Sorry, we replaced that old technology, “see-through glass”
twitter.com
twitter.com
Not wanting an overtly fancy contraption you pick a no frills unit that includes a touch screen along the side. A few hours later it arrives. Setting it up was almost as easy as your old one. Plug it in, enter your wi-fi password, and a credit card to start your free pro trial of the monthly subscription service that tweets at you when the toast is done. It says you can cancel at anytime but it requires a 5 day waiting period. It also requires access to your contacts.
Tired and just wanting your toast you agree. You insert two slices of white bread and press the big red GO button on the touch screen. An electrical motor whines from inside the toaster at it begins to retract the toast into itself. There's a few seconds of silence as the toaster slowly heat ups. While awkwardly standing there you notice the touch screen flickers and begins to display a buffering icon. An ad for I Can't Believe it's Not Butter begins to play. To make matters worse you can't even ignore it by looking away due to a small tinny sounding speaker playing the company's jingle.
This is your new morning routine.
Welcome to the future.
All the while I couldn't help but want to share how good pan-fried/toasted bread is. It's the butter of course, just generously butter up a pan, spread the bread so it soaks up the butter. Takes a little longer, but you also get to feel like a cook.
and no ads
Luckily the world is burning, so many people just cook on the sidewalks. The smart cooks learned that the solar panels get pretty damn hot, so they've been hijacking the roofs. Electricity prices now vary with meal timings (as well as everything else).
Every home I've ever seen has a cook top. Everyone has pots and pans. What am I missing?
And Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalog is looking better than ever.
Is this not an ad for pan-fried bread?
---
Pepperidge Farms.... D: NOOOOOO
https://www.heb.com/product-detail/pepperidge-farm-original-...
My grandmother made those in her Sunbeam toaster before loading them with room-temperature butter and Laura Scudder's smooth peanut butter. (Yes, my grandmother kept butter at room temperature but refrigerated the eggs. Go figure... grandmothers.)
Generally, I assumed if it’s in the refrigerator in grocery store (which butter is) then it goes in refrigerator at home.
Or do you mean something else than butter?
I grew up on a farm and the first first 15 or so years of the life ordinary butter was the onlh alternative.
It had to be kept in a jar at the counter or it would become unusable.
Generally, I see people using the spreadable alternative to butter though.
I assume that's what you're talking about. Keeping the butter dish in the fridge at all times would be pretty strange--butter is good for weeks at room temp, far longer than a single stick is likely to last.
American commercial eggs (and this has been true for a long time) need refrigeration because thet are washed, which reduces surface pathogens but compromises the eggs natural resistance to environmental pathogens and spoilage. Meanwhile, in most climates, butter is safe out of refrigeration. So, your grandmother was doing it right.
We buy the single brick of European butter for toast and daily use. It stays in the butter bell on the counter. We also buy sticks of unsalted butter for cooking and baking. Those live in the fridge until needed. Thaw on the counter in the morning if you need it soft when cooking.
The RFID chips make the toast taste better!
welcome to paradise!
Samsung fridges have machine vision systems to catalog their contents, then combine the data with data from samsung smart TVs. That way, they can be joined against your tv watching habits. This is all to better target ads.
If you disable it, then it breaks the demand response function on the fridge, indirectly killing polar bears and other living things.
They cost as much (or more) than non-connected versions.
They’re really years ahead of the pack in this villainy, so I don’t doubt that it’s true.
Except they all got killed by people who tampered with the safety features in their refrigerators.
”There is no planned release date for Bixby Vision for refrigerators, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat. It’s more of a concept than a feature today”
On the other hand, that’s from over 2 years ago, and https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00062803/ says
“Did you ever think the day would come when you could talk to your refrigerator, and it would actually listen? With Bixby on Family Hub, you can ask to see the contents of your fridge or even start playing music without lifting a finger.”
So, the camera is there. Whether it has machine learning to detect contents and connects that with you tv, I wouldn’t know.
Yet.
They said the next newer model of that will no longer receive updates at the same time.
I’m not sure whether to add that smiley here. That would have been a big middle finger to their customers, but the alternative they chose turned out to be worse for many customers. Maybe, the rule should be “if a product requires a subscription, the product should be free”?
In WD’s case, it surprised me their cloud still supported a device they stopped supporting in 2015.
