Jumping Jubilee! : When Tupperware People Gather, It Gets Very Crazy, Very Corny and Very Profitable

The guy on stage is not Elvis Presley. Never mind the hundreds of women jumping around in the audience, screaming in rhythm, hooting and hollering till their faces turn pink.

Whoooo. Whoooo. Whooo. Whooo. Whooo. Whooo.

The guy on stage is Tupperware’s vice president and general sales manager for the West. His name is Glenn Drake. From the rear of the cavernous Long Beach Convention Center auditorium, which is teeming with nearly 1,900 Tupperware People, as they call themselves, Glenn Drake looks like a generic guy.

But, confides Elizabeth Cirkan, a Tupperware distributor from Burbank, “Everyone loves him. We feel someday he’ll be president.”

From Thursday through Saturday, everything and everyone at the Long Beach Convention Center has been the best, the biggest and, that favorite Tupperware adjective, the most exciting. This is the second West Coast Jubilee of the summer, one of seven mammoth pep rallies Tupperware holds each year from Orlando, Fla., to Long Beach.

If you think it’s easy to excite people about going door to door (“friend-finding” in Tupperspeak), to make them really want to sell those Chees-N-Butter Keeper and Spice Carousels and Super Cereal Storers by drumming up, say, six Tupperware parties a week, think again. Since Tupperware skips stores, it really needs those friend finders to find a lot of friends, so the Orlando company spends millions on pumping up its front lines at Jubilee, according to Tupperware’s Monty Hall-like president for North America, Gus English.

And it’s done with lots of praise and lots of prizes.

“I always think that being the No. 1 manager is like being Miss America,” English says dreamily.

Attending Jubilee is like watching “Let’s Make a Deal” for three days straight. “Let’s Make a Deal” with some “Miss America” mixed in. And day camp. Lots and lots of day camp. Throughout Jubilee hundreds of grown-ups are liable to stand up at any time, without warning, and start singing:

I’ve got that Tupper feeling deep in my heart

Deep in my heart

Deep in my heart

I’ve got that Tupper feeling

Deep in my heart

Deep in my heart to stay.

“It’s crazy and it’s corny, but we make money,” says Sylvia Boyd, Tupperware’s vice president and Western regional manager.

Eager Tupperware ambassadors have already infiltrated 43 countries, where they sell $1 billion a year worth of Quick & Easy Salad Sets and Modular Mates with the famous Tupperware seal (designed by Earl Tupper to resemble a paint can), among other Tupperstuff. But this year, Tupperware’s 39th, there’s more at stake. Tupperware is trying something no less challenging, no less exciting, than changing the way America cooks.

In the Tupperware world view, this is the year America shelves its moldy old pots and pans and begins cooking in Tupperwave stack cookers, a new three-level system for cooking entire meals in a microwave oven in just 30 minutes.

“Get ready to see your business explode.”

Gus English is standing in front of a backdrop painted with a giant stack cooker. Firecrackers are popping. Drums are rolling. The crowd is roaring. “Let’s put a piece of the future here in your hands.”

Chorus lines of arms stretch out for their free stack cookers. By the time the Tupperware People go home, they will be lugging tons of stuff--Tuppertoys, piano telephones, outdoor thermometers, parking-meter cassette players, tapestry handbags. And, if they play their cards right, if they sell a heck of a lot of Tupperware and recruit enough new Tupperware dealers, they’ll get stereos or diamond necklaces or trash compactors or sofas or dining room sets or his-and-hers leather jackets.

“My entire house is Tupperized,” says Joe Altieri, 39, of Corona. “We have a custom kitchen. We have Freezer Mates in our freezer. We don’t use Saran Wrap (the S word). All our glasses are acrylic. We have Tupperware dishes. We won Tupperware furniture. Our whole house is Tupperware.”

Altieri is one of that rare breed, a Tupperware guy. He gave up a tool-and-die job to concentrate on Tupperware, and Tupperware has been very, very good to him. Last year, Altieri says, he made $63,000 selling Tupperware, almost $20,000 more than he was making in his old job. Altieri, a plump man with a dark beard, was not, however, what the Tupperware party-goers were expecting.

“When I first started off, they’d walk in, and they’d ask, ‘Where’s the Tupperware lady?’ There’s more and more men in Tupperware. I think Tupperware is appealing to men. We’re like the guys in the closet.”

Altieri is one of 107 Tupperware People at Jubilee who belong to Lime-Lite Sales, a Tupperware distributorship out of Burbank.

Distributors are pretty high up in the Tupperware food chain. The bottom rung is dealers, and there are 96,000 across the country. Dealers who recruit three other dealers who together sell $3,000 of Tupperware in a month become managers (11,000 nationwide).

