You probably don’t think of a bag of ice as a barometer of American life—but Texas Monthly senior writer Lauren Larson makes the case that you should. Her feature tracks Reddy Ice, the Dallas-based giant that now dominates North America’s bagged-ice market, and shows how its sales quietly mirror the national mood. “Ice sales are a cornucopia of unexpected insights into how Americans hang out,” she writes. When people gather—backyard parties, job sites, birthday splash pads—Reddy’s numbers spike. When they hunker down—perhaps because of a recession, a pandemic, or even immigration crackdowns—those numbers sink. As Larson puts it, “there may be no more tangible an indicator of when Americans are and are not having a good time than Reddy Ice’s sales figures.”
The piece traces how a once-local, sawdust-and-icehouse trade evolved into a sprawling modern network that keeps not just drinks cold but highways, hospitals, labs, and disaster zones functioning—all while staying surprisingly low-tech. One key part of that transition arrived in the 1990s with the “in-store ice bagger,” a machine perfected by industry giant Jim Stuart, whose Packaged Ice company would go on to buy Reddy. Larson also digs into what most people likely never think about: where the ice we buy comes from and how safe it is. Large producers are regulated, but many store-made cubes don’t have that same oversight, with one 2017 study turning up bacteria in about one-third of such ice. Read the full story, which explains why it is apparently immune from an an Amazon takeover.