* Contains forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future performance or result expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.
Although forward-looking statements contained in this presentation are based upon what management of the Company believes are reasonable assumptions, there can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management’s estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.
The My Toaster is just a regular USB toaster.
Then they let you customize the alarm noise, so that you can choose how to be alerted of the future house fire. Soon, companies get rich selling $3 "toaster fire ringtones."
Eventually, even after fire-less toasters are "invented," people prefer the old, "still catching on fire" ones, since "toasters have always worked that way."
I don't want bluetooth in my toaster. That shit is hard to clean.
I don't want a flashing OLED emoji on my toaster judging my diet. I do plenty of that myself: flashing emoji.
I don't want a toaster with a "personality." I want it to toast, only toast, and nothing but the toast, so help its electronic soul.
Sunbeam Radiant Control: ride or die. Anything made after the 60's is junk by definition.
Except the bread bin your mother gifted you for Christmas is a Google device, and the two do not work together. As such your toaster is always adding a reminder to buy bread onto your Amazon Fresh grocery list. Your fridge is constantly reminding you about this, whenever you are more than 2m away, and it is in "suggested products" mode.
Compared to the adverts you saw before - often for processed junk food even though you are trying really hard to be on a diet - you actually find the bread adverts a relief and less distracting.
Here's the process, for those interested. And I did work hard to see if there's any other way.
1. You download the printer "install software" from Canon's website.
2. Run the installer. It makes you read a long legal agreement, including that you won't use the printer for any antisocial purposes.
3. And then asks for your permission to install monitoring software to collect data from your printer. Probably including whatever confidential documents you print? Apparently in China all this stuff gets sent automatically to a "research firm". Oh yeah, and if you don't agree, it installs the software anyway but they say they won't use it.
4. The printer initially acts as its own WiFi access point. Your PC disconnects from its router and connects to the printer. What if your neighbour has the same printer? Who knows. Maybe you'd connect to that too.
5. The PC then connects back to the router's WiFi network... And the printer does 's too. Somehow. Never gave it the WiFi password. But I'm guessing it just asked my PC very politely.
Scary stuff.
Edit: or you can switch to The Daily Cannibal. The freedom of choice is yours to enjoy.
As a 28 year old in tech for the last 7 years, I am definitely a Luddite.
Its heartbreaking some of the most talented minds in software engineering are just making ads appear.
The internet is an ad network with content at this point.
[0] https://www.mcpressonline.com/programming-other/microsoft/mi...
(Because outlets require certified chips with power-certificate-chain validation on both sides of a power cord, if you ever get your hands on such an old-fashioned hardware.)
(from Red Dwarf)
Bread will be though.
The obligatory Technology Connections link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
Not sure if we have to wait until 2050
It’s a contraption that exists because there a rule that each new version of a thing must consume more resources than what can before.
You know, for the economy.
(thanks for your dystopia, they sometimes show up on HN and I love them. This one is very well written)
If this is any of the big chain groceries, the manager doesn't even have the authority to put a sticker on the glass door. This was vetted by hundreds of people and none of them thought... glass?
Business class tickets were purchased, hotels were booked, months of back and forth, daily meetings. Hundreds of thousands were spent on pilot programs like this one. Still no one thought... glass?
In my opinion, it's a silly idea. But I applaud the person who had this silly idea, built a company around it, got deals with screens, door, glass, and cameras manufacturing companies, and then convinced a grocery chain to buy this for their store.
I would really, really love to have been in that sales pitch meeting.
Edit: What bothers me the most about this, is that it will actually work. Any surface where eyes may fall on, will be replaced with an ad.
I'm sure it came up. Customer experience vs revenue for in-store billboards. Ad revenue won.
I'm not sure what that means. These already are ads. They are directly advertising the products literally inside the case.
Now that I think about it, I have not seen those TVs since the 90s. Maybe they drove the retail workers mad.
Well, yeah, but glass would be just as effective and much cheaper. So they're doing something in addition to that.
If the requirement was "display the goods we have for sale" then glass beats this thing in virtually every way. Cheaper, minimal maintenance, no firmware updates, and most of all: familiar.
