A white cooler is worth it if it lives in the sun.

A white cooler is noticeably better than a dark one in direct sun, because it reflects sunlight instead of letting the shell soak it up.

Dark coolers absorb a lot of solar radiation. The surface can get hot enough that you don’t want to touch it, and that heat works its way through the walls into the interior. A white or light-colored cooler bounces most of that energy away, so the inside stays closer to what the ice