Managers whose dealer-groups sell $16,000 in four months become car-qualified managers, meaning that Tupperware gives them a new Chevrolet Lumina van in their choice of those favorite Tupperware colors: red, white or blue. There are 55 managers in Lime-Lite, which cheers everybody up at weekly pep rallies.

Everyone at Lime-Lite looks up to manager Nickie Malouf, 45, a thin, chirpy woman who has been selling Tupperware for 12 years. Streaming from her name tag are eight Tupperware achievement ribbons that say things like “Peak Performance” and “Personal Sales Challenge.” She’s been Miss America-Tupperware style, the No. 1 manager at the West Coast Jubilee, for three years in a row.

This year, she has promoted seven Tupperware dealers to manager. And in the last four months, she and her Tupperminions have sold a mind-boggling amount of Tupperware, about $200,000 worth. (About 25% of that money is theirs.) That makes her No. 1 manager again this year. Over the years, she’s won a couple of diamonds, three cruises to the Caribbean and Mexico and two trips to Hawaii. When Malouf’s name is called, she runs up to the stage and everyone screams and Malouf grabs a microphone and says, “Dreams come true at Tupperware,” and she means it.

Malouf is pretty intense about Tupperware. “You know, in a business office, there’s always a boss who drives you crazy and bosses you around. In an office, you work hard and the big bosses get it all. In Tupperware, you’re self-employed. It’s up to you. What you put in a business comes right back to you. So a girl can be home all day long, have a party and make $75. Like one of my girls says, she can work all day and not make $75.”

This is not to say selling Tupperware is always easy. “One of my dealers went to a party and it was in a nudist colony,” Malouf says. “They were all naked. I would have died.”

Tupperware people talk a lot about attitude. They preach positive thinking. They like to say things like “ ‘No’ doesn’t always mean ‘No.’ ” And, in classes on “dating”--booking Tupperware parties--they’re told, somewhat relentlessly, “There’s nobody you can’t date! There’s nobody you can’t date! There’s nobody you can’t date!”

Chris Guttman, a recent Lime-Lite recruit, has attitude to spare. During Jubilee, he sells Tupperware to a convention center security guard. “I can sell anything to anybody,” says Guttman, 40, a beefy guy from Highland Park.

He certainly has had practice. He’s sold Amway, Encyclopedia Britannica, Kirby vacuum cleaners and Herbelle cosmetics.

Once when he was selling vacuum cleaners, he’d made his way into a housewife’s living room by loading up her hands with a free case of cola so she couldn’t shut the door. But he discovered that he hadn’t accounted for her husband, who happened to be an off-duty policeman, who happened to be at home and pointing a gun right at Guttman. Selling Tupperware has been less eventful. He does it with his wife, Carol Sepulveda.

“As a husband-and-wife team, I flirt with the hostess a little. I give her a magnet. We have play money and Carol will hold up a piece of Tupperware and she says, ‘What page of the catalogue is this on?’ and whoever gets the right answer gets $100. We get a little hysteria going.” Guttman is the one who loads up the car with Tupperware. “They call us the Tuppermules.”

This is not to say that Guttman’s mother-in-law is happy about the couple’s new career. “She’s still having a heart attack,” Sepulveda says cheerily. “She’s convinced I’ll be a derelict on the street. But if I do, nothing will spoil.”

Guttman views Jubilee through the steely eye of experience. “Ninety percent of sales is hype, approximately. The numbers could be off. You’ve got to get all these people super-excited or they won’t sell.”

David Van Wess is pretty excited Saturday evening. It is Funtime, the last evening of Jubilee when people are supposed to dress up in costume. Van Wess likes to dress up anyway. He figures he does 10% of his Tupperware parties in drag.

“A friend lent me this ‘60s waitress outfit, with a turquoise wig and a black-and-white zebra apron. This thing has six layers of crinoline under the skirt.”

Van Wess, a 30-year-old manager from North Hollywood, is a positive thinker from way back. He’s done est. He’s done Lifespring. “I’m a practitioner student with the Church of Religious Science.” He figures that Tupperware has let him turn all that positive thinking into bucks and a time-share condo in Hawaii. “If you let enough people know what you want, you’ll get it,” he likes to say.

Van Wess has put on his waitress outfit and red lipstick for Funtime. Over the turquoise dress is a giant Doritos bag. He’s going around telling everyone his name is Dora Ritos. Van Wess may have many things, but shyness is not one of them.

“I used to be embarrassed to tell people what I did,” he is saying, as he teeters on a pair of black high heels. “Now I either tell them I’m the Tupperware king or the Tupperware queen of the Valley, and it strikes up business.”