Cooler screens
computer.rip
computer.rip
Walgreens began to sour on the idea of the idea of these screens, and the current CEO basically cancelled the whole deal when he came in, calling them ugly, costly and ineffective.
Cooler Screens has been forced to take back many of the screens, which are custom made to the size of the Walgreens coolers, and cannot be resold of reused without getting new coolers to go with them.
Cooler Screens is suing Walgreens over this, but this is very much looking like a failed dystopian experiment.
I've worked on interactive signage for retail so I would have liked to read it, but it's just really bad.
Suddenly this absolutely brain-dead idea catching any traction at all with any business suddenly at least makes a tiny bit of sense.
Not a lot. But a tiny bit.
Cant wait to hang a cheap surplus cooler door on my living room wall hooked to a computer.
The retail experience consumers want and deserve
Cooler Screens was founded on the core idea that consumers deserve a better experience in brick-and-mortar retail. We bring in store consumers an irresistible experience with what they love about shopping online: ease, relevance, and transparency.
90%+ of consumers no longer prefer traditional glass cooler doors
I mean... come on. Surely someone must have noticed this? Is it some kind of cruel joke?
I thought the article we're discussing covered it well.
> "Transparency" seems like a poor choice of language when promoting a product that infamously compares poorly to the transparent door it replaces.
First on some testbench, developing software, power supply, (physical) install procedures, etc. With that done, one would expect to outfit a few stores to see how they work IRL. But no:
"The initial round of installations in 2018 reached 10,300 screens in 700 stores."
As part of a $200 million plan to cover 2,500 stores.
From testbench to fitting 10k screens across 700 stores, without intermediate testrun in a few stores?!?
On the plus side: if this crashes & burns (pun intented) then it's mostly VC going up in smoke. Hopefully eating profit from Walgreens who dared to go into consumer-hostile territory. And showing other chains not to do this.
Also the difference between the firms' marketing research & actual reception by consumers is baffling. Probaby:
"Or perhaps the surveys backing this data were only ever collected in the first two days following installation at Walgreens locations adjacent to dispensaries holding free pre-roll promotions."
Of course regular shoppers are not Cooler Screens' customers. Or even chain owners(?). The brands they sell advertising space to, are.
There could be 1 consumer-friendly use: looking up label info, ingredients, nutritional value, vegetarian / vegan / halal etc, perhaps compare with alternative products. Without having to open door & grab product. Only a small screen per section would suffice. But nope...
The whole concept is just bad all around. Perhaps it's good thing this initial roll-out was poorly implemented.
Most of these displays are powered by run of the mill Windows machines. Often they are just standard off the shelf hardware, which when packed in an enclosed space with other electronics, and wrapped with cardboard, doesn't last too long. Even the screens are often just standard bigbox store TVs, although some manufactures do make displays specifically for digital signage (for 10x the price).
We have our own hardware running a custom Linux distro, and it's designed to operate in these sorts of environments. However not all accessories are. Right now we are trying to figure out what to do with a camera which is only designed to operate in environments under 50c where we keep having hardware failures.
The budget for installations like this most likely comes from the marketing department. So instead of paying for print ads with no idea how well they convert, the money is spent on digital signage which can at least track basic data like the number of impressions. Unfortunately in this case, it's probably treated like a win as they get more analytics data than they did before (impressions, door opens, open time).
Have you tried putting them in a cooler?
We were demoed these screens by one of those display providers (probably Planar) probably 8 years back... If these are the 'transparent' door displays my understanding is that they are essentially just normal displays without backlights/or that foil backing. They were pretty experimental at the time and they were seeing if we had any room to experiment with them (we didn't at the time)..
We did a bunch of experiments around 'ad tracking' displays in store by mounting cameras as well and writing basic opencv code that detected people looking at the display with mixed results.
I've been out of the game awhile though.
IIRC we displayed our office calendar on it, among other things.
On the other hand, the screens in the article seems to have made away completely with the glass, leading to completely opaque, black rectangles if they are not running. What a mess.
The emperor really has no clothes, but customer surveys say otherwise.
One VP introduces this idea, does "case studies" designed to make it look good, rolls it out, distorts the statistics to show that it's a win, collects a bonus, and then moves on.
A second VP recognizes that it's bogus, removes the program, distorts the statistics to show that it's a win, collects a bonus, and then moves on.
