Ice vs. Electricity

Workers today get 214 refrigerators for the time price of one in 1925.

In 1925, households kept food cool with iceboxes—wooden insulated cabinets chilled by a block of ice. Depending on size and quality, they typically cost between $15 and $50. With entry-level workers earning about 25 cents an hour, a $35 icebox carried a time price of 140 hours.

Today a 4.4-cubic-foot mini-fridge at Walmart sells for about $184. Entry-level workers in limited-service restaurants earn roughly $18.75 an hour, bringing the time price down to just 9.8 hours.

For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money for one icebox, a worker today can buy 14.3 mini-fridges.

The 1925 ice box didn’t actually come with any ice. The price of a 100-pound block of ice in 1925 was typically 25 cents, and this could double during “ice famines” caused by mild winters. At 25 cents an hour, a 100-pound block of ice would cost one hour of earning time, and would generally last for three to seven days. If the ice block lasted five days that would be a time price of 12 minutes a day.

The Walmart mini-fridge requires 269 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year, or 0.74 kWh per day. Residential electricity runs around 12 cents a kWh, so a year’s supply of electricity will cost $32.28, or 1.72 hours for entry level workers. Spread out over the year, this would require 17 seconds a day.

For the time it took a worker in 1925 to earn the money to buy ice cooling for a day, workers today get 43 days of electric cooling.

Electric refrigerators entered American homes in 1927 when G.E. introduced the iconic “Monitor Top,” named for its resemblance to the USS Monitor, a Civil War armored warship. The unit sold for $525. With entry-level workers earning 25 cents an hour, the time price came to an extraordinary 2,100 hours. Today the Walmart mini-fridge costs 9.8 hours. The time price has fallen by 99.53 percent. For the time it took a worker in 1927 to earn enough money for one electric refrigerator, a worker today can buy 214 mini fridges—a stunning increase of 21,300 percent in refrigeration abundance, compounding at 5.62 percent a year.

U.S. population has tripled from 116 million in 1925 to 348 million today. For every one percent increase in population, personal refrigerator abundance has increased 106 percent (21,300% ÷ 200% = 106).

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Please let me know in the comments if there is a product you would like to see analyzed in a future article.

Learn more about our infinitely bountiful planet at superabundance.com. We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a board member at Human Progress.