We like to think we’re living in the peak of human civilization. We have supercomputers in our pockets, cars that drive themselves into dividers, and AI that can generate pictures of Shrek eating a burrito. But I’m here to tell you that we actually peaked in 1965. Specifically, in the refrigerator department.
Somewhere along the line, we traded actual utility for touch screens that play Spotify while your milk spoils. I found this video of a fridge from sixty years ago, and it genuinely makes me angry at my own kitchen.
Today we’re watching a clip called “How Could This Be a 1965 Fridge?”. And the answer is usually “because companies used to care,” but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This thing is like the Iron Man suit of food preservation.
I’m going to pause this frequently because every single second of this appliance’s existence is a slap in the face to the $2,000 stainless steel box currently humming in my kitchen. Let’s see what we’ve lost.
Did you see that door? That door has better organizational skills than I do. “Spreadable butter.” It has a dedicated climate-controlled panic room just for your butter so it doesn’t rip your toast to shreds.
My fridge has a “butter compartment” that is essentially just a plastic coffin where dairy goes to freeze into a brick. This thing from the Lyndon B Johnson administration understands the delicate physics of breakfast better than Samsung does in 2025. It also had a spot for “leftovers.”
Do you know where my leftovers go? They go behind the pickles, into the Narnia of mold, never to be seen again until I move out. This door is mocking me.
Stop. Look at that tilt.
That is a “picture window hydrator.” It tilts down. You don’t have to squat like a goblin and rummage through a crisper drawer that always gets stuck off the track. You just tilt it. It greets you.
It’s presenting your vegetables to you like a sommelier offering a fine wine. “Would sir care for a crisp bell pepper?” Meanwhile, modern crisper drawers are designed to break if you look at them wrong. They’re made of the most brittle plastic known to man.
And notice she said “show you your supply at a glance.” It’s visibility. If I want to know what’s in my veggie drawer, I have to physically excavate it like I’m searching for dinosaur bones. This is 1965. We went to the moon four years later. I’m starting to think this fridge is why.
Pause it again. This is just flexing now.
You can take the whole bucket to the sink. It’s modular. It’s tactical. You don’t have to shuttle handfuls of wet grapes across the kitchen floor like a caveman. You bring the mountain to Mohammed.
Why did we stop doing this? Did Big Tupperware lobby against removable fridge bins? I feel like I’m watching footage of Atlantis before it sank. Just advanced technology lost to the sea of corporate greed.
Okay, pause. This is actually making me depressed.
Roll-out shelves. Do you understand the magnitude of this? “Without moving anything in front.” This just solved the “knock over the ketchup to get the jam” paradox.
In my fridge, if I want something from the back, I have to play a high-stakes game of Jenga. If I lose, a jar of olives shatters on my toe. In 1965, the fridge just hands it to you. It’s polite. It respects your time.
It’s solid metal, too. You see that? No sagging plastic. You could park a Buick on that shelf. Today, if I put a gallon of milk on the middle shelf, it bows like it’s doing yoga.
Woah, pause. Rewind that. Did you see that violence?
“A shower of ice cubes.” She turned that tray over and it just nuked the bin. No twisting. No banging the tray against the counter like a primate trying to open a coconut. Just… push. And avalanche.
“Frosty dry.” That’s a bar. My ice maker is a solid block of frost bite that sounds like a distinct dying engine every time it tries to dispense a single cube. This manual ejector is infinitely more reliable than the complex mechanism in my $2,000 fridge that breaks every six months with a malfunctioning ice maker that was the subject of a settled class action lawsuit.
And look at the storage. It’s huge. It’s not taken up by a massive ice machine engine. It’s just space. We have regressed. We have absolutely regressed.
So there you have it. A fridge from a time when smoking was good for you has better UX design than anything at Best Buy right now.
I’m going to go look at my fridge now. I’m going to open the door, look at the flickering LED light, and the shelf that’s held up by duct tape, and I’m going to weep.
If anyone finds a 1965 General Motors fridge on eBay, hit me up. I might actually trade my car for it.
Well. That about wraps it up. See ya next time.
