Where the fridge cases were previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door-size computer screens instead. These “smart doors” obscured shoppers’ view of the fridges’ actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer: ads.
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These internet-connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens Inc., frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often, they caught fire. But store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10-year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US locations like this one. It planned to install 35,000 more.
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On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one. Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”
Sometimes you can have a thing that isnt a computer. Sometimes you can just have a glass door. I promise it’s okay.
But think of the ads we can’t play! THE ADS!
Have they tried subscriptions? I’ve heard it’s the next big deal after ads.
Install electrochromic glass. Sell Walgreens Prime subscriptions that will allow you to turn off ads and untint the glass.
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When I walk through my house I have sweet motion activated lights and doodads that I have spent hours tweaking and I enjoy thoroughly.
In the bathroom I use a switch.
Not everything needs to be “smart”
I have my bathroom fan turn on if the lid has been open more than 45 seconds … some things you just don’t (yet) know you need to be smart :-D
For me, all of our lights are smart (some bulbs with smart switches that talk to the smart bulbs and some just smart switches), but, everything needs to be able to function like it’s dumb … nothing needs an app to function. The wall switches will function as expected … home assistant adds additional functionality, voice commands add extra functionality, but, it all works as you’d reasonably expect it to if you just go and hit the wall switch.
Okay I’ll admit the fan thing is clever…
In tech, SMART is an acronym. I shit you zero nots, this is for real.
Self Monitoring And Reporting Technologies
Fuck SMART everything. I am fundamentally at odds with telemetry, what is it up to half our mobile data plans are lost to advertisers? W.t.f.
@[email protected] already took care of what SMART means and is good for, so, I’ll address what the spirit of your message instead.
For me, _almost _nothing in my house phones back anywhere with telemetry. Sure, anything that uses WiFi needs the network to run, but almost nothing has access to the actual internet because it’s on a VLAN that specifically blocks internet access.
If you plan out the equipment you buy, you can ensure it’s safe (the absolute easiest way to do that would be to only buy z-wave or zigbee equipment since by design that’s a completely offline ecosystem, unless you buy a controller for it that requires the internet). With WiFi, I basically only buy stuff that can be flashed to ESPHOME, which removes its online requirements and puts a completely different firmware on the devices … this is more work than most people would want to do though, but you can always buy devices that were already flashed by someone else. IIRC, there are even some devices that come that way from the factory and use ESPHOME as an option. Or, they’re devices where I bought the sensors and microcontrollers and wired them up myself and put ESPHOME on the microcontroller.
For me, I love walking into a room and the lights turning on. If it’s night, the lights are red to not jolt me awake. Later in the night, they’re dim and a bit more orangey rather than bright white. These are QOL improvements that I would not want to go back to not having.
My garage doesn’t have any of the standard RF “clickers”/4-digit-code-panels connected because they’re garbage, but I have a relay sitting on it that I can remotely trigger and open the garage. I have motion sensors so that if no one has been in the garage for the last 5 minutes and the door is open, it’ll close the garage door (this was because people kept forgetting it was open.) I have sensors to let me know when the windows are open at the same time as the heating/air conditioning to try and prevent burning money. None of this is internet enabled, but it is controllable over my network and my network is accessible over my VPN.
If the humidity is high in the bathrooms, it assumes someone is taking a shower and turns on the exhaust fans if they’re not already on. This can help prevent mold from growing. There are some real benefits to things being smart and I do 100% agree with you that apps that send data to companies on when we’re home/away and all that are BAD, but, if you plan ahead you can have your cake and eat it too, but the number of choices for equipment you’ll have will be lower, but at least your stuff will keep working regardless of internet access and regardless of whether the company that made the equipment is still around or not.
I like the cut of your jib.
I have flood lights outside I put together from fog lights, motion sensors and lux level sensors, just in case something comes up on us in the night. I’m off-grid and battery power is always at a premium, so usage sensors are a hedge I’m willing to make.
Good. What an awful concept. A whole bunch of extra screwing around trying to keep products aligned with what’s on screen along with maintenance and running costs; just so you can piss off your customers with a worse experience and waste more of their time with advertising nobody wants.
