The ice must flow

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

Is the ice for the kidneys or just like a post-nephrectomy cold plunge?
- ...yes
- Thank you for teaching me the word nephrectomy, gonna bring my death threat game to the next level
  You can have hemicorporectomy in exchange

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

They're freezing you out!
- sighs, rubs closed eyes
  I’ll allow it.

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.

Except Britain and the rest of northwestern Europe. It's going to be plunged into an ice age by the collapse of the gulf stream.
- Your point is correct, but it’s the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, that’s the real problem. The Gulf Stream is just a part of its system.

Ice bucket. We chill wine bottles.

I was going to say liquor, but yeah. You can use it for soda too if you buy a 12 pack and bring it back to the hotel with you instead of letting the drink machine nickel and dime you.
- No put that ice in your drinks. Dirty.
Yep, champagne is our main use case. If the wife and I are staying someplace nice, we love to get a bottle of champagne and some nice cheese at a local store and hang out in the room at least one night.
Most hotels have mini fridges
- The last hotel I stayed at (fancy expensive hotel for a company gathering) had a mini fridge stocked with ridiculously expensive items, in such a way that the fridge was unusable for outside items. There was also a note that any items removed from the fridge would automatically be charged to the room. There was one bottle of complimentary water on the counter though.
- an ice bucket chills something waaaaaay faster than a mini fridge or even a mini fridge with a freezer

Isn't the cooler also for drinking?

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.

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.
- [almost] Nobody wants warm drinks. Many of us happily tolerate warm drinks.
- Me, i always order warm tap water at restaurants
Thank you for this comment.

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.

What if they're just coolers?
- Ah no, all the users of generic coolers have died to the Yeti death squads.
  May they rest in piece.
  Hail Yeti forever, long may she reign.
- An Igloo Cooler for young people
- Nah, it's just what they transport your mom around in.

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.)

I'm sorry to hear about the whole death threat thing
- 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.)
- Yeah, that came out of nowhere
(But never for putting into drinks.)
This can't be emphasized enough. Those things do. not. get. cleaned.
- If you don't use hotel ice but do get ice from fast food then boy do I have some bad news for you
Yup. Put ice in the bucket, put canned/bottled beverage in bucket, wait a bit.

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...

Don't think about restaurant ice then...
(Hint: same ice machines, and the same lack of oversight)
Source: 10 years working commercial HVAC/R...
- 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 don’t take ice in restaurants either
- Worked at a place that had an ice machine. I can attest in 5 years it was never cleaned.
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.
It's like a giant freezer, nothing bad can grow in it on it!

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.

Your wife will do well when the water wars start and you'd be wise to start following her lead.
As as aside, next time you know you're going to a hotel bring a secret, second ice bucket to fill shortly after she fills the hotel one. Bonus points if you can acquire it from the hotel so they're identical.
Don't mention it or anything, just let her work out the logistics of what happened when she notices. If she's as serious about hotel ice as she sounds, you'll probably get laid right then and there.
- Your wife
  Semi said "ex".
  you'll probably get laid
  Again, "ex".

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?

I'm guessing they pay those exorbitant vending machine prices.
Still stumped on the second one though.

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

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.

This is it. And it's because tap water can be really different from locale to locale. If you're not used to it, it can taste quite bad. And room temperature water from the tap can enhance the flavor. So people put ice in it to cover it up.
- He's also correct in that those ice machines never really get cleaned.
Hard pass on putting the ice in drinks. This is true of hotels and any fast food or restaurant: their ice dispensers are absolutely crawling with bacteria. Some probably even have live rats in them. Don't fuck with ice, they're all disgusting.
- Man why you gotta hassle the ice rats man. They just trying to get by, y’know.

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.

Too bad, I wanna know how it augmented jumping in the pool! Were you expecting it to in any way? Or was it just ADHD decision making?
- 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 i understand it, it's there as a destination for when you coerce your wife/girlfriend into going out of the room naked.

Hmm, I'm having trouble visualizing this 😘

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.
- Or when the mini fridge has that stupidly buggy weight system that charges you a storage fee rendering it effectively useless

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.

You're staying at much nicer hotels than I am. In my experience they don't fully stock anything in the room anywhere.
- 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.
Get to the cheap or moderate ones. I was in 2 hotels last week, Hilton Garden in Chicago and Econo Lodge in Buffalo. Both had mini fridges for use.

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

“If you can think of a better way to get ice, I'd like to hear it.”

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.

Champagne

comments are forgetting there's a fridge in the room

I don't agree.
It's early afternoon and you're on the front end of a 48 hour work trip. You just got off a plane in Cedar Rapids, found a rental car, and drove to the hotel. You've been traveling since 7:00am, the water bottle that you refilled at the connection in Chicago and again at the destination in Cedar Rapids is both disgustingly warm and mostly empty. The rental car was hot as fuck because it's Cedar Rapids in July and the rental cars are sitting in an open lot rather than a garage.
Let's Zork this out.
You need to cool down and rehydrate. Do you: a) buy a single use refrigerated bottle of water b) remember that there's a fridge in the room and wait for 2 hours c) go east d) get yourself some bucket ice and tap water
Side quest pro-tip: do not pick up the metal bar
- C, provided east is the local grocery store:
  Get one cold beverage from the refrigerated section, drink it while getting something hot (I like the chicken fingers and potato wedges all grocery stores seem to have)
  Get a 6-pack of something tasty (I like fancy root beer)
  Drink cold one on the way back
  Put ice on bucket (nobody should be consuming the I've directly) and a couple bottles in the ice, and the rest in the mini fridge
  Poop and shower
  Enjoy what's left of your evening with the frosty root beers and hopefully still-warm chicken and wedges
  I bring my Steam Deck along with me, so I'd much rather stay in with my chicken fingers and soda than meet up with people I probably don't like much anyway.
This, lol. Most hotels have a mini fridge. Seems like a better way to keep drinks cold than ice.
- Not if you want to chill drinks quickly. Not everyone is spending multiple nights in their hotel rooms to have enough time to wait for the fridge to do it's thing.
- I like cold drinks.
  I also like chewing on ice.
  For some drinks, such as Sprite, I like the drink-flavored ice more than I like the cold drink.

In case you have to pull an Inception

This apostate should be banished from the land... of hotels.

I like to drink alcohol when I travel. It helps me forget that I’m in a hotel. I always grab booze at a nearby shop to bring back to my room.