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?

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 collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, that’s the real problem. The Gulf Stream is just a part of its system.
- And I'm still not sure if that'll be better or worse.

TL;DR: ice, once a luxury, 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 for decades after refrigeration allowed its manufacture. Hotels could still charge for it, so they did.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s ice went from cheap to essentially free. Concurrently, roadside motor-hotel chains spread across the US. Among these, Holiday Inn was the first to offer ice as a complementary amenity.

Competitors followed suit, and with national roll-out of ice machines at franchises, it quickly became a standard amenity.

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.
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.
Don't call me an ice bucket. You're an ice bucket.
- Is that a challenge?
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.

Has nobody topped off a cooler on a trip? Ice is useful for more than just drinking.

Isn't the cooler also for drinking?

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
- Yeah, that came out of nowhere
- 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.)
(But never for putting into drinks.)
This can't be emphasized enough. Those things do. not. get. cleaned.

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
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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

"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

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?

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.
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.

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

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.

Champagne

comments are forgetting there's a fridge in the room

This, lol. Most hotels have a mini fridge. Seems like a better way to keep drinks cold than ice.