Skip to footer

Six steps to choosing the best refrigerator

3. Pick your features

Business Wire/File
This Maytag French door model (pictured here in 2006) includes an external ice and water dispenser. Refrigerators include a great deal of add-on features, which are great conveniences but also represent added cost and more potential for breakdowns.

  • By Jessica Snow Contributor

Some of the basic features common to almost all models of refrigerators include shelves, crisper drawers, and door compartments. If all you’re looking for is a space to keep your food cold and fresh, then this is probably all you need. If you would like something with a little bit more luxury, manufacturers today are offering an increasing variety of new and useful features. These include:

• Icemakers

• Water dispensers

• Adjustable shelving

• Spill-proof shelving

• Soda-can dispensers

• Adjustable controls for crisper drawers

• Moisture controls

• Auto-defrosting functions

• Enclosed condenser coils

Icemakers and water dispensers are great conveniences, but they represent two more things that can break on your fridge. Adjustable and spill-proof shelving are great, too, but often come at an additional cost. Ditto for added controls and auto-defrost. Features are different across brands and models. If you find a fridge you really like but it lacks a feature you were hoping for, keep looking. Somewhere out there is a fridge perfectly suited to your needs. 

3 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.