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Hotel's need good ice dispensers so that you can fill a bathtub with ice after removing your tinder date's kidneys.

I've been working for years to get my fire dispensers into hotels but the useless ice dispenser lobby keeps blocking me.

Some of us are from the warmer climes and appreciate the healing power of ice. And soon, all of us will be from the warmer climes.

Ice bucket. We chill wine bottles.

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.

Hence our icy embarrassment of riches.

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.)

Lots of joke replies but the real answer is because people travel with yeti coolers and sometimes it won't all fit in the fridge.

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...

Every time my ex and I would check into a hotel she'd immediately fill the ice bucket. And it would sit there, unused, until we checked out or it melted, at which time she'd have me empty it and fill it with ice again, which would then just sit there and melt.

I didn't understand it at all.

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

Does this person not drink anything while at a hotel? Or never need to leave someone in a bathtub full of ice after stealing their kidney?

The first thing I do when I get to my hotel room is fill up the ice bucket. Who likes warm drinks?

As i understand it, it's there as a destination for when you coerce your wife/girlfriend into going out of the room naked.

Americans tend to like ice in their water and in their drinks. When I was a kid, my family would typically grab a bucket full of ice to cool down the tap water we would drink in the evenings.

Hotel ice can be really funky, though, and I think the practice may be falling out of fashion in any case.

My family used to buy summer passes to the local Holiday Inn's swimming pool.

My cousin and I used to fill our pockets with ice cubes from the machines and then go jump into the pool.

No further questions please.

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.

"You've got to start selling this for more than a dollar a bag. We lost 4 more men on this expedition."

Coolers, wine/champagne, cups with vending machine beverages, water bottles...

Op doesn't have much of an imagination

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.

Champagne

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.