Walgreens replaced some fridge doors with screens, and some shoppers hate it
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
> Retailers are eager to add new experiences to their physical stores. But many consumers aren't eager to change their habits — and they certainly aren't used to watching freezer-display ads.
> "People really appreciate their routines. They're not always seeking excitement," said Julio Sevilla
Has CNN introduced a parody section when I wasn't looking? Is this some sort of joke article, satirising corporate nonsense-speak and journalists blindly reprinting press releases?
This isn't a matter of shoppers being scared of "change" or disliking "excitement" - nobody is "excited" to "engage with advertising", they're just inconvenienced. This is walgreens making the shopping experience worse in the hopes of making more money.
How someone so unable to speak plainly could forge a career as a professional journalist I have no idea....
Whether you like it or not, grocery store is an experience. For instance there are considerably cheaper grocers that can fulfill many basic goods (C-Town, Dollar General, etc) but some people avoid because the "experience" is not as pleasant (lighting, color scheme, spacing, etc)
I don't think the optimization is the issue, it's who's doing the optimization and why/what purpose
I agree the freezer thing sounds awful and hopefully is just a failed experiment. But products and layout are optimized by the brand. Just take a look at the packaging. Pretty standard comparable size, dimensions that fit in the place they're meant to be stored, meaningful information up front, clear well printed packaging, a million other things. I don't think you're giving enough credit to how incredibly convenient and curated a trip to a modern grocery store in an economically developed country is.
The goal is to sell you more stuff obviously but 95% of the time my interests are aligned with the brand. I don't want to waste time figuring stuff out. They just make it easy for me.
/s
I hate advertising and actively disrespect people who work in the ad industry. It’s virtually all just disinformation and behavioral modification tricks. The cigarettes for our brains in the 21st century.
The store is small enough that even if you don't know the layout it doesn't take long to find something. There are only a few choices (if that many) for any given item so you generally don't even think about price-comparing on a per-ounce basis or anything like that. The cashiers are blazing fast. You are in, out, and get on with your day. No they don't stock everything but they have all the staple products you need from day-to-day.
The harder it is to run in autopilot, the more inane distractions there are, the worse the activity.
But I miss absolutely nothing about going to a grocery store.
EDIT: in fact in general the pandemic has been pretty good at cutting the number of ads I have to see and hear daily since I've been away from high trafficked areas a lot. That sensory assault I do not miss at all.
Well-laid out spacious store, with good lighting and non-obtrusive background music is quantifiably better than a dirty, cramped corner store with a sus-looking shopkeeper and ethnic music blaring out of tin speakers.
But, clearly, being exposed to #more# ads is not something that adds to said experience positively.
Well, I was in an Indian store recently and they were playing this story from the radio, I'll admit it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Now, that’s an experience.
Call it fake news, propaganda, or the nice PR - but that’s what these “journalists” are. They’re not true journalists but serial killers, wearing the skin of the dying profession.
The ridiculousness of the story sells itself. It doesn't really need professional help.
Most journalists are in the ad business - imo this is why they hate Facebook so much, they’re competitors and ad supported news orgs mostly ship a crappier product.
Minimum word limits throughout college, for starters.
So apparently they're wildly unable to gather a representative sample of people, or have structured their survey to mislead them to an extreme degree.
Sounds like a company to stay far away from.
Nothing screams failure like appearing on media lying about how everyone likes you so much.
they speak with the exact degree of obfuscation as is required to get their paycheque.
That might be nice. So, one redeeming feature.
Another point worth mentioning is that the startup claims that their 'targeted ad' tech is 'identity blind'. (I have visceral hatred towards targeted ads). What is preventing them from making it identity-aware in the future if it succeeds by any chance - especially given the fact that targeted ads work better when it is identity-aware? It will eventually become the real-world equivalent of online cross-site tracking, no matter what the creator claim. Never concede ground to malicious technology just because it has some purported benign uses. Let them just add a braille pad and speaker on the side for users who need it.
i would rather stare at a blank wall with a drab white color than watch the newest variety of pizza topping by pizza hut or gilette shaving blade ad.
sure they pay to subsidize tech but i would rather pay to have them not be seen than being forced to watch.
the same is with internet. go and open any website without having ublock origin and you will be surprised or more like outraged because the ad cancer is really really bad.
> How someone so unable to speak plainly could forge a career as a professional journalist I have no idea....
