The Worst Gadget at CES Was My Hotel Mini-Fridge
LAS VEGAS — There were a lot of crappy gadgets on display at the Consumer Electronics Show: hare-brained half-ideas, overpriced SkyMall junk, nonfunctional gizmos that should have spent more time in the lab, horrifying designs for unnecessary products.
But, by far, my least favorite gadget at CES this year was the mini-fridge in my hotel room at the Aria.
It’s not that the refrigerator didn’t cool down food or beverages. It was doing that, so far as I could tell. What made it the worst gadget at CES is this:
This, ladies and gentlemen, is technology gone awry. It is a perversion of the technological capabilities that God and Silicon Valley and Alex Trebek have granted us. It is what happens when a hotelier watches Black Mirror and doesn’t realize the show is depicting a dystopia.
Just because we can do something with technology does not mean we should. And charging folks for looking at the nutritional facts on a can of Red Bull for more than 60 seconds is not something we — as a culture, as a society, as a collection of human beings going it together in this rough-and-tumble life — should be doing.
The fridge is made by a company called Bartech, which, for some reason, lists its high-tech fridges in categories including “automatic” and “semi-automatic.” That’s horrifying enough, I think we can agree — I do not need a 12-gauge refrigerator in my room, thank you. But somehow, the sensors that allow hotel proprietors to bill a credit card after you’ve removed an item from the fridge are even worse.
I don’t think I have to tell you that, at a hotel like this one, the markups were almost hilarious: A bottle of Coca-Cola cost $5.50; a small bag of Gummy Bears ran $11. There was a bottle of Grey Goose in the fridge, but the price on the menu was simply listed as “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
I spent much of my time at the Aria paranoid that I would somehow jostle the fridge and that five bottles would fall over, resulting in enormous charges to my room. Stumbling toward the bathroom at night had never had such high stakes; one wrong move, and I wouldn’t be able to afford to eat out for the rest of 2015.
Now, you might not think this is necessarily a technological problem. It is. First, it serves as a glimpse of the future where tiny sensors will be used to up-charge (or, more optimistically, more accurately charge) each and every thing you do. (See this comedy club with an idea to charge by the laugh.)
Second, if you think of the refrigerator as an app store, and the goods therein as its apps, then you can see the issue: The apps are plentiful, but they are too damn expensive to justify. Also, if you think of a refrigerator as an app store, and the goods therein as its apps, then AOL has a high-paying job that may be right for you.
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Anyway, back to my complaining about this evil fridge: The placard states that you should “feel free to explore … your mini-bar.” This is a lie.
I could not “feel free” exploring the fridge because I had only 60 seconds to explore, after which I would immediately be charged for the item in question. Looking in at the fridge, not able to touch anything, I felt like one of the guys from Storage Wars standing at the precipice of an auction locker. Do I hear $250 for a bottle of orange juice?
The 60-second rule is barbaric. I am deciding whether I want to purchase a snack, not disarming a nuclear weapon in a spy movie.
And paying a $25 “personal use fee” to store your own food in the room refrigerator is laughable. What could I possibly be refrigerating that I would pay $25 for a refrigerator? An insane amount of caviar? Pounds and pounds of foie gras? A human head?
In truth, this isn’t even a refrigerator. It’s a vending machine. You can pay to transform it into a refrigerator, but calling it a refrigerator is incorrect.
Instead, the refrigerator at the Aria represents our worst-case-scenario techno-future — a future of malicious machines, monetized everything, and sensor-laden appliances that squeeze every penny from your time and movement.
Some things that happen in Vegas should stay in Vegas. Here’s hoping the Aria’s cyber-Hell Fridge is one of them.