But these are going to be:
* Tracking consumer interest ("eNgAgEmEnT")
* Swapping between content display and billboard-style advertising
* Changing prices dynamically depending on weather, foot traffic, historical "engagement", national ad campaigns ("all Coke products 50% during the World Cup!"), etc.
* Pretending there's still Red Bulls in there when there aren't.
* Pretending those Red Bulls are on the 3rd shelf, right, when the stocker actually put them on the 4th shelf this time. (He forgot to read the updated Planogram email)
It's dystopian crap, I want nothing to do with it.
This is what the future looks like though. Welcome.
> This is what the future looks like
Is it though? Is it impossible for us to stop? Or is this premature defeatism?
I don't know about you, but for me the amount of ads I see decreased compared to some points in the past. I don't watch TV, I listen to music using a streaming service with a paid subscription, I actively look for interesting stuff to buy, but not because I've seen an ad. Probably because I haven't seen any recently, because I block them.
People buy some stuff on Amazon not because they were advertised a particular brand, but probably because they needed something and searched for it, compared between options, you know. This is our present. Ads on coolers in supermarkets might be just a swan song of a dying way of selling products. Is Amazon less scary that this though? Really?
My media consumption is similar to yours, but I think we're the outliers, or maybe we just slipped between the generational cracks of an evolving but still very consumerist society.
Honestly I think targeted ads that are actually interesting to the person they are intended for is the only sane way out of this. No one likes ads that aren't relevant. If I'm going to be tracked and targeted, then at least don't annoy and bore me to death.
I'm not sure. Home fridge doors didn't traditionally have glass because it doesn't insulate as well as, well, insulation. Glass is also a leaking point in houses. Especially if they were replacing older, less efficient units, they might use less power, and seem cheaper in the long run. Bonus points if the price changes and sale tags are electronic and require less work.
The other thing these do, at least with the ads, is provide moving images. Humans notice these, so it is likely that more folks notice the drink coolers due to the movement on the screens.
They already track consumer interest - loyalty cards, regular purchases, and credit cards selling data does this.
Coke tried changing prices dependent on whether: Folks have outcried over that. The others, though: This is normal store stuff. Foot traffic is pretty predictable, and has already been accounted for. Sports events? Known if it drives your sales. Historical engagement? Probably shows in the inventory.
In general, if a planogram is updated, someone goes and changes it. I cannot think of a reason for the door to update before someone has the planogram completed, and any company large enough to have those screens now would do this (I worked at CVS, and generally was assigned planograms). Even new item reports have to have a code for completion. And most folks put most things up correctly so long as there is some sort of label there (and there probably is so long as inventory and ordering controls use barcodes).
It can easily be made to detect if someone is near and making their choice, but otherwise they can be part of a larger ad.
Something like https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ
When it breaks the index function to display a full-height animated Coke bottle, that's an ad.
You're right that I wouldn't rage quit and leave without doing my shopping the first time I saw these, but I also might not be back. Sure, I'd learn to live with it if every grocery store were to get on board, but in that scenario not having them would become a major competitive advantage.
There are 'bargin' stores in my area, and higher end stores. The higher end stores have lots more bio stuff to buy, and other fancy goods, but also stock major brands of everything else.
Even though the product is the same, the pricing is 15% average more expensive for those common products. I suspect they get away with it, because you're already there, and I never see a full shopping cart there.
The also have baggers. The bargin store does not.
My point? The bargin store might shave even more off, with enough ads. And those people buying full carts?
Might be even happier with the savings.
I think as with many things, those struggling with money can't care one iota (not don't, but can't), and just do what saves the most, no matter the cost to society, or themselves.
Survival first. Rent first. Savings first.
Thinking more about the product, there's probably also a long-term vision wherein it becomes more useful than it is today. e.g. maybe it automatically handles tracking quantities and greys out the item photo when it's out (and alerts them to restock), shows prices in a more user-friendly way than regular shelves, makes promotions more prominent (but hopefully not too obnoxious), slightly reduces labor costs (by automatically updating prices), and allows various user interactivity such as clicking an item to see metadata like nutrition and ingredients. It's easy to make fun of something at an early stage when we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but 10 years from now this may become a repeat of the infamous Dropbox thread.
Rules of the Accurate Pricing Policy If the pricing error involves a product that costs $10 or less, the product is given to the customer free of charge.
