Tales From The Minibar

Today in Tedium: More than 20 years ago, a reporter for The New Republic took a sharp stab at a famous conservative conference by implying nefarious activity that involved a minibar. “The minibar is open and empty little bottles of booze are scattered on the carpet,” the reporter wrote of the 1997 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “On the bed, a Gideon Bible, used earlier in the night to resolve an argument, is open to Exodus.” The minibar was a great scene-setter for a reporter whose scene-setting skills made for great fiction. As was figured out by a Forbes reporter two decades ago this May, the writer of that article, Stephen Glass, was fabricating breezy stories that weren’t even remotely true. Nonetheless, Glass’ CPAC tale may perhaps be the most prominent use of a minibar in popular culture. (Thank you, Shattered Glass.) The minibar, a hotel mainstay for the desperate, deserves an analysis. Here’s mine. I promise I will make up no facts about it. — Ernie @ Tedium

A drawing included with the German patent for the original refrigerated minibar.

The technologies that made the minibar possible

The genesis of the modern refrigerated minibar is commonly attributed to a Hong Kong Hilton location that, in the mid-1970s, saw much success by adding liquor to its many fridges—and likely kicked off the trend at luxury hotels worldwide after it saw drink purchases surge by a not-insubstantial 500 percent. Per the South China Morning Post, the minibar gained tiny bottles of liquor thanks to Robert Arnold, the food and beverage director of the hotel chain at the time. Arnold was inspired by a mini-bottle of liquor he got on a flight over the South China Sea and wondered if it would be a good fit for the mini-fridges the hotel chain had just acquired. As it turns out, they were.

While the Hong Kong location was certainly early, the minibar is actually quote a few years older than that. For one thing, a 1971 Associated Press story featuring the then-head of New Jersey’s Alcohol Beverage Control bureau noted that the state was eyeing putting tiny liquor bottles in those fridges—a full three years before the Hong Kong Hilton offered up its version of the idea.

Going even further back, evidence of its creation exists more than a decade prior to the creation of the Hong Kong Hilton, and can be traced back to a 1963 patent from Siegas Metallwarenfabrik, a German manufacturing firm that specialized in industrial products, including refrigeration technologies.

The 1963 patent is in German and I’m therefore relying on Google Translate to make it clear, but the basic gist of the patent was that the refrigerator was designed to cool glass bottles at a consistent temperature all the way through, while allowing hotel guests to grab out a bottle at will without disturbing other bottles in the fridge.

While examples of refrigerators or food storage mechanisms designed for hotel rooms had surfaced prior to 1963, it appears Siegas was first to build a fridge around beverages, including alcohol and soft drinks.

And after it was conceived, the innovation did not appear in Hong Kong first, but in the hotels of Washington, D.C., with one of the District’s most iconic venues, the Madison Hotel, getting the minibars upon its opening—at the behest of John F. Kennedy, no less—in February of 1963.

The minibars, a common element of D.C. luxury hotels of the era, had their way of showing up at modestly historic times. A post-Pentagon Papers New York Times profile of leaker Daniel Ellsberg briefly touches on the “soft drinks and cheese” Ellsberg and his interviewer grabbed from a lounge minibar.

And the Madison Hotel’s minibars even played a small role in the ending of the Cold War. Historian Martin McCauley’s book The Cold War 1949-2016 noted that, during the 1987 Washington Summit, in which Mikhail Gorbachev met with Ronald Reagan at the White House amid a thaw in U.S.-Soviet, the minibars at the Madison were heavily used—perhaps too heavily.

“The Soviet delegation stayed at the Madison Hotel where the minibar was replete with wines and spirits,” McCauley wrote. “They imbibed so heavily that the head of mission had to ask the hotel to replace alcohol with soft drinks! Outside, they gorged on Big Macs and Cola.”

Colin Powell also recalled the incident in his 1995 book My American Journey, noting that the Soviets racked up a $1,400 bill on minibar alcohol in a single night.

This was the image that top Russians had of our country—that you could get spirits inside a tiny fridge in a snazzy hotel room.

A minibar fridge. (Wikimedia Commons)

Does the minibar have a future?

It’s not hard to run into a story about how the minibar is in decline or will soon be on the way out.

The New York Times dedicated an article to it last year, and they were probably late to the trend. The Huffington Post write about it way back in 2014, noting that some chains were dropping the feature or paring it down, in part because of a 28 percent drop in sales between 2007 and 2012.

In some ways, it makes sense why some think minibars are on their way out. There’s only so much stuff you can fit in a tiny fridge, or perhaps a kiosk on the wall. It makes more sense, logically, to have a built-in convenience store, which gives hotel customers a broader array of options than you might expect to find in a dedicated room fridge.

But on the other hand, it represents a missed opportunity for hotels to win consumers over with the psychological mechanics that come with your average hotel stay.

Perhaps the problem has less to do with the minibar concept itself and more with what you can get out of that minibar. While chatter around the decline of refrigerated minibars has increased in the past few years, some boutique hotels have responded to minibar criticism by improving the quality of the goods sold within the minibar.

In other words, the reason why minibars suck is because of Diet Coke and Jack Daniel’s being a mainstay in every one, not because minibars are a terrible idea in general.

In a piece for GQ last year, writer Mark Byrne made the case that minibars were secretly in a renaissance, by doing things like pre-bottling cocktails, embracing their local liquor scenes, and improving the quality of the mixing equipment. Having a shaker in the room is a nice perk.

Another example of this surfaced just this week: The Los Angeles Times, which covered the minibar’s decline back in 2013, wrote this week about the decision by the hotel chain Standard International to offer in its minibars a lotion and a gumdrop snack laced with cannabidiol, a key compound of marijuana that generally isn’t as psychoactive as actual marijuana. (Standard, interestingly, is teaming with Lord Jones, a cannabis company that plans to open a dispensary at one of the chain’s locations.)

That’s a left-field turn, sure, but the hotel industry could use a little left field right now.

Of course, this isn’t really happening in the national chains so much as the boutique hotels. But those boutiques are the ones that often set the stage for innovations that show up at larger chains—because they’re the pacesetters, the idea labs, the petri dishes of the hotel industry.

Sure, it gets watered down by the time it gets to the Sioux City Hilton, but the idea could have legs in the right context.