It’s for drinks. Is that actually confusing? Rather than put an ice maker in every room they just put one on each floor. So if they’re broken or ill-kept, that affects a lot of people.
Yup. Doubly true when someone wants to use the criminally overpriced mini fridge in their room. Maybe people want their $25 shot of whiskey on the rocks.
I feel like I’m the only person who goes to a hotel to sleep, not chill a 24 pack of diet Coke and a bottle of champagne to drink (without this hotel ice) after eating a ham sandwich out of my rolling cooler which needs a top off.
Where are you all traveling with your champagne and ham sandwiches?!
Said by someone who’s never had to cool down their bear beer with a bad mini fridge or without one at all.
I’m leaving the typo because it makes me giggle.
Edit - oh I was giggling about bears so much I forgot. It’s also a service for the local youth Ice Hockey teams. They come to the hotels with these cute little plastic sticks capable of turning a hallway into a ice based turkey shoot improvised game of hockey with ice pucks.
It did make jumping in a little more refreshing, but it was just ADHD decision making. We also threw the ice at our other cousins while they weren’t looking.
As a kid I thought this was just a weird hotel thing. Got the backstory eventually.
TL;DR: ice became commonplace around the time motel chains spread across the US.
Ice was once an exotic import only nice hotels could offer. Its perceived luxury remained decades after refrigeration allowed manufacture. Hotels could still charge for it, so they did, but in the ‘50s and ‘60s ice went from cheap to essentially free.
Concurrently, roadside motor-hotel (motel) chains spread across the US. Among these, “Holiday Inn” was the first to offer ice as a complementary amenity. Competitors followed suit. National roll-out at every motel franchise happened quickly. Soon nearly every hotel offered self-serve ice as a standard amenity.
Nice history. Ice is awesome, what kind of psycopath’s want warm drinks? Even if ice hadn’t been some exotic luxury in the past, I would still demand ice.
In my childhood, we drove everywhere - vacations, moving cross country to escape death threats, traveling to visit distant relatives, moving back cross country after my father died.
And the one constant was the road trip cooler. Stuffed with soda, snacks, bread, and lunch meat, that thing got toppedd up with ice at every hotel.
And as an adult, I don’t really do that sort of travel anymore, but as others have said - for chilling drinks and what-not. (But never for putting into drinks.)
Oh, no worries. As a kid, it was a real adventure! I didn’t really learn about the reasons behind it until a few years later. And at that point the risk of danger had passed.
(Although, I probably shouldn’t have been told about it until I was an adult.)
I used the ice machine at the hotel to chill the drink I bought at the store. I have used the a bunch of times actually. On my wedding night, we stayed at a super fancy hotel and I used the ice machine to fill the bucket for chilling the last bottle of champagne we had
When carrying medicine on a road trip, I have sat it (in a ziplock bag) in the ice bucket overnight and packed ice in the cooler in the morning for the next day’s drive. There’s no such thing as a usable mini fridge anymore, they’re all mini bars fully packed with pricey items.
Right? I’ve never seen a hotel fridge with anything in it. Hell I’m actually staying at a hotel right now that’s pretty decent and was reserved by my company. Smallest mini fridge I’ve seen, but it’s empty and could certainly fit some meds.
I guess I go to nicer ones. I haven’t seen alcohol in years (illegal in my state anyway), but most at least have sodas or water bottles. I never know what’s complementary, so I just avoid it.
PSA don’t use that ice directly in beverages. I have no published evidence to back this up but I’ve never heard of any kind of rules regarding their cleaning schedule…
If it helps, I worked in restaurants for eight years and at least every other year, someone would forget how thermal shock works and put a hot glass directly into the ice maker, so we’d clean it thoroughly then.
So you know, not oversight or intention, but stupidity leads to sporadic cleaning.
I’ve worked for some garbo places, but all of them shut the ice machine down immediately for super thorough and annoying cleaning. Ice and glass are too hard to tell apart and the dangers of ice in a drink are too high for even the greediest managers I’ve had to want to chance it.
Someone out there might risk it, but it’s a pretty obvious thing to avoid
Eh. That’s no way to live life. Can’t be worrying about that kinda stuff. Who ever heard about anything bad happening? With the ice? Sure, if you think too hard about it it might seem gross, but…just don’t think. My happiness grew 100% the year I gave up thinking. I don’t even know how percentages work. That’s how much I don’t think. Ice is fine. Eat the ice, put it in your drinks, whatever. There are very few things left in this late stage capitalist hellacape that we even get as “perks” anymore because we aren’t fucking appreciated, we are just figures now. You used to be able to check your bags on a plane for free, but then 9/11 “hit the industry hard” and to “get back on their feet” (after their billions and billions in bailout money)—-shit…I started thinking again. I vow to never do that again.
Add comment