If it helps, they also lock a lot of product, requiring employees to come and help customers directly.
https://eurweb.com/2025/walgreens-theft-prevention-struggle/
It’s like they made their stores as hostile as possible to shop in.
The only reason i go to Walgreens at all is for my medication. I’d gladly go somewhere else but they strangled out the competition. It’s literally the only place that consistently has my medication.
the only place that consistently has my medication
is there a Costco near where you live? if so, you might give their pharmacy a try (you don’t need to pay for a Costco membership if all you’re doing is getting a prescription)
I had similar challenges finding a pharmacy that consistently has my ADHD medication in stock. a few months ago I tried Costco based on a recommendation from my doctor, so far they’ve been able to fill my prescription every month no problem.
Unfortunately Costco are on the other side of town. The Walgreens is three blocks away. 🤷♀️
It’s like they made their stores as hostile as possible to shop in.
I saw a tweet that called it a “weird deodorant museum” and that phrase is now permanently etched into my brain. it’s such a perfect description, similar to “private taxi for your burrito” for Doordash etc.
Ads are the cancer of Humanity.
i’ve got an ad-blocking DNS on home network and my phone, i use youtube revanced, i’ve even got a fucken apk patcher to strip ad shit out of mobile games. it’s WILD to me how tolerant people are of ads. like anytime someone’s showing me a video on their phone and an ad plays, i have to do a little mental math on whether it’ll be annoying or mutually beneficial to just start playing the video on my phone instead.
and it takes such little effort to get rid of them! i’m constantly offering to teach people how to use patchers or revanced, folks are just like “nah it doesn’t bother me” MAN, HOW? sponsorblock alone is a goddamn godsend, sometimes more than 30% of a video is just ads and self promotion! how does anyone happily throw away their time like that‽
People value their time far loo low. You’ve only got a limited time on the planet. Don’t waste it listening to people telling you what you need to buy.
I love what Sao Paolo in Brazil did: banned all outdoor advertising. I’d love to live in a place that did that. https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/
Doesnt the state of maine also ban outdoor advertisements.
I feel this so hard. Ads and PtW are slowly becoming the only business model because we have stone-age-level impulse control. Hopefully, someone like the EU eventually unfucks it and we switch to micropayments to cover server costs.
The only way it could get worse is if they started banning anyone too poor to properly whale.
Nah. That would make it better. The whales can go whale in their little ecosystems and we can keep using and making the fediverse better.
That’s true. At least there’d be a wave of people forced to discover better ways. It’d suck for things like YouTube videos that have too much overhead to be free, though.
Since I posted this, it also occurred to me that predatory lending could make it’s way in. That’s how a lot of other underclass-serving businesses work.
I would definitely recommend reading the full article. There’s all kinds of hilarious tidbits. Like that the Cooler Screens ceo Arsen Avakian’s leadership seems to be rather fiscally disastrous wherever he goes. Or my favorite bit:
Avakian discussed the concept that would become Cooler Screens with friends in Chicago business circles, including Wasson [co-founder of Cooler Screens]. As head of Walgreens from 2009 to 2015, Wasson is most remembered for overseeing its fraught international merger with Alliance Boots, a European chain. But he also bet on technology, gussying up its pharmacies with tablets, acquiring e-tailer Drugstore.com and leading the company’s $140 million investment in a then-promising startup called Theranos. (Oops.)
Jeepers fucking creepers, you would think that Walgreens/ big corporations in general would do some kind of background investigation or get a PI to find out if they have any skeletons in their closets that would prove fiscally harmful if entered into an agreement. Their total lack of operational security and basically saying ‘Yes, Daddy, please?’ when presented with an opportunity from the same guy that dragged the company into the whole Theranos debacle is flabbergasting.
Wasson set up a demo meeting with billionaire Stefano Pessina, Walgreens’ largest shareholder and his successor as CEO, with whom he remained friendly after departing the pharmacy chain. “‘We’re not tech guys,’” Avakian remembers the Walgreens team saying. “‘Prove it to us.’” He and Wasson say that based on their PowerPoint presentation, the company approved a six-store pilot program for 2018.
