Soft coolers vs hard coolers for beach days: Soft wins for portability, hard wins for multi-day ice retention

Soft coolers are lighter and easier to carry through sand with a shoulder strap, while hard coolers are unnecessarily heavy for a single day. Soft coolers lose ice retention after about 12 hours, but that’s fine for a beach day from morning to sunset. A $50 RTIC works just as well as a $400 Yeti for this use case.