Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It’s Now a $200 Million Fiasco

"what if we installed a thing that was less functional and more expensive and required a lot more maintenance and also introduces new problems on top of solving no existing ones"

"Brilliant give me $200,000,000 worth"

Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”

Lol. Lmao.

Every so often, they caught fire.

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When I saw these I couldn't help but laugh. What a dumbass idea. They were worse in every conceivable way

Between this and the locked goods thing from earlier this week, I'm beginning to think we have not put our best in charge of the livelihoods of a lot of workers.

These are gonna be chests full of loot in my postapocalyptic setting called Fridges and Freezers™

Trash future predicted this.

So....not shoplifters but shitty off the wall management decisions yet again.

They took them off the doors of my local Walgreens

I sort of wonder if we're close to peak "Tech for speculation's sake". This constant pursuit of solutions in search of problems can't hold up forever.

Walgreens has seemed to me to be shrinking and slowly going out of business over the last decade or so... why the fuck would they make such an obvious fuck-up like this?

Wait, the CEO of the smart screen company whose product occasionally bursts into flame is named Arsen? Are you kidding me?

: “Do you like my innoVOOSHUN, poors?”

I couldn't stop grinning throughout this whole article. A perfectly farcical representation of American capitalist "innovation"

So like, when people say we can't increase wages because it will result in higher prices, are they also against investing in useless things like this because it will increase prices? I've heard people say the former alot, rarely have heard the latter.

whites are just more innovative. other races stay jelly

https://archive.ph/9LMO2/35bd1edc129d44acb71899518c0c783e9a530b48.gif

Just a giant shitshow and confluence of utter morons at all levels. Highlights:

• The main guy in charge is a scam artist
• The former Walgreens CEO who partnered with the scam artist invested $140M in Theranos, and is therefore a complete dipshit
• They don't even make the screens themselves
• The scam artist is serious apple fanboy, and asked designers repeatedly to make the giant screens "more like an iphone"
• The scam artist wanted the doors to respond to voice controls
• The doors frequently just didn't work
• When the doors did work, they often didn't actually show what was inside of them because whoever set up the screen's images remotely had put the wrong things on it
• The ads didn't even make money
• Apparently fridge doors aren't standardized so they can't be used anywhere else now that Walgreens backed out of the deal, and there are $50M worth of panels sitting in a warehouse
• Walgreens is now trying out their own in-store screens

And these absolute fucking buffoons have more money than you or I will ever see.

With its cash dwindling, Cooler Screens shifted its attention to Kroger. Avakian persuaded the supermarket chain to agree to scale up from a small pilot to 500 stores. He told staff at a meeting around this time that the Walgreens deal was falling apart and heading toward litigation, but that its new business with Kroger marked the beginning of a turnaround. Avakian added that a Kroger exec had expressed excitement about their future together and said Kroger “didn’t give a f--- about Walgreens,” according to two attendees. (Kroger declined to comment.)

you hate to see legends beefing

this is still not as bad as the time I replaced all my computer screens with fridge doors

every new tech in retail they roll out is like this or worse ask me how i know

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. By this point, Walgreens had already tried to pull out of the deal and get rid of the doors, blaming what it says was glitchy hardware and software. But Cooler Screens had temporarily prevented their removal the prior June by suing Walgreens for breach of contract, seeking $200 million and demanding its screens stay in place. Unreported until now is that over the ensuing months of legal battling, during which Walgreens had countersued for monetary damages, Cooler Screens Chief Executive Officer Arsen Avakian decided to try a different form of pushback.

What a name

This is very similar to an episode of Silicon Valley.

We live in the stupidest dystopia