We have 5 people in my family. We cook different meals for ourselves vs. children due to different dietary requirements. So the kids have learned to cook their own things, too, and do so for 2 out of 3 meals each day. If you assume even just 2 openings of the fridge to get ingredients for each meal and put them back, that is 24 openings at a bare minimum. Adding in some snacking and needing more than 2 openings for ingredients when cooking, that isn't hard to envision 40+ openings.

But aside from the arithmetic, I'd think the number of times matters less than how spread out they are. If it opens and closes often during mealtimes, but stays shut the rest of the day, does the number of times it was opened really make a huge difference?

This feels like it would be pretty dependent upon the number of people in the household. I'm sure our family has higher than average door openings because our fridge does not have in door water/ice dispensers.

Kids

Yep, keeping ur kids in the fridge is a great way to keep them fresh for weeks :)

Just open the door every 20 minutes or so to check on them.

But then the fridge would complain that it wasn't run at maximum efficiency.

Ehh... when eating, easily I always forget someting in the fridge and end up opening it x times. Now that is even after meal is prepared and already opened y times. And then there are number of other people that may want to take something that was not interesting for me. Yeah, bad logistics, but I prefer opening multiple times vs keeping doors opened for longer periods of time.

I had a small kids party at my home yesterday and it would've easily been opened a total of 50 times or more by various people.

44 times? Sounds like me in a somewhat depressed phase on a Saturday evening. Nothing extraordinary...

Consider that you open a fridge twice for each glass of milk (if you do it right and close the door after retrieving the milk jug), and that his family is possibly bigger than yours, and 44 times/day doesn't really seem crazy at all.