The Parents Who Have Bought Their 16-Year-Old $3,000 Worth of Stanley Cups Need To Be in Jail

Wall Street Journal — How many water bottles—or Lululemon leggings, or Tree Hut body scrubs—does any one person need?

For some people, need isn’t the issue. It’s about buying things they say make them feel good, and showing them off online. The Stanley Quencher tumblers that have ignited tussles at Target stores and become a viral topic online are the most recent example of a shopping trend: buying multiples, and sometimes dozens, of the same item. 

Amelia Awad got her first Stanley Quencher a year ago. The 16-year-old high-school sophomore in Birmingham, Ala., now has 67 Stanley tumblers. 

“I’m obsessed,” Awad says. The insulated Quencher—which currently retails for $45 for the 40-ounce version, or $50 for limited releases—first caught her eye on TikTok. Her parents have now spent about $3,000 to acquire them in every possible color and size.

Awad has racked up 137,000 TikTok followers in part by sharing how she organizes her Stanley collection or coordinates her tumblers with different outfits. She says she uses every cup she gets, even the coveted ones in colors like pink parade that are reselling for hundreds of dollars online. 

“If they are rare, I would want to use them more because I’m special for having them,” Awad says. People frequently question how much she’s spent on Stanley Cups in comments on her social-media posts.

If you've spent any time around a 13-to-30-year-old female in the last year or so, you're undoubtedly familiar with the craze of the Stanley cup — a receptacle that is supposedly revolutionizing hydration around the country. For those of you who may think, "There can't possibly be anything so special about this cup," it has a straw and comes in cool colors. So you're wrong.

And if anyone out there wants to have a Stanley to tote around and let people know they're one of the cool kids, have at it. I have nothing against people buying things that make them happy. But the parents who have spent THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS on these cups for their 16-year-old daughter need to have an intervention at minimum and honestly may need to spend a couple months in county lock-up.

There's giving your kids a good life, then there's spoiling them and then there's spending three grand on cups. I don't know if the kid or the parents have more of a disease. Of course your teenage daughter will take $3,000 worth of Stanley cups if you buy them for her, but you're the one facilitating this nonsense behavior.

When I read, "I'm special for having them," I almost fell out of my chair. She said that to a reporter! I can't even imagine the kind of gremlin these parents are raising — or whatever you'd call the method of parenting where you buy thousands of dollars worth of water bottles.

Congrats to Amelia for her outstanding Stanley collection, though. I guess she's living the dream.