If a third VP were to pop up and point out that it's stupid, they would be vilified for standing in the way of progress and eventually ousted, or just leave out of disgust because of the company's stupid ideas.
People often forget that when "moving fast and breaking things", some parts are more frangible than others.
I was equally puzzled at why on earth they might have done this; It finally occurs to be, having read this, that they must have been screens, but they were off.
Fantastic.
I haven't seen it myself, and I don't fancy a supermarket trip _just_ to check. It's also not one we frequent so it may be a while before I witness it for myself.
As for the polarized glasses thing; I recently found ad-blocking to be a feature of mine; I can't see the video/screen adverts on London bus stops when I'm wearing my polarized sun glasses; major win (shame it's not sunny very often).
https://www.businessinsider.com/cooler-screens-make-it-harde...
And/or sports bars.
Only annoyance would be when the bartender has to open the door during a touchdown.
These things are obviously a solution in search of a problem. MAYBE it would make sense on the front of a vending machine (because then you could hide the mechanics and perhaps get them more dense).
The animated doors I've seen in bars are transparent LCDs, but the Walgreens screens in the businessinsider article above appear to be opaque & have a full (thick) monitor backing when opened. So they're... even less futuristic???
An example of the product I've seen in bars: http://damoccoolers.com/ - notably the contents of the cooler remain clearly visible most of the time.
I suspect that's part of the air of desperation in the Cooler Screens/Walgreens relationship. Cooler Screens doesn't actually have leadership on the technology so they need to hang on to their major customers to appear to be the mature, ready for business option.
They are mostly broken?
> Out of order, please do not open
> [opens door]
> [finds food]
And it's not like it's the cooling unit that broke, you can see when the door is open it's still one big area connected to the working one next to it.
As an adult I realize that the tech is a layer of gloss and glamour on actively making the world worse than I knew it could be. I didn't have that perspective as a teen because as a teen I hadn't known the world.
> "Age-old advertising technology would use the context that you are in front of the ice cream door as a trigger to display the ice cream through the door. In the era of the Cooler Screen, though, the ice cream itself is hidden safely out of view while the screen contacts a cloud service to obtain an advertisement that is contextually related to it."
Another great line:
> Cooler Screens promise to bring the experience of shopping online, "ease, relevance, and transparency." "Transparency" seems like a poor choice of language when promoting a product that infamously compares poorly to the transparent door it replaces.
Lots of great lines. Enjoyed the highlight of the cognitive dissonance in citing the benefits of "transparency.
>"The retail experience consumers want and deserve," Cooler Screens says on their website. I would admire this turn of phrase if it was intended as a contemptful one. Cooler Screens promise to bring the experience of shopping online, "ease, relevance, and transparency." "Transparency" seems like a poor choice of language when promoting a product that infamously compares poorly to the transparent door it replaces.
> I'm not sure that we're really captive in Walgreens, although the constant need to track down a Walgreens correction officer to unlock the cell in which they have placed the hand lotion does create that vibe.
(Can we claim Hitchhiker's Guide as Prior Art for all this nonsense?)
Maybe it's different from where your from?
Particularly since it's much lighter than an actual, single glass pane of equal thickness, which is the point here: the weight wouldn't be an issue, and even if it was, the screen is far, far heavier than better insulation.
A solid pane literally equal in thickness with a typical double pane assembly would practically only ever be used for much higher end products, like armored cars and so on. No one serious would ever consider it for normal commercial coolers.
And the vast majority as of 2023 already use double paned glass, so comparing this at all seems irrelevant.
You don't need to have expert knowledge to insist on your own opinions, but presenting amateur knowledge as if it was doesn't help the discussion. I would recommend studying industry publications if your genuinely curious about this field.
Recall that the topic was your suggestion that "It's not feasible to make glass doors on coolers much thicker", which given this new information, doesn't seem true. Indeed, these screens are a second layer of glass stuck on the existing glass cooler door, with electronics in between. That's heavier than the same thing with air in between.
If you really want to be energy efficient, you'd switch to chest freezers/coolers, as they don't "spill" all the "cold" every time you open them.
Or at least doors where you can open the top or bottom half instead of the whole door.
But the energy expended is likely quite small, much less than the energy expended in upgrading anything.
Whether or not this kind of change is a smart move in the first place is a different discussion.
The way they engineered it is a bit like strapping a diesel generator on the top of an electric car as a promise to increase range... but a very inefficient one that weighs almost as much as the car itself.
