So happy this is failing, it looked like an absolute nightmare from the videos I saw. Endless ads, waste of energy, waste of time and effort, just a disaster.
> 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
Why not do a smaller test run to gauge response?
I question the ability for anyone who oked this to make basic decisions…
Wild that they thought there was any reason to advertise pizza rolls to me when I'm already at the shelf where pizza rolls are sold.
Those screens look like the stupidest thing ever, and just another example of tech industry brain-rot. We already have excellent tech to see what's inside a cooler: it's called a window. Why replace a simple, functional solution like that with some monstrosity that needs power, data feeds, and development/tech support?
The thing that astounded me about these things was the sheer amount of heat the screen threw off, you could feel it radiating from the screens when you walked by.
This might be the future of every 3rd party LLM support chat bot :)
Such is the way for tech purchased by companies to run something important when the company lacks an internal ability to maintain it
If you're coming for a 2000 year old technology like GLASS you best come correct.
There is a convenience store near me that implemented these about a year or two ago (not a walgreens). They suck, even when they are "working" - it often takes several seconds for the screen to "wake up" and realize you're there, sometimes the items or prices are wrong, and usually ends up with me getting frustrated and opening every single door. So, I just stopped going altogether to that place. At first I was enraged, like "who is this even helping?" until I realized oh, this isn't for my benefit.
At some point this industry needs to come to terms with the fact that hostility towards users to generate revenue is not an infinite resource. Any technology that does not make things better for the end user should be immediately suspicious. So much produced nowadays is just overly fancy crap that isn't providing much or any additional utility to the alternatives, or it falls apart completely after a year or two or when the company disappears and stops supporting it.
The fact that Cooler Screens thought sabotaging its own client would be a good business tactic is mind-blowing to me. Who in would ever solicit their business after knowing that? After this boondoggle who'd ever even try a similar product?
> Avakian recently learned that Walgreens is even experimenting with new in-store screens.
Oh.
> Every so often, they caught fire.
This is just so funny to me
> In the early years, it was downright familial: Avakian co-founded the startup with former Walgreens CEO Greg Wasson, who helped secure the deal with his old employer.
It's not about what you know but who you know. Anyone with an ounce of sense would realize this is a garbage idea. Without Wasson this startup would have gone exactly where it should have - defunct.
Hopefully these screen doors will find their way on ebay or similar and put to good use as novelty monitors. Hell, I'd love it if you could buy one as a single door fridge so the TV and beer are in the same place. Perfect for a garage or man cave setup.
LG was pushing their transparent display at CES this year. This seems like the one of the few profitable applications for them. Hopefully they go transparent when they fail.
Stupid things like these screens and so many items being locked up makes me think these corporate retailers aren't actually interested in having people buy stuff from them.
“They’re solving a problem that didn’t exist.”
The crux of the problem right there. Always approach startups as "what problem can I solve?".
Everyone saw this coming but Walgreen's executives.
Cooler Screens Chief Executive Officer Arsen Avakian decided to try a different form of pushback. ... 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.
That's a dick move. We've all heard the story of the independent developer shutting off access to their work for nonpayment. This is different, and IMHO it's actively damaging a business because of a dispute. As much as I hate the screens, and really don't give two cents about Walgreens, Cooler Screens is in the wrong here.
I remember the first time ever seeing the screens was in the midst of covid, when some grocery stores were getting barer shelves. I thought the original purpose they wanted them for was to hide the empty shelves.
I just got an idea for a great shopping experience. An app on my phone that I can add my groceries list to and it will tell me where in the shop the particular item is located and will automatically keep the tally of what I've put in my cart so far so that I know how much I'm spending and my total shopping time will be much smaller. It could also automatically connect to some cart sensor so that I don't even need to scan each item at the cashier, but I can just pay. Something like Amazon Go, but works.
This should never have been anything more than a $20K experiment.
Arguably not even that.
It's amazing to me how someone could find themselves in a powerful enough position to make this decision yet somehow be so stupid that they decide to actually go ahead with it.
Meritocracy is a lie. Literally any normal human could look at this idea and go "well that's just dumb, wasteful, over-engineered, and weird".
Is the takeaway that the idea is bad or just the implementation? On web and mobile the hostile design is commonplace, and there is plenty of incentive for that to bleed more into the real world. Especially, if the physical world business is run by people who want the degree of nudging and surveillance found online.
I read this and thought, "Hey, cool name, I should start a consultancy called Cooler Heads!" Then such heads prevailed, and my bank balance remained the same. What did I do wrong?
- [deleted]
It was obviously a shitty thing to do, from the conception stage.
If everyone who moved it forward loses their job or investment money, that negative reinforcement is a good thing for society.
Did NO ONE pay attention to how risky these things are, as demonstrated when Gilfoyle hacked Jin-Yang's smart fridge? Suck-It-Wal-Greens
In one of the animations what's on the screen didn't even match what's on the shelf. What a colossal waste of resources.
If anybody is optimally situated to persuade people to waste money on stupid things, it's the advertising industry.
They're all gone at my local walgreens already. The drove sales into the basement.
If I wanted to buy a picture I would order online.
Well, if the idiot herd could be taught not to stand there with the fridge door open, staring at the products, this would probably never have happened.
I still see this routinely. Even when the freezer door is glass, a customer is standing there with the door open staring at the ice cream selection.
All that said, the whole "ad industry" aspect is ubiquitous across the entire economy at this point. With all the negative comments this story received here, you would think there would be a general rejection of ads taking over every aspect of product UI, but apparently connecting those dots is out of the question.
Just another indicator of the end of the american era...
Another business that is great for the vendor, potentially great for the business, and completely fails to consider the customer at all. Really makes you wonder how many venture capitalists are just degenerate gambling addicts with access to a lot of financing.
If you want to make yourself depressed then just remember, everyone involved in the decision to do this probably makes significantly more money than you and will continue to do so despite wasting $200M on a idea that it would be charitable to simply describe as stupid.
Thanks. Can we also have a article about how the web was replaced by bullshit popovers and invasive javascript much to the dismay of people who use it?