Where the fridge cases were previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door-size computer screens instead. These “smart doors” obscured shoppers’ view of the fridges’ actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer: ads.
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These internet-connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens Inc., frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often, they caught fire. But store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10-year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US locations like this one. It planned to install 35,000 more.
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On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one. Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”
Things like this move me to imagine a world completely devoid of ads. “But how would you discover a product you didn’t know you needed?” I don’t care. I would go without that product. That is preferable to me.
Sometimes you can have a thing that isnt a computer. Sometimes you can just have a glass door. I promise it’s okay.
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Good. What an awful concept. A whole bunch of extra screwing around trying to keep products aligned with what’s on screen along with maintenance and running costs; just so you can piss off your customers with a worse experience and waste more of their time with advertising nobody wants.
And money! Customers pay for these atrocities.
Ads are the cancer of Humanity.
I feel this so hard. Ads and PtW are slowly becoming the only business model because we have stone-age-level impulse control. Hopefully, someone like the EU eventually unfucks it and we switch to micropayments to cover server costs.
The only way it could get worse is if they started banning anyone too poor to properly whale.
Nah. That would make it better. The whales can go whale in their little ecosystems and we can keep using and making the fediverse better.
That’s true. At least there’d be a wave of people forced to discover better ways. It’d suck for things like YouTube videos that have too much overhead to be free, though.
Since I posted this, it also occurred to me that predatory lending could make it’s way in. That’s how a lot of other underclass-serving businesses work.
I would definitely recommend reading the full article. There’s all kinds of hilarious tidbits. Like that the Cooler Screens ceo Arsen Avakian’s leadership seems to be rather fiscally disastrous wherever he goes. Or my favorite bit:
Avakian discussed the concept that would become Cooler Screens with friends in Chicago business circles, including Wasson [co-founder of Cooler Screens]. As head of Walgreens from 2009 to 2015, Wasson is most remembered for overseeing its fraught international merger with Alliance Boots, a European chain. But he also bet on technology, gussying up its pharmacies with tablets, acquiring e-tailer Drugstore.com and leading the company’s $140 million investment in a then-promising startup called Theranos. (Oops.)
Jeepers fucking creepers, you would think that Walgreens/ big corporations in general would do some kind of background investigation or get a PI to find out if they have any skeletons in their closets that would prove fiscally harmful if entered into an agreement. Their total lack of operational security and basically saying ‘Yes, Daddy, please?’ when presented with an opportunity from the same guy that dragged the company into the whole Theranos debacle is flabbergasting.
Wasson set up a demo meeting with billionaire Stefano Pessina, Walgreens’ largest shareholder and his successor as CEO, with whom he remained friendly after departing the pharmacy chain. “‘We’re not tech guys,’” Avakian remembers the Walgreens team saying. “‘Prove it to us.’” He and Wasson say that based on their PowerPoint presentation, the company approved a six-store pilot program for 2018.
A fucking POWERPOINT is all it took even after Theranos to convince them of this boondoggle.
I don’t really understand how Walgreens is still in business. I only go there when I need something that the grocery store pharmacy section doesn’t carry and I’m not willing to wait 1-2 days to have it shipped from Amazon. Every time I go, its a ghost town with more employees than customers.
It’s honestly the corpse of a retail store being dragged along by a perfectly healthy pharmacy. Every rx sold, regardless of what the customer pays, nets Walgreens the full value of the script. So when grangran runs to Wallygreens to pick up her no cost diabeetus meds, walgreens gets the full 1000+$. And that’s every script sold, every hour of every day.
Oh, that sounds like a sweet deal. I should have been aspired to be a corporation instead of a normal person.
No, it’s the opposite. The pharmacy doesn’t make a ton of money, that’s why they expanded to have all the other stuff.
I was a certified technician in that pharmacy for 5 years. I can tell you with confidence that is patently false.
This is incorrect from all angles I’ve seen.
Look what they own and look what assets are being held. They’re what I like to call a shell company
I live in a very small city with a Walgreens and 2 CVSes, all within a mile or so of each other, and they all seem pretty busy. We also have a Walmart, a medical supply store, and a small neighborhood pharmacy, as well as two grocery stores. I think how busy your local drug store is is pretty variable. We do have a college in town and also a pretty active main street with a lot of shops and restaurants that bring in a lot of tourists and people from neighboring towns and bigger nearby cities.
But like, we have kind of a lot of CVSes and Walgreens around here and they all seem to do well enough. I don’t think it’s just that we’re in a college town. Though, again, we do have a lot of colleges in general.
Comedy gold, except for everyone who has to try and shop at a Walgreens.
I imagine it’s less fun for employees.
The Walgreens closest to me had those installed for maybe a month before they went back to glass doors. Fucking hated those things. Completely annoying when they’re working as expected.
I hope the company goes out of business.
We live in Idiocracy.
You can thanks capitalism for poisoning our cities, towns and soil with an extremely dangerous neurotoxin (lead).
A source close to both companies says the word that trickled down from Brewer’s team was blunter: “Why do our stores look like an effing casino?”
Because everyone loves GaMiFicAtIoN!!!
Hilarious.
Hahaha fucking weasel dumbasses, hope your ad revenue will cover your service contracts!
You love to see it