P.S.: Coolers I can understand, but how come freezers use glass doors rather than a real insulator ? (+ printed out list of contents... now here might be an opportunity for minimal functionality, low power, e-paper displays ?)
Keep in mind that store fridges and freezers are opened a lot. If you can see through the door to what you’re trying to grab, you may be able to grab it faster, thus enabling you to close the door faster.
I mean, there's a kind of honesty in making your money as a meth dealer. This product is like co-opting healthcare budget for shitting in a water fountain.
The gas pumps that play advertisements while your car fills are incredibly obnoxious and makes me regret being a customer.
I think of "tax what you want less of".
It's more work everyone. Workers need to design the screens according to product inside, I need to wait to see whether my favorite cheese has moved for "engagement", etc.
I absolutely hate to be held hostage by ads.
Nobody ever measures lost sales due to annoyed customers, it contradicts someone else's project, politics. Like that website that you immediately close when it bombards you with engagement popups.
I worry about the feedback loop here. You stopped going because of the ads, but unless the person making the decisions knows that, then these things don't change. I don't have a solution.
I don't really care though. Gas quality is the same across brands.
The second time we didn't go there while passing that place, I dropped them a friendly mail. I must have been not the only one, because now they accept cards.
Sometimes talking to people helps. Though with a franchise there might be no-one on site with the power to "just fix" things. Regarding the gas station: Maybe charge at home instead? :P
Deface them. This is legitimate defense.
Does it make murder right? Certainly not.
Because you want others to believe that that is a bad solution. If its the only available effective solution then it isn't bad.
> It should be obvious, vote with your dollar, don't pump gas there.
How many gas station chains do you have to choose from near you and what makes you think that the others won't just put on the same annoying ads? Voting with your wallet is meaningless for issues where most people will begrudingly put up with something because there are only so many options and there are more important differences to them (mostly price).
What happens if you boycott your closest petrol station, spend extra cash, time and CO2 to reach the next closest one? You've penalised yourself, and the environment.
You may or may not convince other people to do the same, but the drop in revenue may not be noticed, or not get attributed correctly, or might be more than offset by the extra revenue from the adverts.
Meanwhile the replacement place that you're using notices that people seem to be tolerating the annoying adverts so they decide to do the same.
Direct action is likely to be more effective.
What is the solution to the problem?
Channel the inner 5 year old. It's the only way to be sure.
My suggestion would be to spray expanding polyurethane foam (e.g. Great Stuff) into the grille. Immobilize the diaphragm, and muffle anything that's left.
But, vandalism is bad. Even when it is justified retaliation. :-/
[0] MuteTheAds.com
This trick stopped working at all of the gas stations I frequent, sometime within the last year or so.
All at approximately the same time, multiple brands. Or at least multiple signages, not sure I could attest to big oil corporate structure consolidations!
I assume it was a software update from the pump/ad network vendor, possibly in reaction to the secret getting out.
So, thanks. :)
Comparing hearing an ad while you pump gas to rape is disgusting. Grow up.
The gas-pump ads are not as bad as airplane ads, since I could reclaim my right to choose by just walking away and never driving again, but in the later case there are literal restraints involved because I cannot leave the flight. What is disgusting is that "captive audience" is a selling point for marketing "innovations".
All attention was drawn directly towards me with this screen blaring advertisements at me. I as very much "put on display" in a way I did not enjoy.
As far as walgreens goes. I hate dealing with them. They charge premium prices for every item. But their parking lot is always dirty and unkempt; and their employees are less than helpful; and there is always a line. I'd rather just go to CVS and use the self checkout.
After all, the big glass front is not very thermally efficient. Regular fridges like you have at home have much more insulated doors.
But then we find out that not only is there still glass behind the screen, but also the screen itself is very hot and therefore consumes a lot of power.
Madness.
If this catches on I’m sure they’ll eventually have them make sound too, noise pollution is no big deal right? Why not eventually make you watch a 5 second ad to open the freezer to force engagement? Itll be like YouTube except at the end you get eggs and Gatorade. How fun! Maybe you can get a coupon for 5 cents off if you watch 10 ads on the door. Then it’s like they’re doing you a favor!
