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"
- Tech bros are a disaster
- The only problem (one I REALLY have to nitpick on) that I could see this fixing is sometimes the windows are fogged up, making it hard to see what's inside.
  
  Vinyl decals were invented in the 1960s
  
  There are industrial water repellents that fix this
- InOvAtiOn
- This has to be an actual thing, right? Techwashing has to be real phenomenon.
  Rube Goldberg being vindicated about technology yet again.

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.
The Secret Fate Of All Lithium

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

Trash future predicted this.

These are gonna be chests full of loot in my postapocalyptic setting called Fridges and Freezers™
- Post apocalypse fridges are never gross enough. A closed fridge with any food in it is a petri dish after a day or so if it'd not working
  
  Flashbacks to when my sister’s refrigerator died like the day after she left town for a month
- Looks like a monster full pile of loot.....
  2 gold.

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.

They took them off the doors of my local Walgreens

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

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"
- Leave your job as CEO to found a start up that does the most useless, worthless thing you can imagine and use your remaining pull to sell your old company a service contract to use it for 10 years. Then sue them when they figure out the product is killing their profits and try to stop using it.
  Innovation is using your money and influence you got from being wealthy and influential to trap the largest target you can into a predatory rent seeking business arrangement.
  
  Looks like he went from making a tea and cafe company to this shit, which is also a great illustration of capitalism. He starts with making something physical and helpful to actual people in real life, but it isn't profitable enough. You know what is? Ads and data tracking, something which doesn't actually produce or make anything physical, or even helpful, but in our capitalist hellscape actually is more profitable, and more attractive to VC's.

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

We live in the stupidest dystopia

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

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
- Half the ad revenue of a freezer door can't possibly be worth the cost of manufacturing a screen that size, never mind the engineering for cold and being swung around, never mind even the cost of electricity to display the ad.
  
  Read the article, it wasn't. The screens cost thousands and generated several hundred dollars a year max while barely working. It's why Walgreens dropped the deal.
  
  The ad revenue is worthless compared to the facial recognition data it can generate. They've all got inward facing cameras, and most have outward facing ones. The company gets the absolute best marketing data they possibly can: demographic information, a face to match to other information, what products you looked for, how long you shopped around for a product, which products your ultimately bought
  It's an immensely invasive system but incredibly lucrative for the company. Millions of data points for millions of shoppers nationwide to sell off

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.

This is very similar to an episode of Silicon Valley.

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

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