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Comment by sspiff | Hacker News Reader

A fun aside: Cooler Screens, the company making these, used to be the CEO of Walgreens, and Walgreens is their only "whale" customer.

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.

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> A fun aside: Cooler Screens, the company making these, used to be the CEO of Walgreens, and Walgreens is their only "whale" customer.

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.

What is it with Walgreens and adopting terrible tech ideas? This apparently started in 2017, shortly after Walgreens had terminated their Theranos partnership; you'd think that would have given them pause.

I wondered if someone else was going to bring this up. I guess retail is just super competitive and you're always desperate for the next differentiator... but still.

LOL from their homepage:

    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

Fortunately we don't have them where I live but they seem like a truly horrible idea.

> We bring in store consumers... transparency.

I mean... come on. Surely someone must have noticed this? Is it some kind of cruel joke?

We put the opaque in transparency lolll

> Surely someone must have noticed this

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.

Where did that 90% number come from? Did they ask ten people around the office?

I wonder if the survey question was something misleading like "Do you prefer to spend time looking through cooler doors or at an LCD TV with programming for you?"

Depends on the show.

> 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.

Cant wait to hang a cheap surplus cooler door on my living room wall hooked to a computer.

This is all covered in the post.

Yes way way down in the (admittedly entertaining and well-written) post. I thought the comment was a useful summary.

Sorry, I didn't notice. I read the beginning but it was a bit long winded for my taste (insert comment about modern attention spans here). I skimmed through it but obviously missed the multiple paragraphs about the Walgreens saga (insert comment about modern reading comprehension skills here).

The formatting and background do absolutely zero favors even if you're actively trying to read the whole thing.

I've worked on interactive signage for retail so I would have liked to read it, but it's just really bad.

I found it hard to read as well, and confirmed reader view in Firefox helped a lot.

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