It's so they can coerce the brands inside the cooler to pay them to show them, just like (I suspect) much of Google Ads revenue is making sure that the top result for a search on "Coca Cola" isn't "Pepsi".
i.e. Holding up the queue because I'm unable to choose what I want from the menu, because the menu has temporarily changed into something else, and I have to wait for it to cycle around again.
>When you think about it within the context of "I'm in front of an ice cream door and I want to buy," you have the ability to isolate the message to exactly what a consumer is focused on at this point in time based on the distance that they are from the door.
This also is achieved by a sign taped to the glass saying “ice cream, buy one get one free,” but where’s the VC money in that?
But it's just pictures of what's behind the door when you open it?
The only way this could be even worse and more hostile is if it was used for flashing advertisements.
(Don't get me wrong, I _LOVE_ cyberpunk dystopia, in my entertainment fiction, music, art and vide-ogames, but not IRL please)
Cashier (the only one left that's not a robot): Did you find everything you want?
Me: I went into the aisle where the pop was, but couldn't find any. I saw plenty of TVs though.
Cashier: We don't sell any TVs.
Me: I don't care. I wanted pop, not TVs.
I think Walgreens is solidly heading toward the second.
In the cooler aisle I was just looking for some ice cream, and I had to open 5-6 doors to find it. Not only were the displays wrong, upon opening the coolers they were mostly empty.
It was one of those times where I felt like I could be living in some sort of technological satire.
---
Bloomberg Businessweek has run a series of articles about the problems at Walgreens.
https://www.google.com/search?q=walgreens+bloomberg
They just settled a shareholder lawsuit over the failed takeover of Rite Aid.
(I patronize Walgreens quite a lot because they are one of the closest stores to my location, mine used to be a Rite Aid.)
Before that they merged with the Boots chain in the U.K. and got the idea that they could increase sales in the front of the store (e.g. not pharmacy) but they didn't seem to understand the "cost disease" in the U.S. that makes health care an order of magnitude more expensive than anything else such that CVS, doubling down on health care, had the right strategy.
The pharmacy staff at our Walgreens deal heroically with a huge amount of brokenness, there was the time I needed a prescription filled in a hurry and they called around and found a competing pharmacy that had it in stock and sent over all my data including my insurance for one of those "seamless" experiences that marketers are always talking about. Then there was the time I came on Friday and they told me they could have it ready in 30 minutes but I said "No, I'll come tomorrow because I want to make it to a football game" and they said it would be ready the next day.
Well the next day they weren't able to fill any prescriptions because of some electrical failure that had technicians working in there. It turned out the pharmacist, because of a worker shortage, had driven two hours to get to work that morning! He also told me that they couldn't fill the prescription just yet anyway because my refill only became available the next day to which my reply was "I wanted to get the ball started early in case something went wrong."
This would be a nice target for some guerilla hacking. Have some Pac-Man ghosts chasing each other from screen to screen, or something like that.
If I see cooler screens. You will never see me in that store again.
> "Cooler Screens does refer to them as vivid and engaging, and they must have thought that they needed to compete with store lighting to catch attention... the wattage of the backlighting (and attendant heat dissipated) must be considerable.
> "...I suspect they have a thermal problem. The whole system probably worked fine on a bench, but once manufactured and mounted with one face against an insulated cooler door, heat accumulates to the point that the SoC goes into thermal throttling and gives up on real-time playback of 4K video. The punishing temperature of the display and computer equipment leads to premature failure, and the screens go dark."
Does that sound accurate, or is there more to it?
https://www.sixteen-nine.net/2023/06/20/court-filings-on-200...
Alas, it appears to be a not-so-cool Walgreens idea that came into practice.
PS Where does the weird name, Walgreens, come from? Maybe the name originated from the same 'great mind' having this 'cool' idea?
Truly a first world problem, and another things we don't really need...
The only redeeming quality is that they apparently "Drive TikTok'ers nuts" according to Businessinsider...
The one, single thing that could be a positive over glass doors is that if someone holds a door open too long, condensation builds up and obscures the view. But in every other respect these LCD panels make the experience worse, often dramatically worse.
As for the contextual ad part of it -- I never saw ads, just pictures and prices of what supposedly was inside. If there were ads I would have only resented them. But in fact the panels are often down, or show the wrong information due to them not tracking inventory well.
I hope I never come across this in real life.
Some products are smaller than the others, making them harder to spot. Having a well organized and clearly visible directory that is also a guiding system might help.
