By now, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the video of people at Target rushing the seasonal Stanley cup display, apparently desperate to snag the latest colors of the now massively popular drinking vessel brand. And even if you haven’t come across the video until now, you’ve probably at least heard about the Stanley cup hype sweeping the internet (and maybe your gym and workplace as well).
The brightly colored cups, which range from around $20 to $60, are the middle class status symbol du jour, with the most exclusive colors supposedly commanding the most respect from fellow collectors. I get it—the cups seem sturdy, maybe even indestructible—and they’re cute, especially if you opt for one of the more eye-popping colors. But shoppers are now harboring whole Stanley cup collections, collecting the most obscure colors so they can, I suppose, have a Stanley that matches every single outfit in their closets.
These collections have caused a stir on the internet, with critics claiming that massive Stanley cup collections are textbook overconsumption, our society’s capitalistic tendencies run amok. They’re right. These are reusable water bottles specifically made to be durable. They’re meant to be reused. You shouldn’t need 15, or eight, even three Stanley cups sitting around in your cabinets, ready to be filled with water once a month when they finally get their turn in the water bottle rotation.
But we don’t like to be told that we’re consuming too much. As economic inequality in this country (and across the world) reaches a fever pitch, we want to be able to enjoy our small luxuries, our pretty $45 water bottles that inform others that we at least have enough money to jump on the latest water bottle trend. Some have even claimed that the criticism around Stanley cup collections can be boiled down to misogyny, which is an argument that, coming from a person who believes that many of the world’s ills can be boiled down to misogyny, is intellectually dishonest at best and downright stupid at worst. Others repeat that phrase that’s often used to justify our problematic behaviors: “Let people enjoy things.”
Firstly, not everything a woman does equals feminism. Overconsumption feeds into a global capitalist structure that causes widespread environmental destruction that at this point overwhelmingly affects people in the Global South, who, ironically, statistically consume the least. It’s not feminist to uphold this structure because feminism should work to free the most disadvantaged of us, not white suburban women in Lululemon yoga pants who want another hot pink water bottle to add to their Stanley cup collection.
And I’m not saying that people shouldn’t enjoy things. You can enjoy your single Stanley cup as you refill it, day after day, because it serves a purpose in your life other than helping you maintain appearances. But are you really even enjoying a water bottle that’s just taking up space in your cabinet 95% of the time?
Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism, questions who is free to “enjoy things” anyway. In an Instagram post, she writes, “Who gets to enjoy things on a burning planet where consumerism is definitely a problem?… When a cup goes viral and US citizens make it their mission to collect and acquire them, it will negatively impact the world…” they write. “Is it only the most privileged citizens of that burning planet (because truthfully standing in line for a cup that isn’t even designed to be recycled makes you that) that get to ‘enjoy things’?”
The Stanley cup isn’t the first middle class status symbol, nor will it be the last. But as consumers, it’s time for us to think critically about our purchases and our consumption habits because they don’t happen in a vacuum. What’s going to happen to all of those Stanley cups people have stacked in their kitchens once they go out of style in a few years? If most of our other consumer goods offer any hints, they’ll soon end up in landfills in countries that already have to sift through richer countries’ garbage, just one more product contributing to the global trash heap that’s poisoning our planet and people who could never afford spending $45 on the random hunk of stainless steel that you took to the gym a grand total of five times.
If we’re ever going to find our way out of our global economic and environmental predicament, we’re going to have to be honest with ourselves. Collecting things, whether it’s Stanley cups or fast fashion or cars, just for the sake of collecting them (or for showing off that we can afford them to impress others) is killing the planet and many of the people on it. Yes, we need systemic change, but we’re never going to get there unless we learn to recognize when enough really is enough.
Maybe when we learn to stop spending our hard-earned money—and the planet’s resources—on multiple Stanley cups and all the other useless shit we buy that we don’t actually need, we’ll have the time and the mental clarity to imagine a world in which everyone has access to what they need, a world where joy is more easily found in connection and community than in water bottle-shaped status symbols.
Samantha Maxwell is a food writer and editor based in Boston. Follow her on Twitter at @samseating.