If the pricing error involves a product that costs more than $10, the merchant must sell the item at the advertised price and give the consumer a $10 discount.
If the same pricing error occurs for identical products during the same transaction, the merchant must sell each product at the advertised price, but the $10 discount only applies to one product.
Mistaken updates, or hacking, could be quite costly. Maybe this risk is just perception, but...
Of course, I'm not thinking this ad-glass company is really playing a long game. They've just happened to move a piece earlier than most.
This isn't really how it works.
If it worked that way then lighting, music, display organization, cleanliness, shelf space, brand, packaging etc. 'would not matter'.
All of those things matter, immensely, at any real scale.
The kinds of comments I'm seeing here are a little bit uncomfortable in this regard, indicate a kind of lack of self-awareness as to consumer (i.e. our own) behaviours.
This is just one of any number of studies [1]
THE EFFECT OF SHELF DISPLAY ON PURCHASING DECISION
"The final results show that, even though the students know that they should act like rational buyers who choose products according to their intrinsic value, when describing how they act in real situations, they admit to behaving differently, in the sense that they are influenced in one way or another by marketing policies ..."
This is not revelatory or controversial, we've known this for a long time.
These 'fancy displays' have a very obvious advantage purely in terms of their clarity and impact, and of course the reduce pain of having to constantly tweak tags and pricing.
Distracting advertising and any kind of privacy invasion would be a drawback obviously. As would possibly the cost.
But this looks like a really obvious opportunity to test for retail.
My worry would be not so much any of the stated issues here, but that there would be a new kind of war for retail space and that brands would bid on the size of their placements on the screen, as opposed to their slot on the shelf. Just ugly and unnecessary operational overhead.
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
(Upvoted; thanks for the insightful comment.)
Almost all of the commentary on this board is missing 'the most obvious points' from a consumer retail perspective.
Issues such as privacy, invasive advertising are obviously relevant, but if we are 'thinking retail' this is going to be about shopping experience and operational overhead.
In terms of impact, experience, clarity and reducing labour input costs - it really has so many upsides.
Far from being a 'bad joke' ... just the opposite it's a pretty neat concept. This is not fodder, it's very possibly the future.
Turns out there's a huge chunk of the population who cannot waste a single cent on what marketing dept has to say
The notion of 'consumers can't afford' doesn't really make a lot of sense.
The marginal cost of most of these things is very small.
In places where people are super price sensitive, maybe, but most people are not that.
Most people have some marginal flexibility which means an openness to buy things that can provide them more value.
Ads may not have been the only value proposition here, in other words. Data that can be used to improve merchandising may be equally valuable.
Think about ads being contextual, e.g. for complementary products, or unrelated to the products inside at all but briefly reminding about new stuff, promotions, sales, etc.
Imagine thus screen showing navigation help ("where is milk?"), product data("is it sugar-free?") and other such things momentarily.
Until someone finds out every screen has the same default password. And a few supermarkets are forced to shut them down because what was displayed was way, way worse than ads...
I wouldn't be surprised if it was the other way around: The startup that produces these doors probably pitched them for free to this store, perhaps offering a cut of the ad revenue. If the startup is well-funded, they may have even paid the store up-front to let them install the doors.
Given that these aren't widespread and the product is prototype quality, the startup likely needs a few pilot installs to show their investors and prove their product out. Assuming they're funded, getting some of these installed ASAP is their top priority. Trying to sell them would only slow that down.
Employees do not care about financial or literal waste.
They only meme in mind when they go to their job for “make money”.
I goto meetings with a vision and zero fucks about the implementation all the time. Why you expect that to be different otherwise in the same culture is beyond me.
You have to sell the media to someone. This is not like the type of self-promotion posters that come with some products, this is a separate thing entirely.
This might conflict with supermarket deals with the beverage manufacturers. It might make it harder to sell some brands.
So either the ad space vendor is aligned with those interests and the ad buyer has an interest in buying this space (which might be hard to justify) I don't see it lasting too long.
Oh yeah and guess what happens if the fridge needs maintenance and is not owned by the store... Something has got to give there.
Me too. I could do with getting a bit of extra cash handed to me in a brown envelope.
Everyone thought "glass". The whole project, from the grocery store point of view, was about testing an alternative to glass doors.
I would bet that lots of people did think glass but were convinced by the social inertia that glass must have some issue that makes it inferior.
