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Memories, in the form of plastic alligators

Fridge magnets: who invented them, who makes them, and why they matter.
A two-parter from 2021 by Faine Greenwood (previously).
posted by rory on Apr 15, 2026 at 1:15 AM

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I still have one of the 1970s Peanuts fridge magnets she mentions in passing, of a joyous dancing Snoopy. It's followed me halfway around the world and been with me fifty years.

I've been reading Wendy A. Woloson's Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America (thanks to scruss's pointer), and this was an excellent complement to it.
posted by rory at 1:21 AM

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You can't be a proper grandparent without a good supply of fridge magnets, with which to display the unending supply of art your grandkids give you. Thankfully, damned near every plumbing, hvac, lawncare, etc. company includes flat magnets with their junkmail.

Back in the day, I had one of those collections of tiny magnets with words on them that you use to create your own Shakespeare lines with. That was fun.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:31 AM

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When we renovated our kitchen 18 years ago, we selected white appliances, mainly to buck the trend of stainless steel, but also because magnets don't attach well to a SS fridge.

We mostly have magnets from trips. The quirkiest non-trip magnets we have are some glass bumblebees and a set that look like chewed gum.
posted by Artful Codger at 2:01 AM

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Decorative fridge magnets are fucking useless. None of them attracts worth a damn. Put two sheets of paper between magnet and fridge and the useless little bastards just fall off straight away when exposed to the slightest hint of a breeze. We have an overhead ceiling fan in our kitchen, and a deaf cat who likes to jump on top of the fridge and bat at things, and the manifest inadequacy of most of the magnets on our fridge annoys the tripe out of me.

What you want are the fierce little weird-shaped flat neodymium magnets you can extract from the head positioning mechanism of a discarded hard disk drive. Those things cling hard and are easily good enough to hold a dozen thicknesses of paper to a fridge, even a stainless steel one.
posted by flabdablet at 2:05 AM

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Minimum fridge magnet qualifications in this kitchen:

functional - must be able to firmly hold in place a lenticular postcard from the 1970s

decorative - must not be easily knocked off the fridge surface when I stumble into the kitchen in the dark to make coffee
posted by datawrangler at 3:44 AM

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Two things:

To add to flabdablet's point, if you take push pins, cut off the pin and super glue a neodymium magnet into it, you have the perfect item for holding stuff into your fridge, in that it's really easy to remove. I have three acquired from a former workplace that had replaced cubicles with a metal divider between each side of the desk in an open plan office.

My spouse and I collect Christmas tree ornaments when we travel. Fridge magnets are obtained if we cannot find a good ornament. They serve the same purpose, but they feel classier for some reason.
posted by Hactar at 3:47 AM

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You can superglue the little hard disk magnets onto the back of your existing fridge magnets too. They're only about a sixteenth of an inch thick.
posted by flabdablet at 3:51 AM

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We have the best of both worlds: decorative ones on the front for fun, strong ones on the side for paperwork!
posted by dowcrag at 4:34 AM

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They're one of my travel souvenir staples, with criteria that include: Is it cheesy? Is it at least somewhat unique? and Does the magnet not entirely suck?

But like dowcrag says, we do indeed have the mix of industrial and decorative magnets going. (Our fridge is located kind of to the edge of our kitchen by an outer wall, so it's not a central information hub. All we really keep on it is the monthly class rotation for the gym, and stuff like a list of what weird stuff we can and can't recycle.)
posted by cobaltnine at 4:44 AM

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Fridge souvenir magnets are the best. I like getting museum themed ones myself.
posted by Higherfasterforwards at 4:47 AM

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That was an unexpected trip through memory! My grandparents had the fruit magnets, and we had--I can't remember. So, an unexpected trip through amnesia! I can remember a brick-red magic magnet with some sort of logo in white, and importantly I can remember how it felt to chew on, which puts a certain limit on when we had it, but the logo? Lost in the mists of time. There were also--boringly--little calendars on magnets given to you by, I don't know, insurance salesmen or something, bold black numbers for the days of the month, red for holidays. You would like to be the person who gets to rip off the old month to show the new month.

One thing I found really interesting about this piece was, we've never gone in for souvenir magnets, so I guess I haven't really ever noticed how many there are out there? I guess that's not entirely true--I have a single magnet from a trip someone else took--but mostly they're just "oh no we need more magnets, we'll buy some at the store." So they don't have the same kick of nostalgia that she's talking about. Which is a shame! I love nostalgia! I want some!
posted by mittens at 4:49 AM

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> Magic Magnet products in Zimmerman's style stop appearing on eBay by the 1980s

Took me a second to parse that.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:58 AM

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Th best magnets are from speakers and microwaves! They're hard to extract but well worth the effort. They're big though.

We have a fridge magnet of a blue dinosaur head. It's got to be 30 years old. The story is that me and a friend were in a store and and there was a display of magnets. I stopped and said, "Hey, this one's fun!" "Pinch it", she said. Well, I was kind of interested in her so I did. It's not the best reason to do something and not the worst either so I'm not feeling any shame on this.

