satisfy the fabricated hunger.
“You can make anything valuable,” I remember Sharon, the wife, saying. She was holding up a plastic lettuce cutter at the time.
“Look at this item,” she told us at the big meeting. We followed her gaze, which caressed the serrated knife down one side. We “oohed” at the palm-shaped handle and “awed” at the crisp celery color of the knife.
“Metal knifes will make the lettuce leaves turn brown,” she said, looking up to us for the emotional swell.
“BOO!” we chanted collectively; we were comrades joined against the enemy of unsightly lettuce. We knew at the end of the demonstration, she was going to gift that lettuce cutter to one lucky winner. We all wanted it.
“You want this?” She asked our hungry eyes. “YES!” We chanted back.
Then she pulled her arm over her ample shoulder and fling it into the auditorium. Women would lunge, and, at least one time, scratch, but one lucky lady would finally hold up the lettuce cutter, and the others would back away in reverence.
“You see,” Sharon said from the podium, and we turned as a unit to look back at her. “That lettuce cutter cost 3 cents to make” – waiting for our bristled shock – “but you wanted it because I made you hungry for it. It’s a prize worth three pennies, and even after knowing that, how many of you still want one?”
I raised my hand high along with every other woman in the building.
“It’s not the thing itself that holds the value,” she said. “It’s what you make the person belief its worth.”
In the year that I sold Tupperware, I was never lucky enough to catch a coveted monthly trinket. But I gained something more valuable than a 3-penny piece of plastic.
When I start to feel an ache in my belly, “Oh, I wish I owned that,” or “I wish I had her brain,” I remember the lettuce cutter and the fact that I’m not even hungry. I don’t care that my lettuce turns brown after cutting.
Sharon’s entire plastic empire could never satisfy my hunger for the things of worth: friendship, integrity and, on the just-because days, a cream-filled, chocolate-iced donut.
Abigail Blythe Batton is a staff correspondent for the Cherokee Scout. Her column runs every other week. Email her at ablythebatton@gmail.com or leave her a message in the local newspaper’s office at 837-5122.