With AR you don't even need surfaces.
When the company that made these was analyzing their market, I have no doubt they were targeting this exact scenario knowing that even the stupidest products have a place to make a boring brick and mortar retailer think they’re doing technology.
I think TFRC was an ego project, rather than an egoless project. Yet TFRC was a wonderful project that happened to work; if it failed, it might seem like an ego project with no point.
I don’t like saying “you need ego,” but it also seems true that you can’t find large corporate projects without it. Are there good counterexamples? I’d like to change my view.
HN's comments following Bitcoin's launch have made me acutely aware of how hostile we can be towards new ideas.
I'd guess that most innovation comes from startups and smaller companies that get acquired, or iterative product development that aligns with a company's primary focus (iPod, Office, Ford's electric pickup) and not from dedicated experimentation organisations.
Corporations are poorly setup to benefit from innovation anyway. The funding model doesn't encourage the right incentives, and true innovation becomes political. A classic example is Kodak's early invention of the digital camera, which was a threat to the companies cash cow.
Because this has zero benefit for shoppers.
[1]: https://twitter.com/RunDaltonRun/status/1408573096756269061
One day someone will be hunched over on a sidewalk, dying of thirst, and a patrolling Nestle®-branded drone senses (using state-of-the-art machine learning "customer needs" technology) his predicament. The drone hovers there projecting a holo-ad about Nestles hot product "Nectar of Life" which is just water from the region's last remaining aquifer cut with brackish water from the coast. The ad ends with a map to the nearest vending machine and buzzes off for it's next engagement. The man, too weak to move, just sits there, nothing he can do except wait for another ad drone to come by.
1. waywaywaybackmachine/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27637963
Brawndo is the product the drone would be advertising.
The sad thing is, we engineers are building this dystopia. Maybe even fellow HN readers. Our next JIRA ticket in the queue is to shove another ad onto another previously unmonetized surface. Many of us are actively bringing about this world!
The engineer who built this grocery screen was probably highly compensated for it. The biz guys who just hi-5'ed each other for "crushing it" are too, and the entrepreneur is probably already a millionaire. Everyone's making money by being part of the problem.
Probably force-repeat the ad.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is a thing because just having your brand name out there (even if it’s bad news) is better than it not being out there at all.
Fuck advertising and the greedy profit-driven place it comes from.
Another student said: "You mean, a radio?"
IHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia
"the company owns more than 850 full-power AM and FM radio stations in the U.S., making it the country's largest owner of radio stations. "
If someone had taken this and put it in a museum as an art installation, I would love it. Thinking about it like that ... it tickles something in my brain. Using those absolutely huge, gorgeous screens, using our most sophisticated technology ... just to display a flat, bland, skeuomorphic representation of a completely mundane part of the human experience: the convenience store fridge section. I dunno, I'm finding it hard to describe what I feel thinking about this as a piece of "art". It would definitely make quite the statement. The size and scale of it is what takes it to another level.
But yeah, instead this is reality...
0: https://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/visual-arts/...
It’s like connecting VR goggles to a front facing camera, so you can watch what you would see if you took of the headset.
As art, I’m kinda digging it too.
It's a bit sad to think how wasteful these are. Not just the waste produced by producing the screens and powering them all day, but the fact that you can't reliably see what's in there by looking means people will just learn to open it and browse with the door open, letting the cold air out.
Edit: Also, does anyone know what the cameras are for, if not facial recognition or CCTV? I'm guessing it's eye tracking for market research. I suppose that could be anonymized and aggregated on-device in a privacy-preserving way, but you'd have to take their word for it.
* the second one is supposed to show the next stations and connections, except for when it doesn't and shows ads.. for many minutes at a time.
It's possible the whole display is specifically for market research. Play with product placement and see what increases sales for the most profitable items.
Now that I know these exist, I kinda feel like being contrary and opening every single one to "look for" whatever it was I wanted.
The answer no doubt was “think of the ads” and “our AI guy (there’s always that one AI guy) is working on a model to help detect low stock”.
And yeah, the creepy little camera on the top of all of them makes me very pleased to have an excuse to wear a mask inside the store.
The bigger a tremendous fucking hassle it is to go to the store instead of ordering online, the fewer people are going to come in.