The problem is that the motion sensor coverage area is too small, and the transition to map view is too slow, so you wind up standing in front of an opaque screen that's supposed to be showing you what's inside, but isn't. Then it's faster to open the door than it is to wait for it to change, so you wind up opening the door, searching for the product you wanted with the door open, and wasting a bunch of energy.
So now you're paying twice for energy: once for the display, and again in increased refrigeration costs.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/walgr...
Thanks for clarifying that its not just a solution in search of a problem but a really horribly implemented solution.
Now I get it.
Next the doors on the freezer will lock until the ad has finished playing all the way through, and the ad will stop playing if you look away in distraction.
Also, the gas will stop pumping if you don't look at ad on the screen on the pump at the gas station and you must also verbally engage with the ad when it asks a question otherwise it stops pumping. If you answer enthusiastically it will waive the $2 surcharge because you had the audacity to use a debit card.
I am so glad I am getting old and will die soon so I don't have to live in this dystopian hellhole the new generation are creating for us.
I’m getting vibes of DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE and Sony’s advert patent https://www.engadget.com/2012-08-24-sony-patent-wants-to-mak...
>To Avakian, it's simply an expected growing pain. Cooler Screens plans to educate >customers about the digital displays and launch features like voice recognition, >so shoppers can ask about prices or item locations.
So unintuitive and user-hostile that you have to "educate" customers about them.
How the heck did they make this deal with Walgreen when it is obviously bad?
I'm going to assume they got a bunch of VC money with a pitch of "we found a space that doesn't have ads on it yet, and we can fix that". And now they're paying more than the value of the ads to Walgreens. They'll probably raise another round of funding off the "success" of this contract, and then bail.
This fridge door is a bad idea whether it works or not.
Yep exactly. In the big chain supermarket near me they continually play their brand jingle, along with ads for themselves. The jingle is repetitive and simple, just 7 notes that match the syllables of the "lyrics" - a tedious line about fresh food.
I'm already there buying stuff, so can only guess their tactic of spamming the store with their jingle, is based on some theory of reinforcement.
I've also noticed a news radio program I sometimes listen to, is now taking more breaks to advertise themselves. Not programs or content, but just how good they think they are in general, and how trustworthy they are. It's self-congratulatory cringe. The person who decides if they're trustworthy is me, the listener, not them telling me over and over that I should trust them.
Touting a particular feature is generally a sign that you don't actually have that feature.
Food advertised as healthy ("now with 10 vitamins and minerals!") is probably junk food masquerading as healthy. The tomatoes and broccoli in the produce section, on the other hand, have no advertising but you know they're healthy.
Along those same lines, if I have to tell you how trustworthy I am, you should take everything I say with a grain of salt. IMHO you need to find a new (better) favorite news source.
I really hate the trend of putting "smart" screens and networked ads everywhere. Those startup bros can go jump off a cliff with their trash ideas.
Is it really so hard for retailers to stick to their core competencies and keep the transaction simple between us? I give them money, they give me goods/services. No need to get random middlemen involved.
If I see these color door screens someplace, I am simple going to walk out and refuse to give that store any business. I refuse to support companies that are actively trying to make my life harder.
You literally said you open them hard to break them.
Instead, talk to the manager and explain why you dislike the removal of glass doors and why you will no longer do business at their store as a result.
Digital shelves are still stupid as all hell, but strictly from a KISS perspective, not a business one. The fact that this approach is so conceptually similar to existing SOP is probably why so many big grocers are getting swindled by this "innovation".
AFAIK one of the claims is that the doors are a net energy savings, because you can use better, opaque insulation material rather than glass.
And then there's the accounts of people opening the doors to see what's inside because it's faster, or opening the doors only to find out the product they wanted is actually not there.
It just feels highly unlikely.
These doors are brightly lit; they are a lot of pixels; each door has the equivalent of a computer and a couple graphics cards in them. I believe that the doors even have active cooling fan vents on the sides (the doors are something like 3 inches thick!).
None of this says "power savings" to me.
It is much worse than that. Even companies willing to stay on top have trouble, can be affected by zero days, data leaks, and eventually stop supporting their hardware.
That's been my experience. If not out of stock, perhaps shelved elsewhere.
Putting signage of any kind on fridge doors in retail is annoying. Just let us see the products. Aisle clutter in supermarkets has become worse, too. In some places it's so bad that it's not worth shopping in person any more.
This entire product seems like a thinly veiled effort to push more unwanted and intrusive ads. The technologist in me wants to believe there is more to this so I would be happy to be proven wrong, if anyone else has some insight.
