Fridgeblogging
One of the charms of not owning your own house, and having the university as your landlord, is that when your fridge dies, the university brings you a new one by the end of the day. The new fridge has a larger freezer and smaller refrigerator compartment than the old, which means that the top shelf of the fridge, which used to be at arm level, is now lower and I have to bend down to get anything. Why would you build a fridge this way? Theory: people now use more frozen food than they did before. Thus, more freezer space; and the bottom of the freezer, rather than the top of the fridge, as the most easily reachable spot.
I don’t really know how to test this theory; some good places to look are probably Quick Frozen Food International and The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen Entrees and Side Dishes with Pasta Products As Major Ingredient Excluding Rice Dishes, Meat Pies, and Nationality Foods in Greater China.
In related news, the great SoCal indie rock band Refrigerator has a new record and a myspace page.
Filed under: commerce, economics, food, music | 2 Comments
I once helped my parents select a fridge by using a simple method–standing at a distance and identifying the one with the smallest freezer compartment and (therefore) the largest fridge compartment. As we had a separate chest freezer of adequate capacity, every cubic inch that was in the fridge compartment rather than the freezer compartment made the unit that much more useful.
A competing theory would be that people actually use less frozen food (and particularly less long-term “deep frozen” food); fewer people therefore have freestanding freezers. So people need slightly bigger freezer compartments in their refrigerators, since that’s all the freezer they have.
Lately there seems to be a move towards freezer-on-bottom units; those are probably the best in terms of making the fridge easy to access.
A friend of mine has a fridge with the freezer on the bottom. I think it’s pretty old though – at least 10 years – so it doesn’t have to do with recent trends in the refrigerator market.