Well, dear reader, you know how this ends. I still have the magnet and no, we didn't get married. Nothing happened, as a matter of fact other than I now have a blue dinosaur magnet on my fridge. It's a survivor, having survived multiple relationships, a move across the country, children and their friends too. The funny thing is that nobody in my family actually knows where it came from. I have no problem telling the story, it just never came up.
posted by ashbury at 5:51 AM

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I simply bought a raft of 10x5mm neodymium discs and 3D printed finger friendly handles for them. Boring but nothing comes off the fridge or whiteboard until wanted.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:08 AM

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Most destinations have iconic symbols or imagery that are expressed in souvenirs. They are clichés or stereotypes, but still, we look for fridge magnets that best show those in as non-tacky a way as possible . A few examples: Paris - we avoided the landmarks and went more for la vie en rose - a café tablecloth with a croissant, an espresso, and a copy of Le Monde. For London, the transit roundel (bought at their transit museum) saying MIND THE GAP. Perhaps my favourite: the seaside promenade in Nice is known for a particular type of metal chair, and we have a fridge-magnet that's simply a flat 3/4 silhouette of the chair stamped out of blue magnetic sheet. It was ridiculously-priced at 8 Euros, but I had to have it. I still love it.

As the article (part two) points out, tacky is in the eye of the beholder, or even defiantly the point.
posted by Artful Codger at 6:35 AM

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I have a penchant for fridge magnets from unglamorous places that really shouldn't be doing fridge magnets at all and it's surprising even that fridge magnets exist for such places - forget London or Paris, I want fridge magnets from places like Barnsley, Hull, Dresden, Drogheda, Barrow-In-Furness.
posted by BigCalm at 6:43 AM

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I come from a people and have married a man who all think fridges should be naked. Once we were too old for those letter magnets, the fridge of my youth again became desolate. I did not realize how much I've been missing.....
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:54 AM

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I don't have wall-to-wall fridge magnets like the most devoted collectors, but the ones I do have are laden with memory, like the dancing Snoopy my dad bought for me on a work trip to the U.S. in 1976. I started listing some of my others and got to fifteen before I realised it was too long and boring a list for a Mefi comment. But I'll sneak in a few...



I absolutely related to Greenwood's thoughts in the second part of her article about souvenir magnets and memory, and her poignant recognition that all of those associations will be lost as soon as we're gone. It's the way of just about everything we acquire, really; but as souvenirs go, these ones are relatively small, cheap and harmless (unless swallowed).

I don't use them to stick stuff to the fridge, though, for the reasons flabdablet gives. That's what generic powerful magnets and OXO magnet clips are for.
posted by rory at 6:55 AM

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My refrigerator front has a collection of magnets from places my kids have been to. They want to bring me a souvenir, but t-shirts became expensive and postcards get put in a drawer. I used to have tons of free magnets, but tossed them in favor of scotch-taping recipes to the side of the frig. I always have more scotch tape.

When the kids were young, I stuck their art on the refrigerator, like many people, and those papers got wet and stained because, well, we had kids. This post reminds me I need to get letter magnets for the grandchildren.
posted by Miss Cellania at 7:08 AM

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A few years ago my landlord replaced my fridge with a non-magnetic one. Why would such a thing even exist? Truly it is an affront to reason. Luckily I live in an NYC apartment with a metal front door so we transferred our magnet and ephemera-held-up-by-magnet collection there, with the unfortunate but hilarious side effect that no visitor leaving our apartment ever clocks it as a door, and instead every single one of them tries to leave via the adjacent coat closet.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:25 AM

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Fun article about souvenirs, kitch, and memories. (Definitely some "yikes!" photos.)

I don't think I've ever purchased a fridge magnet as a souvenir. I do have a souvenir from a time (my childhood) rather than a place: My Freakies cereal monster magnet is one of the few things I wanted to keep from my mom's house. It's weird, the things that bring back memories.
posted by evilmomlady at 7:28 AM

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My SO is a sucker for fridge magnets from places she visits. This is the first I'm hearing about the SS fridges being poorly magnetic, but it tracks. We have Guinness brewery and Porto tile style bottle openers clinging to the fridge right now. The fridge is not to blame for the redundant Manila opener. It just has the weakest magnet known to humanity built into it.
posted by biffa at 8:33 AM

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Having just come back from vacation, selecting the coolest magnets from all the zoos and museums I visited was totally a big part of the fun. Sure, they might not individually hold a lot of paper on the fridge, but my fridge doesn't see a lot of paper posting to begin with since most of my important documents are electronic anyway. Magnets are small, relatively inexpensive, and you see them every day, so they make a great nudge to remembering getting to see a real dugong in person and so forth.

(I also bought a lot of patches with a vague plan to pick up a canvas jacket and start covering it with places I've been to.)
posted by sciatrix at 8:42 AM

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Haaaa, it figures that these came from St. Louis originally (or at least from China and Japan via St. Louis). Definitely seem to recall some variations of the fruit magnets and possibly one or two of the state magnets growing up.

Another thing that comes up with fridge magnets is their relationship to grapheme-color synesthesia. I have that, and a few but definitely not all of my letter colors match magnet colors I recall from childhood. Wooden blocks probably account for a few others.

