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Comment by alwa | Hacker News Reader

Did you ever have the pleasure of encountering the US drugstore that replaced the entire set of doors of its entire refrigerated section with hulking, bright, animated, human-height-and-ultra-heavy TV screens?

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/business/walgreens-freezer-sc...

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The amount of effort that goes in to syncing up the contents of the fridge with what it is on the screen must be staggering. And not for a moment do I believe it reliably detects empty stock or the placement of the contents. Not to mention dealing with the extra heat it gives off.

Countless hours wasted and it is still worse than a glass panel in every way.

Not unlike orchestrating a dozen microservices and three Dooms worth of code to render a simple form to the three users a typical application has.

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.

“This is the future of retail and shopping,” Avakian said.

If this is our future of "education", these parasitic, data grubbing companies can fuck right off along with any larger company that supports them.

Nothing whatsoever about this in the least bit improves the time you spend grabbing something from a cooler. It's blatant enshitification of a very basic buying task that need not involve any further interface, and it so obviously does nothing but try to squeeze more money from said basic interaction for nobody's benefit except Walgreens, the companies paying for their grubby little digital visuals, and the scum-loaded company that's selling this garbage to them.

I can almost imagine a future in which even the tissue of toilet paper comes covered in "engagement" ad visuals impregnated into its material through some sort of micro-display technology. At last in that case it would get exactly the engagement it most deserves and afterwards go where it really belongs.

Not to mention the genius of putting a heat generator right in front of the fridge.

I wonder if people opening it to look for something that is out of stock has a large effect.

No measurable effects were observed on the items not in stock.

A little bit of an aside, but the absolute gol CNN website is impressive:

> We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.

> We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser).

It turns out that whole thing was a grift where the former CEO left and founded the startup and then “sold” the Cooler Screens to his friends back at Walgreens. The new CEO came in and realized how dumb and expensive the screens were, killed the deal and is now being sued by the grifter.

The CEO at the end of the video talking about "educating" the consumers about the benefits of this new system really drives the point home that a large part of current tech is made and paid for by douchebags.

Yes, though at the time I believe it was static (no ads) so I was just left wondering why they felt the need to put up a TV screen showing what I'd see through the glass. It may have obscured whether something was in stock, but I forget.

I would argue that is worse than open refrigerators as you now have to also cool the heat producing TVs.

We spent all this money to replace inefficient open refrigerators with glass door ones just to undo it for advertising...

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