Supermarket window: "we now use anti-shoplifting face and license plate tracking" [e.g. auror.co ]
Supermarket aisle: can't see any products, have to open every door to look at actual products instead of TV ads
Supermarket aisle: e-ink price labels; can no longer flip up to see how much the thing cost before it was on "sale".
Supermarket aisle: e-ink label is down, no idea how much product costs
Supermarket checkout: always scans shit at the wrong price
Plus we've got covid, drive time, smaller selection, unknown stock levels [sold out].
Any old man could tell you giving a shit about your customers' experience is going to benefit you in the long run. But no. It'll be too late by the time they realize what they've done.
That said, at some point a failing business will realize the end is coming and cash out as much as possible, accelerating its own end in a calculated profit maximization scheme. Brick and mortar stores might as well self-destruct if they also believe they're going down anyway... It's not like anyone works there for the fun of it.
It takes me 5 minutes to walk to my grocery store at most. Hard to beat
I think this is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen. But to be honest, I won’t be surprised if this actually increases revenue since people are going to buy what they buy and it’s not like they will go to another store due to this.
Not being able to see what's behind the glass makes it take longer to shop. People abandon webpages that don't load quickly enough - why wouldn't they abandon stores where you have to open each door on an aisle of refrigerators just to see what's available?
I think most people will be annoyed, curse it, and then get used to it.
I would love to be proven wrong since this is not the direction we should be going.
What else would you do?
I recently bought something with self-checkout at an appliance store, so not groceries. Grabbed a thing of a shelf, scanned it at a touch screen terminal, payed for it with my contactless payment ring and just walked out. No human contact whatsoever. If that isn't future then I don't know what it.
The only downside is the diarrhea. :p
https://twitter.com/RunDaltonRun/status/1408578486046887939
This thing is for tracking what you look at, and is supposed to help the store figure out how to "optimize" their shelf.
A few years ago I tried running without ad or JavaScript blocking at work. That lasted a few weeks until the day I got an JS driven redirect to a porn site from a work related search result. I have no sympathy for the clowns who imposed this garbage on the world.
Triple-paned glass insulates pretty well and for a fraction of the cost…
This way, the shelf can always look full while needing less restocking.
I have to imagine there is a bit of a micro-emotion when you go from seeing the bright, shiny, fully stocked screen to the (potentially) mostly empty shelves behind it. I can imagine it wouldn't halt the purchase or anything, but even picturing it in my head, I can feel myself getting crestfallen at the empty shelves inside.
Wait, what? Is this a thing? If anything, I would guess a half-empty shelf would trigger a "this product is popular so I should probably get some", but even that is stretching it.
I guess it's yet another proof I was born in the wrong universe.
"More than two out of three (68%) U.S. adults would avoid shopping at a particular retail store if they encountered empty shelves"
? Then why is "Only two left! A thousand people are looking at this item! Quick quick buy now!" such a thing?
"Only two left" is more common either:
- In the context of discounted items, where you want to create a temporary rush - Online, where inventory is not visible
I’m not in favor of more animated shinny ads shoved into our eyeballs, but we already had the screens everywhere and there already seemed to be no way to go back without town regulation.
If having them in front of a vending machine makes people go berserk, it might be a good thing, but it still blows my mind it’s the straw that would break the camel’s back.
- Vending machines don't stop displaying what they sell to show ads
- Vending machines that were not designed by monsters show you things that are not in stock anymore, this thing does
- Vending machines often aim at impulse buying in locations where you don't really have alternative. Here, we're talking about actual stores, to which people often go several times a week. That, at least to me, make it twice as frustrating when it does not work as show in the tweets.
Is there anyone, anywhere, who believes this is helping consumers make their choices?
I fully expect an updated movie script where some lunatic sticks his head out the window at 2am and shouts, "I'm mad as hell and I don't want to listen to it anymore."
Usually results in them failing, sometimes spectacularly.
^^^ the real play
In frustration I gave up.
In the name of ads and growth, it’s crazy how user-hostile many interfaces are.
Glass is a great interface. TVs ain’t.
The technology could improve the customer experience, but of course customer experience is secondary to insights, tracking, and ads.
This is about selling more stock. It's also about selling the attention of their customers to manufacturers of their stock. A customer at the store is two things, one is a buyer of the store's stock, the other is inventory to be sold to manufacturers.