Ads. They can make you look at an add at eye level on something you need to look at ( because you want to know if there's pizza or whatever there). It's a potentially pretty valuable ad for "super discount on X" or even regular crap.
I'll just open the door.
Once most of the retailers have installed the product obscuring screens, another startup can produce an Augmented Reality 'x-ray' app that lets you see what's behind the screen by using your smartphone/smart glasses/whatever. They'll make money by selling ads, of course. Another ad-tech company will help a competing retailer place an ad in the AR app telling you about their store down the street that has installed these miraculous glass doors that let you just see their products. The store you're in will pay an analytics company big bucks to determine (in part, from a data feed from the AR app) their customer abandonment rate due to the screens. This data, combined with their competitor down the street taking customers, will allow a consultant to make bank recommending the original retailer install transparent doors. Ah, the virtuous cycle of tech.
This is already done through methods like selling prime shelf space (e.g. eye level) but this only works to a certain extent. Cooler Screens and Walgreens are pioneering a new system where video screens and advertisements are used to further manipulate shoppers towards certain products. Manufacturers who play the game are able to maintain their existing level of sales or even slightly grow them, minus the additional rent they are paying Walgreens and Cooler Screens, at the expense of manufacturers who don't play the game.
This could backfire if the video screens both increase store costs (for the reasons you described) and reduce store revenues from upset customers who no longer wish to shop in such a hostile environment. On the other hand, Walgreens is apparently betting that they have capacity to harass their customers without losing too many of them.
Naturally consumers want less information asymmetry when buying things, that's why they seek external reviews. Let's try to add more to this asymmetry by hiding the actual product behind some manipulative short films!
Why do American companies hate the free market?
A solution looking for a problem for sure. Maybe next they'll try one of those fancy transparent OLED panels and run ads on it!
For example, Walgreens partnership / investment in Theranos was spectacularly costly [0].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/13/therano...
We have a few national chains that expanded hugely, probably far beyond their ability to service, as part of a huge turf war a few years ago. Now they're stuck with loads of locations to fill, and mediocre to terrible service in their core-competency. My family members are constantly fighting with the local chain pharmacy just to achieve things like "be able to collect a prescription during the posted hours" because their staffing has been so terrible.
All the while, they're bleeding customers in that space: you've got health plans desperately pushing mail-order, some plans that refuse to treat some pharmacies as preferred (I had to go to a different chain when I actually wanted to use my plan), and customers being more prone to comparison shopping that tells me that my prescription is cheaper to pay cash for at the local supermarket I'm already visiting, than to pay my co-pay-- or let alone the absurd cash price-- Walgreens or CVS wants for it.
But let's not talk about that. Let's focus on the mediocre convenience store bolted onto the side of the drug counter. The one which is nobody's first stop for any given product. We found a way to make it more miserable and now people will buy 4% more of those weird house-brand snack foods!
Walgreens unfortunately is mine for many things, due to being the most walkable location for staples in my neighborhood, but they put zero focus into it here. The last few years have just been a steady stream of stopping into Walgreen for something only to realize that they ran out and never intend to restock.
Is it full proof? Of course not. Models are inaccurate all the time. But this article and the comments here acting like this is so obviously a terrible idea are silly.
They want to push people to the self checkout as much as possible, so they actually decided to close cashier checkouts for everyone paying with cards. In fact, all cashier checkouts were simply closed, and if you wanted to pay with cash, they had to call around to find a cashier and open one.
Self checkout zone looked like a slice of hell. All self checkout machines were non stop signalling they needed attention from the cashier. The only available cashier, a young girl, was running around like crazy, everybody angry at her, and she was excusing herself to all clients. She was completely exhausted. There was a long row behind the self check out.
I want to buy an USB stick. These are only available at cashier checkouts, and I am not allowed there unless I pay with paper money - this was confirmed by another staff member. I kid you not, you actually can't buy an USB stick anymore, except with cash. So I hid my purchases in a corner (with an OK from their staff of course), went outside the shop, used my bank card at an ATM to get some paper money, went back inside the shop. The girl opened a cashier checkout, gave me the USB stick, and I paid cash and got my change. She actually looked glad to be anywhere else than in self checkout hell for a minute. Meanwhile, multiple people were actually literally screaming for attention in the self checkout zone. When we got back, all 6 self checkout machines were blocked for some dumb whiney reason, and everyone was glaring angrily at both of us for the additional delay.
The basic idea for a shop is: I get stuff, they get money. It seems a lot of the big chains are so far gone trying to optimize whatever metric, they forgot this basic idea.