A fucking POWERPOINT is all it took even after Theranos to convince them of this boondoggle.
You weren’t kidding! This is a rollercoaster ride of incredible twists and turns!
The problem, according to three former Cooler Screens executives and a former Yahoo executive, was that their clients thought of the screens as “shopper marketing,” an old-timey ad category that covered in-store promos like the balloons or cardboard displays that clerks hang over cases of beer. Spending in this area was far lower than the more lucrative digital ad rates Avakian hoped to charge. One of the former Cooler Screens execs says that Avakian wanted marketing dollars well above what the industry was willing to pay and that his lieutenants could be preposterously condescending on calls with the Yahoo sales team, which at times devolved into shouting matches. “The Yahoo people hated them!” this former exec says. “Their MO was to ride them [Yahoo] like Secretariat.” (A Cooler Screens spokesperson says that this description is inaccurate and that Avakian’s relationship with Yahoo executives remained positive.)
Condescending calls with Yahoo sales team. Fucking hilarious.
Agreed. Avakian is fascinating because he’s so entitled in the article. If someone doesn’t want to buy his product he just rails against how unfair they were to him.
Bro: it’s business. If your product were nearly as good as you claim it is, you wouldn’t need to force people into using it.
Also, the end of the article points out that Walgreens has been terribly mismanaged and is a very low-performing company, and they’re still experimenting with screens, just not with Avakian. Hilarious.
Comedy gold, except for everyone who has to try and shop at a Walgreens.
They just keep finding interesting ways to fail!
Things like this move me to imagine a world completely devoid of ads. “But how would you discover a product you didn’t know you needed?” I don’t care. I would go without that product. That is preferable to me.
The Walgreens closest to me had those installed for maybe a month before they went back to glass doors. Fucking hated those things. Completely annoying when they’re working as expected.
I don’t really understand how Walgreens is still in business. I only go there when I need something that the grocery store pharmacy section doesn’t carry and I’m not willing to wait 1-2 days to have it shipped from Amazon. Every time I go, its a ghost town with more employees than customers.
It’s honestly the corpse of a retail store being dragged along by a perfectly healthy pharmacy. Every rx sold, regardless of what the customer pays, nets Walgreens the full value of the script. So when grangran runs to Wallygreens to pick up her no cost diabeetus meds, walgreens gets the full 1000+$. And that’s every script sold, every hour of every day.
Oh, that sounds like a sweet deal. I should have been aspired to be a corporation instead of a normal person.
No, it’s the opposite. The pharmacy doesn’t make a ton of money, that’s why they expanded to have all the other stuff.
I was a certified technician in that pharmacy for 5 years. I can tell you with confidence that is patently false.
This is incorrect from all angles I’ve seen.
Look what they own and look what assets are being held. They’re what I like to call a shell company
I live in a very small city with a Walgreens and 2 CVSes, all within a mile or so of each other, and they all seem pretty busy. We also have a Walmart, a medical supply store, and a small neighborhood pharmacy, as well as two grocery stores. I think how busy your local drug store is is pretty variable. We do have a college in town and also a pretty active main street with a lot of shops and restaurants that bring in a lot of tourists and people from neighboring towns and bigger nearby cities.
But like, we have kind of a lot of CVSes and Walgreens around here and they all seem to do well enough. I don’t think it’s just that we’re in a college town. Though, again, we do have a lot of colleges in general.
I hope the company goes out of business.
We live in Idiocracy.
You can thanks capitalism for poisoning our cities, towns and soil with an extremely dangerous neurotoxin (lead).
FUHHK YEWW ahm GATORADIN’
Hahaha fucking weasel dumbasses, hope your ad revenue will cover your service contracts!
You love to see it
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Tech bros when I show them a revolutionary new peice of technology that allows people to see through it (its called glass):
You know what else they could have done, as a compromise? Make the ad screens partially transparent, by stippling the pixels, or by having glass sections, or by turning the LCD completely transparent for part of its refresh… there are many ways to not be anti-consumer garbage meant only to jump in front of eyeballs.
But how do I serve real time ads?
Project it onto the glass
Hilarious.