Grocery stores are self-service warehouses that sell access to their shelves to manufacturers.
That's why manufacturers pay the stores for shelf access (eg middle vs upper/lower) and why staples like milk are at the back of the store, while good looking fruit and vegetables are at the front.
Don’t we ask retail workers to do enough already? They’ve just dealt with a pandemic for Christ’s sake.
When someone opens the door in one of those cabinets, glass doors always cloud up. Then I have to wait and wait for it to be clear again, and in the meantime, some other customer will often come by, open the door, and grab something, and I have to wait all over again for it to defog.
I do see a lot of opportunity for abuse, but I also see a lot of potential.
> Turns out that Monster energy drinks are found in the "no content" door.
So how did he find it? Obviously he went down the line of doors opening each one until he found it. If the doors were glass, he could have looked through each door instead of opening each.
Probably the fact that you can't see the cheaper alternatives anymore without opening the door.
The ads pay for these.
Of course, this aside from the actual sneaky things that they do.
If they don't jam these things with ads or confusion, I think it's going to work out well.
Has anyone ever seen two-way glass that allows bidirectional observation within proximity of it's surface but diminishes with distance of either observer or view-field depth?
It was used in a pair of bathrooms (men's and women's) for the washbasin "mirror" at a restaurant or nightclub on or near 6th Street ATX about 2004. It allowed washroom patrons to see each other in the other bathroom, but not past a certain distance within each bathroom and didn't work if the viewer were far away.
Is anyone aware of any such thing?
And yes, they should be available from whatever places sell corrected sunglasses lenses. You probably just want the mirrored sunglasses style coating.
Or what did you mean with "not sunglasses"? Mirroring will make it darker, but not necessarily to an extend where you have trouble, hence my questioning of your reasons.
'Privacy invasion' aside there's a lot of obvious benefits to this.
1) Impactful Displays - this will increase sales. In your local coffee shop, going from the static nice pictures, to 'active displays' unambiguously generates more attention.
It's a little bit like having 'nice photo' menus vs 'empty menus' for regular dining. Obviously a nice restaurant doesn't want that - but for everything else, it helps turnover.
2) They can make the 'presentation layer' spiffy without having to worry abut what's underneath. A lot of effort goes into making sure everything looks 'right' on the shelf. Any kind of disorderly shelf gives customers a bad impression.
3) Easy pricing changes. My local 'Drug Mart' they have the 'pricing girl' constantly changing tags. I literally recognize the woman. With the prices on a display, it makes it much easier to manage.
4) Creative possibilities: beyond just displaying 'what's inside' there will be other opportunities. Possibly more detailed product information.
My biggest concern would be frankly the size of those screens and their cost and maintenance - and would the added benefits work out in the metrics. For 3 mid-sized screens at your coffee shop - yes. But for 10-20 large screens (that move, and could be broken) in the back of your grocery store, maybe not.
This is definitely a worthwhile retail experiment.
I suggest we may be seeing a lot more of this in the future.
Maybe not, but it's entirely possible.
Fuck you.
That's really all I have to say about that. I'm sorry this comment doesn't pass the general HN guidelines, but I hope someday you realize why you should feel ashamed for even thinking that this is a good idea.
You realize that 100% of the packaging in the store is designed for that reason? And it's why everything isn't in brown paper bags?
If 100% of the packaging in the store was animated and flashing, would you think that was a worse experience, at the same time as being more attention grabbing?
Though in fairness there's also a more wonkish HN-specific mockery of an over-engineered product failing to perform as well as a cheap pane of glass. I got a tablet PC in the relatively early days and people would joke how their 99 cent notepad graphically outperformed my $2000 fujitsu. But obviously my clunky early tablet PC could do far more other things even then.
If you sold this as AR using expensive glasses everyone is a believer.
> Easy pricing changes.
Prices that change by the hour, or as stock runs low is an interesting idea. Corporate could bring in a hourly special. Corporate has total brand control. Corporate can pull items by hiding them if said company doesn't want to pay for peak. The camera can give you personal specials.
The power is in corporate control. The weakness is the complexity you mention.
I suspect the cameras might be the what's really going on. Camera's by themselves wouldn't be acceptable. Comes with fancy screens though...