Another example of why the word "modernize" has gained a very negative connotation for me.
The freezers have front-facing sensors used to anonymously track shoppers interacting with the platform
That is truly disturbing.
No doubt they're going to say these screens save cooling costs as part of promoting the green-globalist agenda...
And just funny question, does the light go off inside those when door is closed?
So the transparent doors are now giant screens that show video ads all over them until you're in front of it.
When you're in front of it, it shows all the stuff it may have inside.
The "may" is where the really stupid part of this tech comes into play -- the screen shows what is available on a fully stocked shelf but when you open it to look inside, you can see there may be entire rows/products that aren't in stock (as seen in some customer videos in the article).
I know some people like the “low distraction” of something like CNN’s lite mode but I hate it. Since there are no pictures I can’t see what they’re talking about, and that’s often important for the story (like here).
An ad blocker serves me just fine. Or I could turn on reader mode in my browser. Either way I still get the pictures. And they’re important to me.
It reminds me of the obnoxious talking gas pumps that play ads while you’re filling your car.
At first there used to be a “mute” button to where you could silence the crap and all the plastic was worn away from everyone mashing it trying to shut it up.
Now I no longer see any option to mute the ads.
I hate ads with a passion and won’t allow them to run on my devices. Mainly for security and privacy but the aggravation they cause is palpable.
Whenever I work on someone else’s computer and open a web browser I am in shock that people can even concentrate with all the garbage on the screen.
Given that being in the car is not the best place to be, I tend to walk 40ft away to get away from the insanely loud adverts.
That was funny.
Or maybe they just made it up. Startup founders have done worse right?
Just have to ask bunch of questions leading to answer and then just publish that one...
Starts at about 1:00. One of my favorite shows
Edit: updated link, thanks @dvngnt_
here's the exact link with a time stamp
How much would one of these screens/doors cost?
They are essentially (bar the software) a huge TV (or digital signage) screen + sensors/webcams (and most probably Wi-Fi or similar), possibly with some added extra cost for thermal insulation and/or "side" cooling.
But they are huge, something like 80 cm x 2 m, using diagonal inches something like 85-90.
Wouldn't that have a cost in the 2,000-3,000 US$ range each?
Is there anyone who actually likes these monstrosities?
But just having a "dumb" label outside the door would work just as well.
Contrary to a lot of claims, they are trying to solve a problem. The problem is the problem is of no interest to customers and actually creates problems for customers.
I also wonder how long it will be a benefit for businesses. It is difficult to see how the advertising space can maintain its value if this is rolled out everywhere. It is difficult to see how the advertising space can maintain value once the novelty wears off and consumers largely ignore it. It is difficult to see how stores will manage the expectations and frustrations of consumers.
Even without the eggs, that still seems to be a problem with a lot of the internet economy—a lot of ads seem to be directed towards getting people to visit another site here they get—more ads.
The classic example: When the local supermarket ran an ad in the daily printed newspaper, the publisher kept basically 100% of the ad spend (minus the marginal costs for newsprint, ink, and the labour to deal with the ad copy. Now they submit an ad to some network which generously kicks some percentage of that revenue back to localnewspaper.com.
In this case, I'd expect that some of the money being thrown at Cooler Screens is coming from other ad spend verticals-- maybe a few less TV ads or one less page in the weekly newspaper circular.
If Walgreens built their own screens it would still be a stupid idea, but it would probably be more cost-effective than paying someone else who owns the technology and is probably mostly interested in making a pitch to go public some day.
To waking up in a bathtub of ice missing a kidney, maybe.
Actually, now that I think of it when the system is "working properly" I still can't be sure of what's behind the door if I open it.
Totally worthless use of technology.
The only way to make this go away is, when you come upon one of these displays, set your items down and leave without purchasing anything. Spend your money somewhere without one while you still have the option.
Just think of the innovative apps apps apps and experiences we’ll be able to build with those new features! CoolerGraph is coming out soon, can’t wait to attend the hack a thon at CoolerLabs!! They have free Pizza and RedBull!
Sleep, code, sleep dudes!!
Also, you are already in the shop, going to buy stuff anyway, what's the point of advertising the same product that's on the shelf?
The first time I see these screens is the last time I shop at that store.
Originally the button had "mute" clearly printed on it, but it seems to have been replaced with a totally blank keycap. It still works though.
It's like saying I like glass better than a broken lcd...
there's images in that article that make this lite version absolutely useless