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Stanley Quencher Cups.jpg

How a Reusable Mug Became The Latest Symbol of Online Consumerism

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | January 4, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Miscellaneous | January 4, 2024 |

Stanley Quencher Cups.jpg

How long would you wait in line for a limited edition cup? 2024 has barely started and already there have been mini riots from customers desperate to get their hands on an insulated mug. People reported that veritable hordes of people, mostly women, were scrambling through Targets to get their hands on a Valentine’s Day-themed Stanley Cup. Although the holiday is over a month away, these pink and red tumblers have sold out online and in stores across the country. TikTokers documented the hours they waited until opening time to get one, with the police being called after fights broke out. Others have shown off the latest addition to their collection being placed among the tens of reusable mugs they already own. One especially committed Stanley fan laminated the label to keep it around the cup in mint condition.

The Stanley Cup — not affiliated with the National Hockey League — is the latest product to become an unexpected symbol of status and clout in the perennially online age. As with many influencer-favored items, the Stanley phenomenon is the work of women. Once a symbol of blue-collar workers and labourers like my dad who just wants a hot cup of tea on their afternoon break, the Stanley Cup is now more likely to be seen with girlies getting their water intake sorted out. The Watertok fad that still consumes my mind is heavily adjacent to the Stanley trend, providing the vessel for tons of nugget ice (or the fancy cubes!) and flavour packets. The cups are now available in many colours, perfect for matching your beverage to your vibe.

Stanley is an American brand that has been creating food and drink containers for over a century. Typically used by outdoor workers and campers, these insulated flasks and mugs are sturdy, large, and easy to transport thanks to the handle. Initially, their 40-ounce mugs (about 1.2 litres), called Quenchers, were marketed to their usual demographic. It didn’t take off and was soon shelved by the company. In 2017, The Buy Guide, an e-commerce blog based in Utah and aimed primarily at mothers, featured the Quencher tumbler as a must-own. Ashlee LeSueur, Buy Guide’s co-founder, told the New York Times, ‘Every time we linked it, it would sell out so quickly. We got so many pictures from teachers who all have them in their classrooms and from nurses stations with cups overflowing in different colors, and we knew we were onto something.’ Eventually, they started working with Stanley directly to sell the cups directly to their customers. Eventually, it broke out onto social media, going from a mommy blogger favourite to influencer must-have to online phenomenon.

I’m hardly the first person to note the dark irony of an item designed to cut down on needless consumption becoming a fad that inspires people to hoard dozens of them at a time. The whole dang point of a reusable cup is to ensure you limit excessive purchases and avoid creating damaging environmental waste. When the Stanley fad is inevitably replaced by something else, will all of these people throw away their cups to make room for, I don’t know, burger holders or whatever? The trend of weirdly expensive water bottles as a status symbol didn’t start with Stanley either, as Amanda Mull noted in The Atlantic in 2019. S’well bottles, the former king of the reusable container market, are around $35 a pop, but do go up in price depending on the style.

Water is universal and essential. It’s one of the few things in life that binds us together as humans. We’re constantly bombarded with messages and motivational buzzwords reminding us to get our eight glasses of water in every day, and that doing so will make us happy and healthier. Get that glow for your skin! Sleep better at night! Be in your hydration era! And, as capitalism has taught us, literally everything can be turned into a product, including water itself (thanks a lot, privatization of our own natural resources.) It’s not enough, however, to simply make the product. You have to sell it as luxury. Yes, even drinking water needs to be special and glamorous and something you can post on Instagram as a symbol of your uniqueness, even though everybody is using the same cup now. It happened when athleisure turned moving your body into a girlboss empowerment symbol with fashion-forward aesthetics.

The sameness of it all is one of the things that gets me. One of the reasons I have such disdain for influencer culture is because it’s a proud cycle of over-consumerism that doesn’t even have the decency to be original about it. Watch enough of these videos, and you just end up seeing the same products over and over again. It’s Stanley Quenchers, Lululemon leggings, Touchland hand sanitizer, Skims shapewear, and so so much Amazon, Shein, and Temu. It’s minimalism and pastels, the illusion of a clean, fuss-free life that just has to be overwhelmed with products sold you to via affiliate links. A Stanley Cup being viewed as a luxurious representation of your personality is sadly not the nadir of the problem - that hole doesn’t have a bottom. It’s a reminder that so many ‘ethical solutions’ to consumerism are just acts of corporate greenwashing.

Look, I’m not against collecting things or doing what makes you happy. I own way too many books and candles to be that judgmental. And I get how futile it can feel to make small efforts to lessen one’s carbon footprint, only to see Shell spraying oil across the Amazon and world governments acting as though climate change isn’t happening. What’s one or 12 tumblers on top of that, right? But we know how bad things are and how much waste is polluting our planet. We know how buying into these systems exacerbates it. And we know that these damn cups will end up in a landfill, because turning every act of our lives into a fad with products to shill has smothered us beyond belief. Maybe just stick to one water bottle at a time. They all do the same thing anyway.