Yeti Hopper M 30
One of the greatest investments I have ever made was a parking lot combo purchase. $100 for a Roomba vacuum and one of the old-style Yeti bag coolers. Unfortunately, and undisclosed to me, the Roomba had seen better days. Despite my greatest efforts and a few off-brand repair kits from Amazon, I concluded it was unable to be revived. That one didn’t really pan out. The cooler, on the other hand, had plenty of life left in it.
Yeti has moved on from some of its greater earlier designs, but you can still occasionally find them floating around on Facebook Marketplace. I still think the old slightly taller and not-so-long 45-quart held ice better just because of the decreased surface area of the lid. The Hopper 30 was also one of my favorites. That cooler may have been one of the longest-lasting bag coolers the world has ever seen.
Common complaints included the zipper leaking and sticking, or the lack of accessibility into the cooler due to the small entrance hole. None of these ever bothered me a bit, much less slowed me down. That cooler was the perfect size for a day at the pool, a day on the beach, or as a fish cooler for a day on the boat. I mean it was like Yeti designed the cooler around three slot Reds and a dozen 12 oz. cans. She’d fold down when not in use and cleaned out exceptionally well, for a bag cooler anyway. That cooler saw dozens of trout and redfish, and who knows how many beverages. It never missed a trip.
I tore the zipper up last summer aboard a pontoon boat in Fort Pierce from perhaps too aggressive of use. Unable to part with the old jewel, I continued to use it without a zipper. Honestly, the darn thing still holds ice better than any other soft cooler, so why not.
I recently reached out to Yeti and explained my fondness for their product and the conundrum I faced. I was hoping they sold a replacement zipper that I could just sew on. They kinda laughed and offered to replace the cooler all together. Point for the home team. The customer service experience was both painless and fast, and the next thing I knew, I had my hands on the latest and greatest.
The new-body design has a magnetic closure instead of a zipper and a much wider mouth. It is about the same size as the old one and seems to be just as, if not more, durable. I haven’t fully completed my stress test of this item, but it has performed flawlessly on the handful of trips it has been on. Yeti really made some big improvements with their current iteration, and I look forward to making good use of it.
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