Maggie Hennessy

Mm-hmm.

So what I learned was that fridge manufacturers are in fact super responsive to what consumers want.

They spend a lot of time doing focus groups and surveys.

They scrape user reviews and rely on kind of in-home user data.

I got the sense that, because I came into it a little bit thinking that they weren't listening to me, but I've learned through my reporting that sort of the opposite is true.

On the whole, what people seem to want most of all is filtered water, ice cube makers, lots of storage.

But the funny thing is too, is once it became expected for a fridge to have, for example, filtered water and ice makers, people started to say they didn't want to see it

on the exterior of the fridge anymore.

They thought it was unattractive.

So manufacturers, you know, in response started putting them inside, but then that in turn takes away from precious storage space.

So you can kind of see a bit of our problem here.

Exactly right.

Exactly right.

Well, I think from a refrigerator perspective specifically, I was pointed to kind of this like 50s and 60s chef porn, like the early, early GE models.

And they're sort of held up as this ideal of like, wow, we had it so great.

why did we change the way we did things?

And they are really pretty, but they're also not particularly functional.

There's, you know, very heavy kind of glass and metal drawers.

And so if they were made to today's standards, you know, they wouldn't be affordable for most people and they would also be just woefully energy inefficient.

I would say a lot of it is kind of more just like looking with longing at what we once had.