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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

Some images in this article for those who haven’t seen them:

https://www.businessinsider.com/cooler-screens-make-it-harde...

Thanks. I thought the article was some sort of future fiction thing but apparently this is real?

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one that came to the comments to try and figure out if this was dystopian fiction or not. As usual, reality continues to disappoint with the answer.

I've seen these in bars for a few years now - the beer bottle fridges behind the bar will run animated ads for the beer brands in the fridge (mostly Heineken)

Edit: correction on my above comment (past editing deadline).

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.

Damoc is the principle and pretty much only competitor to Cooler Screens, in the cooler-with-a-screen space. I hesitate to endorse any implementation of this as a good idea, but if you accept the premise as Cooler Screens themselves articulate it, it's pretty obvious that Damoc has come up with a far better product.

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.

Sounds like a bar with a great atmosphere.

Typically the bigger dive bars or pub-club chain types; definitely an atmosphere many enjoy, though very much a matter of taste.

And/or sports bars.

Now there would be a use for these - imagine a wall of them along the side of the bar, with the game currently being watched spread across them all.

Only annoyance would be when the bartender has to open the door during a touchdown.

The coolers I've seen have translucent doors (see comment above), so the game wouldn't be super clear. The Walgreens coolers could do it but I presume you're joking as it would have no concrete benefits over putting a normal screen in front of a bunch of coolers (or even projecting onto some white coolers).

The only real benefit would be getting a large screen out of stupid VC money.

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).

I love to get high while surrounded by animated salesmen.

Yeah I saw them as described in the article since 2 solid years?

They are mostly broken?

I made a positive statement to myself, as I left my teens, that I would never become that old man that hides from technology and gets left behind. But boy, I think I'm getting there. Between crap like this and the massively unethical "gig labor" economy and VR headsets, I want no part of what the world is becoming.

I think the core difference is that as a teen we see people reject tech and assume that it's the tech itself being rejected. That there is some underlying progress being shunned.

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.

Ex: "Sonny, I'm not against people communicating easily with their friends and sharing pictures, I'm against what I see as a wave of addictive gamified narcissistic codependency."

It's not that tech, or even new tech, is a bad thing; it's that people keep making awful things with new tech.

The last one is great:

> 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.

Holy crap. That looks like some sort of dystopian nightmare, garishly bright screens crowding in from all sides.

Like the other commenter I also had to look this up to realize this isn't some sort of weird fiction.

Wow, that looks terrible. I get that they want to play ads, but I don't see how these things don't reduce sales

Perhaps the advertising revenue makes up for lost sales...

What an absolutely, utterly stupid idea and a way to complicate something simple...

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