What your fridge says about you

It seems people have strong opinions about refrigerators or their roles in their lives. Be it utility or aesthetics or both, they have something to say. As with many other possessions, for some it’s even an extension of themselves, and extends to judgements made based on their relationship with their fridges.

Sunitha Chowdhary, a Hyderabad-based film critic, disapproves of people who cannot let go of their refrigerators even when they refuse to work. They bleed money, says Chowdhary, who recently bought a double-door model for Rs 79,000 and even ordered a wallpaper for the room to match the colour of the fridge. Her daughter uses it to hide her spectacles, which she abhors wearing, and the hated glass of milk too. “I treat a fridge like a pet dog, I love to keep it clean and gleaming. I never switch it off when I travel,” Chowdhary says.

Writer S Rao of Chennai says she does not really know what’s in her fridge but then lists pomegranate juice, vegetables, apples, chocolates, grated coconut, some old dry fruit, curds and idli batter. She has plenty of magnets and photos on her fridge but no shopping lists or reminders. She bonds more with the softboard in her room where the lists and reminders are. “My fridge is too big. I want to change it. Actually, I think that’s why I do not bond with it,” she says.

In technical writer Vidya Krishna’s Bangalore home, the fridge is where her children post what they want for their school lunches. She does not spend too much time thinking about her fridge but cannot do without one, she says.

Chowdhary may be a dream customer for fridge-makers and retailers like Croma which studied the bonds between humans and their machines in its Home Stories survey, whose latest findings focus on the regional differences between the way Indians use their gadgets and appliances.

According to the findings, consumers in Hyderabad and Chennai top the ‘fridge knowledge’ league (86 per cent and 85 per cent), and are able to reel off what’s in their fridges from memory, compared to just 67 per cent for people from Ahmedabad. “This suggests either a more laissez-faire attitude to nutrition or simply a preference for fresh food!” says the study. Now go and take a look at that fridge, if you don’t know what’s in it, it’s likely there’s some fungus there, along with everything else.

Is it just a convenient surface that one encounters often, or is there more to the fridge’s role in a household? Croma says that when it comes to the outside of the fridge, Chennai and Hyderabad residents are the least likely to decorate their fridge with magnets. Mumbai (47 per cent) and Ahmedabad (53 per cent) score there, where “fridge adornment clearly takes precedence over fridge knowledge!”

Can a fridge peppered with photos and magnets mean you’re a show-off? Well, maybe. Bengaluru shows the highest number of people displaying holiday photos/souvenirs, followed by Mumbai and Delhi. The study takes it to mean that these cities therefore display their apparent high travel ratio and “exhibitionist attitude”.

The refrigerators may even provide some insight into how well organised consumers are about their finances. Among all the cities included in the study, it was in Ahmedabad that the highest number of respondents agreed to use the fridge door as a reminder for their bills and bank statements. Croma sees this as a clear indication of a clear agenda towards efficient financial planning in that city. Chennai and Hyderabad come next. Kolkata and Mumbai show the least number of people who place their financial documents on display on their fridge doors.

The smallest group of accessories on fridges are shopping lists, to-do lists, Post-its and resolutions. Within this category of reminders, Pune and Hyderabad show the highest number of respondents who keep a shopping list on the fridge, and Kolkata and Hyderabad to-do lists among all other things. According to Croma, the fact that reminders only account for a minor share is a sign that people prefer the ping of their device reminding them to pay the bill or take a pill.

The survey is a fun survey but the size of this universe is adequate to represent a larger population. The 1,029 respondents comprise Croma customers and followers of the brand on social media channels who belong to SEC A and are aged 25 – 45.

An earlier instalment of the findings said nearly 50 per cent of Indians adorned their fridge doors with magnets. Fifteen per cent of them added holiday pictures and souvenirs, another 15 per cent added to-do lists.

And fridges seem to bring out the clean freak in fridge lovers. Like Chowdhary, who says she loves her fridge as she would a pet, Anuradha Kalidindi, also from Hyderabad, says she needs to clean it the moment she thinks it looks messy. She has a big fridge too, with several compartments and a big freezer, which she uses to stock provisions and staples like flour and sooji .

Why do people love their fridges so much? And what more do they want from them? A self-cleaning, de-cluttering mechanism? Now, those are questions Croma can look at in the future!

COMMENT NOW