I feel like we spent a disproportionate amount of time messing around with refrigerator magnets when I was a kid. I always wanted a magnetic poetry set but didn't have one until relationships much later, when eventually some of the wistful, sad, and horny poems that ended up on the fridge seemed to reflect something about the nature of those matches.
posted by limeonaire at 8:47 AM

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Do parents still get the plastic magnetic ABCs to put on the fridge for your toddler? Or leave suggestive hints for your partner?
posted by Thorzdad at 10:32 AM

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People should have to be buried in metal coffins with all their accumulated fridge magnets stuck to the outside. It just seems right.
posted by mazola at 11:18 AM

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A couple of the fridge magnets I have were magnetic "save the date for our wedding" things - business-card-size flat flexible plastic, preprinted with the happy couples' portrait and some details about the date of the wedding. That was a go-to insert for some engagement announcements a couple decades ago, I think (my brother and a cousin caught that wave).

I also have a couple of random vacation souvenirs, a couple dancing Snoopy's as well, and a magnet that has some kitchen measurement conversions, which I have on the side of the fridge facing the oven so I can glance over and figure out how to scale down a recipe ("okay, the original recipe calls for 1/3 of a cup and it serves four people, so....lemme see how many teaspoons that works out to so I can divide that by four").

There's also a couple others I bought simply because they were so off-the-wall funny or odd:

* One with a cartoon depicting the random things lurking in a messy fridge, with items like "bottle of unknown condiment" or "potato with antlers" or such.

* One with a cartoon drawing of a penguin, declaring it to be "The Penguin Of Death" and offering two facts about it: "1. He is best known for his enigmatic smile" and "2. He can kill you in any one of 167 different ways".

I cannot even begin to comprehend the "Penguin of Death" one and that is why I bought it INSTANTLY when I saw it in a random gift shop somewhere.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:32 PM

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I am a minimalist and don't buy much when I travel. Things that look fun and interesting on a trip look out of place back home. The only exception is fridge magnets. Small and simple and they remind me of good times. What could be bad about that?
posted by AMyNameIs at 2:56 PM

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Th best magnets are from speakers and microwaves!

Don't forget disc drives!
posted by TedW at 3:00 PM

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Lee Valley sells good (boring, but effective) fridge magnets

the local Pottery Club does a show every May and I scored a beauty for my partner: "Kindly Fuck Off"
posted by runsrealgood at 3:37 PM

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flabdablet: "What you want are the fierce little weird-shaped flat neodymium magnets you can extract from the head positioning mechanism of a discarded hard disk drive. Those things cling hard and are easily good enough to hold a dozen thicknesses of paper to a fridge, even a stainless steel one."

If you don't happen to have any old hard drives available, neodymium magnets in all shapes, sizes, and grades are available quite inexpensively from (among many other places) K&J Magnetics. (I am a satisfied customer!)
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:03 PM

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I'm a fridge magnet collector. My fridge is so full, I've started putting them around the door framing my apartment. I love me some souvenir magnets but don't buy me those boring square aerial view of the city. Give me the giant crab or fake food or pony with moving legs. Those are the best. But I don't limit myself to only souvenir magnets, anytime I spot a cool one when I'm out and about I'll buy one.

I would love to be buried in a coffin covered in my magnets. It would be a great achievement if I had too many to fit on the coffin.
posted by LizBoBiz at 12:22 AM

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One with a cartoon drawing of a penguin, declaring it to be "The Penguin Of Death" and offering two facts about it: "1. He is best known for his enigmatic smile" and "2. He can kill you in any one of 167 different ways".

Hail, fellow Penguin of Death aficionado! I had him on a small mug from an Edinburgh gallery shop, but selflessly gave it to my ex when I was splitting our kitchen stuff. I thought I could find another online, but no. But I did pick up a second-hand copy of the book, which is near enough.
posted by rory at 5:36 AM

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* stares at Rory *

The Penguin Of Death is a thing?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:20 AM

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When I saw the book yesterday I thought, surely this isn't what she means...and YET. Thanks to rory for the sanity check.
posted by mittens at 6:21 AM

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We too have The Penguin Of Death, but on a much-treasured mug.

One of the reasons my other half picked the fridge we have rather than a built-in one with a timber-based door to match the rest of the kitchen was so we could use fridge magnets.

Having said that our fridge magnet collection is not particularly fancy or relevant to our personalities. It is currently made up of: a flexible sheet bearing the quote "Good clothes open all doors" (none of us is particularly bothered about fashion), a commemorative tile from the Vatican City with the last Pope on it (none of us is Catholic), a set of British sign language alphabet tiles that came with some sort of charity donation scheme (no-one here is deaf or knows anyone who is), and a wooden tile with a hand painted cartoon steam locomotive on it (my son is train-mad so this one at least makes some sense).

We also have some magnetic clippy things for holding up photos and notes and whatnot, they solve the "too many layers of paper break magnetic attraction" problem very effectively because the magnet stays close to the fridge surface and the clip does the holding part of the job separately, great idea, would recommend.
posted by tomsk at 2:24 AM

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