By Phoebe Arslanagić-Little
They sell out in under four minutes. In the US, people are thronging about the frail Target display stand, grabbing three or four at a time. In other clips, queues stretch down the street, fights break out and small children are shoved ruthlessly aside. There is a lively trade on Ebay reselling these coveted items at an extreme mark-up for those who just couldn’t make it to the store at 8am, or were thwarted by a soccer mom with the pitilessness of a marauding Viking.
And the object of the crowds’ desire? What shape does this Holy Grail, this One Ring, this Unobtanium take? A Stanley cup. A stainless-steel insulated tumbler. But what are they for? Well, for transporting drinks around, for keeping those drinks cold. Nothing more.
Stanley is a classic and seemingly workaday US brand – its first steel vacuum flask was invented by Victor Stanley in 1913. But after a century of quietly keeping Americans hydrated, Stanley cups got famous, Tiktok famous. Specifically, it is the brand’s Quencher bottles that are the subject of the craze.
In 2022, Stanley saw a 275 per cent increase in sales of Quencher bottles, which can hold over a litre of liquid. In 2023, a 751 per cent increase. An example of the kind of video that has made this humble product the subject of such consumer zeal was posted by one woman in November 2023. It shows the smoking wreck of her car: not only had her Stanley cup made it relatively unscathed through the blaze, but it actually still contained ice.
The Roman playwright Terence said, “I am human. Nothing that is human is alien to me.” These words have struck many great minds with their wisdom: Seneca the stoic; Cicero the orator; Augustine the saint. But acts of sadism and cruelty aside, watching people wrestle angrily over pink, limited-edition Stanley cups may be the furthest away from identifying with my fellow man that I have been. But those tempted to diagnose this strange event as the result of a ridiculous strand of modern capitalism mixed with an excess of social media should be checked.
Consider Tulip mania. Between 1634 and 1637, at a time when the Netherlands was Europe’s wealthiest country, a potent admixture of fad, financial speculation and the disposable cash of the Dutch mercantile classes saw tulip bulbs sell for extreme prices. In one case, a sum far exceeding the cost of an upmarket Amsterdam town house was offered in exchange for 10 tulip bulbs.
Even the viral ‘challenges’ now circulated by Tiktok – the blackout challenge which encourages users to restrict their breathing till passing out is a particularly egregious example – have their mystifying historical corollaries. In 1939, after a Harvard undergrad swallowed a live goldfish to win a 10-dollar bet, the trend swept US campuses and became competitive. One University of Pennsylvania student swallowed 42 goldfish, and it gives me absolutely no pleasure to tell you that there are rumours of a young man who went through 89. Legislators responded with efforts to end the “cruel and wanton consumption” of these unfortunate creatures. And all that without Tiktok.
The Stanley cup craze presses deliciously on many human dopamine buttons all at once. The pleasure of being a collector. The sense of achievement that, for so many of us, accompanies the mere act of making a purchase. And also, just as with the unhappy goldfish, the sense of competition: after all, it was limited-edition Stanley cups that sparked the maenad-like frenzy I described at the top of the article. And even if you don’t find yourself wanting a Stanley cup after hearing how ardently others desire them, there is no doubt some foolish object that each of us so wants that we would firmly (but of course not violently) guide a small child out of our way in order to get it. Just don’t get the goldfish involved, again.
Phoebe Arslanagic-Little is chair and founder of the Women in Think Tanks Forum