Then again, stores like this are already doing their best to confuse, with those screens or without. No reason to believe screens have been introduced to help the customer.
I do my shopping like that. First fridge set, third fridge, bottom shelf: Milk. Same set, last fridge, second shelf, right: My favorite cheese. That's time efficient.
In most cases at least. Upper/lower rows are generally where you can find smaller/niche products are more random on that front.
Like the article explains, the shelf placement has in most cases been negotiated and/or maximized for profit. The screens will not help: I expect them doing exactly the same: scale products to subtly promote/demote depending on agreements.
They will do this in addition to what is currently being already done, so it's likely a net loss for consumers.
Amazing that they managed to raise millions.
E.g. I like reading ingredients of various products. I’d be happy to look at them on a giant screen somehow, as opposed to reading small text while holding a freezing item.
Similar with showing price per weight, total numbers of inventory (so that I know that there are 5 ice creams available), etc.
But yes, this won’t happen, we’ll get ads instead.
We treat parasite infections with toxic chemicals. 50,000 litres of permethrin into the dwellings of the founders of this cooler door startup should be effective. Make sure you get all the larvae.
Glass doors may perform worse than opaque alternatives when closed, but their time open is shorter.
I fear that even this is not an actualisable benefit. Size is probably the easiest visual differentiator to perceive. You can differentiate between eyedrops and shampoo far faster than between different brands of shampoo.
It has a complexity that is equal to its lack of utility.
Seems like a case of someone letting their imagination run away with tech, without realizing that a simple solution, and less invasive test-marketing, is a much better approach.
Do anything whatsoever to interfere with that, you have a demonstrably worse device. You will spend money to lose money, installing stupid doors to produce a drop in sales.
I cannot possibly imagine this is a good idea.
And I cannot possibly imagine anybody involved in the chain of events that led to this being created, had an iota of sense.
Not sure I have been to a drug store of any kind in a few years though. Are these different? Truly screens so you can't see what's in the cabinets?
Sometimes it's fine, and I've had worse healthcare IT experiences, but when something goes wrong for me involving that, it's alarming/infuriating to think how scrod people will be who are non-techies and/or who are limited due to illness.
I've seen great work by Walgreens pharmacists&pharmtechs, and hope for other aspects of Walgreens and CVS to consistently rise to that level of greatness. They are first go-to institutions for some aspects of critical healthcare, not 7-11s nor gas station convenience stores.
The horrow I felt, when the HN comments provided links with pictures... The environmental impact alone should be enough to put several executives in prison! What the fuck were any of them thinking???
At first I thought this item was about walls-of-cooler-fans, like this:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sites/datacenterknowledg...
Imagine getting your raise request denied, meanwhile the guy asking these questions is an executive at your company. I could sadly see this concept coming to fruition in the future as a way for stores to make more passive money by playing ads on them (like gas station pumps do now in the US), but man do I not know a single other good reason to have them.
But they do suck from a technical perspective and while I used to occasionally grab a case of beer or a cold soda from Walgreens I pretty much avoid it for that now, because the prices are still terrible and now the experience is too.
On the other hand, door insulation might be insignificant if the fridge is opened often enough. Which is likely what any retailer hopes for.
The refresh time is big fractions of a minute, but that's OK for static displays.
Obviously that misses the entire point of this parasiteware, which is advertising and tracking.
None of it makes sense but it would have been better to have like a projection of the actual inside with ads over laid on top. Make it more of an AR type setup vs just an ad.
When I find them, I pretty much avoid that establishment from then on.
One would think the brightly colored labels on the products is advertising enough!
What a Kafkaesque world we found ourselves stepping into.
I have seen these in the wild. They're hilariously awful. Best thing about them is the computer.rip article which is entertaining and well written.
I've never seen them displaying ads, just big graphics saying "WATER" or "ICE CREAM" or "MILK" or whatever when there's nobody in front of them. And I find it kind of fascinating how, when they do notice someone's in front of them and deign to switch to showing the inventory, my brain just completely slides off of the crisp pictures of the drinks on a bright white background. Even before the first time I opened one up to find that it was inaccurate, it felt like my brain just knew that the inventory would not necessarily match what would actually be in there, so why bother wasting energy parsing it?
(And this is with them all working, largely as designed.)
I am glad to know they are on the way out. "'Vegas' in a derogatory way" is a good summation of my reaction to them.
i have a strong feeling that things are going to get worse before they get better.