America’s obsession with the best way to consume a basic necessity shows the reach of capitalism in our lives.
If you live in the United States, you’ve likely seen it: dozens of people at school, work, the gym and other areas of social life lugging around the 40 oz stainless steel vats of liquid known as the Stanley Quencher. By all accounts, these pastel-colored behemoths, fit with a handle, straw and cup holder compatibility for convenient sipping, have exploded in popularity over the past two years, in no small part due to a literal explosion. On Nov. 15, 2023, TikTok user @danimarilettering posted a viral video of the aftermath of a fire that wrecked her car. One surviving remnant was her slightly charred Stanley tumbler, which had even kept ice frozen amidst the inferno. The video, which has garnered 9.1 million views as of January 2024, caught the attention of Stanley 1913 president Terrence Riley who, via TikTok, made the generous — and incredibly media savvy — offer to replace her vehicle at the company’s expense.
With that, Stanley tumblers have undoubtedly cemented their position as the water bottle of the moment. On Jan. 19, 2024, the Wall Street Journal interviewed a 16-year-old from Alabama whose towering collection of 67 Stanley tumblers, coming in every size, color and collector’s line, cost her parents an upwards of $3,000.
As she was quoted by the Journal, “If they are rare, I would want to use them more because I’m special for having them.”
A Sacramento woman was arrested for grand theft for walking out of a store without paying for 65 Stanley tumblers, which amount to nearly $2,500 in merchandise according to CBS. Whether they were for resale or a personal collection, her motivation was undoubtedly influenced by the immense clout of the product.
Across the country, concerns are growing among parents that fashionable drinkware is causing rifts between the youth, corroborated by one mother’s story of her daughter being accosted by her classmates for owning an “off-brand tall plastic cup with a straw.”
What is it about this all-around unremarkable water bottle that could light such a fire beneath consumers that it led to Target shoppers stumbling over each other and enduring minor injuries to own a limited-edition Valentine’s Day Stanley? In the broad view of our global economy, it’s not, as one CNN Business article suggests, “because of its ability to keep beverages hot and cold for extended periods of time, and the fact that despite its size, the tapered bottom still perfectly fits in a vehicle’s cup holder.”
But before delving into why the Stanley tumbler is more than just a regular everyday appliance, it’s important to recognize that the Quencher H2.0 FlowState (I don’t think “Parks & Recreation’s” Tom Haverford could come up with more buzzwords in one title) is far from the only trendy bottle to transcend its function as a drinking receptacle. While Stanley’s marketing trajectory is unique, refurbishing a brand traditionally advertised to the archetype of working class men to appeal to young women, it is one of many water bottles riding the wave of social media discourse to mass appeal. For those of who attended school prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s near impossible to forget the memeified — and still enduring — ubiquity of the Hydro Flask.
Even now, new competitors emerge. As recently as Jan. 14, 2024, one writer for Food & Wine Magazine has answered the call of the hydration wars by launching a frontal assault on the Stanley in favor of the other vacuum-insulated, stainless steel option, the Owala FreeSip (I was unaware that other forms of sipping were unfree). Stephanie McNeal, senior editor for Glamour Magazine, goes as far as to anthropomorphize and gender the ambitious challenger: “The Owala is cute. She’s trendy. She’s insulated, with a straw and a lid. Some say she has life-saving properties. In short, she’s that bitch. Stanley? Never heard of her.”
Absolutely brilliant lede aside, it shouldn’t be lost on us how bizarre it is to eulogize a water bottle brand. Fortunately — or perhaps unfortunately — theorists have had their fingers on the pulse of this phenomenon for hundreds of years. German theorist and friend of the column, Karl Marx, made the first stride towards understanding this attachment to the commodity by explicating the theory of commodity fetishism. In layperson’s terms, commodity fetishism describes the process by which the human labor embodied in a commodity — the labor that gives it value beyond its use as unassembled parts or raw materials — is made invisible through exchange on the market. While to Marx the embodied labor in a commodity was objectified as price, nowadays corporations have a multi-billion dollar advertising industry, as well as social media, to further distance consumers from the people who produce their commodities.
In their essay, “Just doing it: Enjoying commodity fetishism with Lacan,” Steffen Böhm and Aanka Batta argue that advertising and branding are critical in obscuring the social relations — namely production by labor and exploitation by the capitalists — required to produce merchandise. Using Nike’s close association with high-performance athletes as an example, Böhm and Batta write, with hard-to-decipher academic chops, “What contemporary consumer capitalism has arguably achieved is that it has provided a symbolic system onto which the subject’s constitutive anxieties (lack) can be transferred, creating a set of fantasies for people to believe in.”
In other words, marketing invites people to create artificial identities, communities and realities to participate in, even for an effervescent moment. Owning Nikes will make you jump higher, and owning the cool new bottle will make you popular (or will, in a practical sense, insulate you from ridicule, speaking as a hideous “green text bubble” Android-user). In this sense, new needs, the strongest of which being the desire to merely belong, are created out of thin air solely to justify the surplus production of commodities. In our contemporary situation, a particularly brutal example would be how the relative overproduction of Apple products drives (and is driven by) dangerous, illegal mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Love it or not, capitalism runs our lives at every level; however, it doesn’t happen at the edicts of secret, international summits staffed by old men in antique leather chairs stroking their Persian Longhairs. The laws of production dictated by this centuries-old global system are plenty visible in how we treat each other, use social media and adapt to social institutions like schools and workplaces. No longer the exclusive realm of advertising firms, the duty of pushing unnecessary products has been outsourced to consumers themselves who, through the construction of artificial social identities, can exalt normal, tangible objects to an almost supernatural status while the exploited hands that produce them remain unacknowledged, unappreciated and undercompensated. Thus, a symbol of social status to someone in the heart of global imperialism is a token of exploitation to the workers in imperialism’s periphery, further insulating us (with a Stanley brand vacuum seal) from the everyday horrors of the capitalist economic model.