Some people now have mini fridges or beer fridges in rooms other than their kitchen. When did this become common?
I don’t know that it’s common, but I think that it started becoming adopted after mini fridges started being rented out to kitchen-less college dorm rooms in the 1980s. Once you get used to the idea of a mini fridge in your dorm room, it seems natural to have them around once you leave.
I suspect it also has something to do with the rise of Microsoft culture, with multiple dudes sharing space to geek out on their machines, copiously supplied with sugary beverages, salty snacks, pornography, and whatever else is available at Fry’s.
Price. Fridges are cheap, nowadays.
I’d love to have one in my home theater.
If I had a home theater.
In our case, college kid comes home and there it is … might as well use it.
When people realized it isn’t really necessary to get out of the recliner chair to get another beer.
Well, my beer fridge is in my basement, because it would look horrible in the kitchen, and there’s not enough room there, and it’s good exercise to go get another beer. Unless I’m lazy, then I fill the pitcher.
We had the double sized cube fridge that BJs club sold back in the early 90s [the brown one with the actual freezer compartment inside that had the little door and cute ice cube tray] in the living room, with the coffee and expresso makers on top. Our kitchen is so damned small, with limited counter space it just made sense to move the coffee facilities to where we actually drank it, and I like cream in my coffee, so we got the fridge to hold beverages in general.
Pornography in the fridge? How does that work?
Every family that I knew in the 1970s that had a home bar had a mini-fridge. Few people have home bars any more, but having a fridge in the room used primarily for entertainment (home theater, den, living room, game room, computer room) seems to be a pretty standard idea.
I also recall that when my friends and I were all going through that antisocial-hate-the-family phase in the 1980s, we all thought having our own minifridges in our bedrooms would be great, since that meant we’d have to leave our room less often.
Yep, every rec room or finished basement I visited growing up had a minifridge or two - one filled with beer, the other filled with sodas.
I knew a couple of kids growing up who lived in homes with full kitchens in the finished basement. So not just mini-fridges, but full-sized ones, along with a stove, sink, etc. One of these families liked to entertain. (Neither family was particularly wealthy.)
I first saw it in a family room(first floor, not basement) in the late '70s. It was in West Lafayette, Indiana, not known for trend-setting, so I imagine it was common before then.
My wife and I are in the attic in our house, and the kitchen is two long flights below. Additionally, my home office is in the attic, so I am in the attic a lot. Given that, a cheap mini-fridge, microwave and coffee maker keeps me from having to constantly traverse the two flights up and down every time I get the caffeine jones or munchies.*
- To stave off questions, my in-laws get the master, because it is closer to the bathroom and less stairs. I complain that I’m getting old now too and don’t need to climb so many flights, but that just means they are getting older and even less capable of navigating the stairs. But it sucks that there is no bathroom in the attic. Hard to navigate to and back from the bathroom and stay asleep when I have to climb stairs, which I can do when it is close on the same level.
You just need a bit extra imagination due to the temperature.
A few guys I knew had them in dorm rooms in the late 1950s. They had to pay an extra electricity fee and they had to have a reason for having them, like to store their insulin in. It was an education to me; I never knew insulin containers looked so much like beer bottles but I wasn’t diabetic so how would I know?