Stanley Cup Culture Needs To Die
can we please let water bottles just be water bottles?
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Our ability as a society to take something that is good in its essence and intention and spin it into a vortex of unfettered consumption is deeply unhinged. Take the Stanley Cup: a company that has been around for over 100 years and is best known for its high quality beverage containers. At their core, each Stanley Tumbler was created to prevent the need for single use cups and bottles — reusable bottles are such great thing for both the environment and our bank accounts (and our hydration.) That is, until social media gets a hold of them.
The popularity of the Stanley Tumbler is nothing new: there are dozens of articles documenting the craze, with some fans collecting as many color ways as possible, spending thousands of dollars in the process. Multiple adults have gotten into actual physical fights over buying new editions of the tumblers, and the company is now doing several brand collaborations and printing money in the process. My issue is not with the tumbler itself, but with the insane world of accessories that have emerged in the past few months — majority of which just create more waste and consumption.
The bottles are not cheap, with the average Stanley Cup tumbler retailing for $35-$45 dollars. And this is before you open up the world of accessories that feels seemingly endless. TikTok is filled with videos of people adding different straw covers made from cute characters, silicone inserts that allow you to have two beverages at once in your Stanley (though you have to be careful how of you drink because the liquids will mix), and ice cube trays meant to specifically stack in a Stanley (which is arguably the most useful one.)
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The accessories I do not understand include this snack tray ring, where the IG and TikTok accounts like to make ASMR type videos of them filling each container with everything from cake slices to popcorn to skittles. Do you really need your water bottle to have a snack ring on top? It’s not like you can actually drink from it? Or there is a separate silicon bowl that you can purchase to carry a scoop of ice cream inside of your Stanley, treating it like a mini cooler?
In addition to the snack trays, people are buying personalized name plates, charm bracelets, and even little plastic attachments so that your water bottle can hold your favorite lip balm. Perhaps the most unhinged accessory of them all is a tiny Stanley Tumbler keychain that people then fill with things like gummy vitamins and clip on to their actual tumblers.
The accessory I think I understand the least are the tiny backpacks that people velcro onto their water bottles and then fill with single serve wipes and hydration packets (again defeating the point of a reusable water bottle), mini lipsticks, foundations, lotions, or your keys and your credit cards. But when does a water bottle no longer just serve as a water bottle? Do you really need all of these beauty minis? What is with the urge to turn your water bottle into a purse? Have these people not heard of backpacks? These bottles are already quite heavy, yet all of these accessories only make them heavier and bulkier. I really wonder how the users drink any beverages out of them?
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The number of “pack my Stanley” or “restock my Stanley” videos that exist on TikTok never ceases to blow my mind. This one even goes so far as to say, watch me pack for a date, where she precedes to stuff an entire sewing kit (?!!! WHY?) into a mini backpack for her Stanley Cup. If I ever showed up to a date and someone had a full accessorized Stanley Cup, I would absolutely leave.
All of these videos are aesthetically pleasing and neatly organized, and the make the consumer feel like *you* are the ridiculous one for not having a full Stanley Cup restock container filled with hundreds of dollars worth of single use packaging and plastic accessories, with their easily linked Amazon affiliate links. And while individually the accessories are not that much, in tandem, they can easily hit the $100 mark. Does your $45 water bottle really need more than double that in accessories?
I am not against owning a Stanley, or even owning two or three Stanleys, if you actually use them (as long as you are not pouring water into it from a single use plastic bottle, which I have seen more times than I’d like to count on TikTok.) But I wonder what happens to all of these accessories though when someone becomes board of their Stanley cup in one or two years and has already moved on to the next trend?
It is truly jarring that while there are people going out of their way to use peanut butter scraps at the bottom of the jar, and pickle their watermelon rinds, all in service of wasting less and being more sustainable, there are people out here taking one of the simplest acts of sustainability — a reusable water bottle — and turning it into the consumerism Olympics. It’s a competition in which we all ultimately lose.
Do you have a Stanley?
HARD agree! Also I never got on the Stanley train because I can’t get a cup like that into the water bottle compartment of my backpack and it’s not 100% leakproof so pretty much useless to me when I’m commuting or traveling.
This means even more coming from a beverage enthusiast