Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It's Now a $200 Million Fiasco 175
Walgreens Boots Alliance has ended a $200 million digital display venture with startup Cooler Screens after widespread technical failures and poor revenue, removing thousands of smart screens from its store freezer doors [non-paywalled link]. The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports.
Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian cut data feeds to over 100 Chicago-area stores in December 2023 during a contract dispute, prompting Walgreens to obtain a restraining order. Walgreens completed removal of 10,300 screens from 700 stores in August 2024, replacing them with traditional glass doors. The screens generated just $215 per door annually, less than half the contractual minimum, according to Walgreens. Nearly $50 million worth of custom-made screens now sit unused in a Texas warehouse.
Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian cut data feeds to over 100 Chicago-area stores in December 2023 during a contract dispute, prompting Walgreens to obtain a restraining order. Walgreens completed removal of 10,300 screens from 700 stores in August 2024, replacing them with traditional glass doors. The screens generated just $215 per door annually, less than half the contractual minimum, according to Walgreens. Nearly $50 million worth of custom-made screens now sit unused in a Texas warehouse.
Wait (Score:2)
Caught fire? Da hell?
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It sounds to me like their partner who supplied the screens and computer to drive them must have had some issues in the design of their electronics, or perhaps the things were installed improperly.
Kind of weird they wouldn't just work on addressing the stability issues however.
Re: Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
You do make a good point about hiding the inventory. They've been locking shit up to prevent shoplifting and it turns out it's cost them hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales to do that. Way way way more than they ever lost to shoplifting. Of course the shoplifting panic was really about trying to trick the public into paying for their security with tax dollars.
What pisses me off about this is with all the big data they knew this was a disaster to begin with. Just like locking everything up behind doors was a bad idea. They would know within a few weeks to a few months at most exactly to the penny how much these new processes cost in lost sales and they did it anyway. It makes me question their actual motives.
I mean there is being incompetent and there's being staggeringly incompetent. I find it hard to believe anyone would be so stunningly incompetent but they could look at the report that says these things cost more than they could ever make back at the test stores and then rolled them out all over
Re: Wait (Score:5, Interesting)
It has also turned out under questioning during a quarterly conference call that there was no outbreak of excessive shoplifting (no, not even in "urban" San Francisco) and that the Walgreens executives were, how does the NYT put it, misspeaking about that to try to cover up bad financial results and mass resignations of pharmacy employees.
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" It makes me question their actual motives."
What if firms no longer need actual sales because they make more from stock market returns, which might actually increase the harder they sell the shoplifting panic story?
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Now if you could find a way to let all the billionaires know that you're running that kind of a scam so that they steer clear of it while also getting plenty of investment and stock purchases from anyone with a net worth under $1 billion dollars then yeah it might work. The problem is it's really hard to keep a conspiracy like that under wraps.
Don't g
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The most obvious thing about "locking things up" is that it's often done for the wrong reason.
The stuff that should be locked up are drugs, nintendo switch games, and anything small enough to be tucked into a shirt worth more than $50. Ever since the 1980's, I've not recalled a time where video games were not locked up/hidden somewhere else in the store from where the display was. Toys R US had the best version of this because they would have an aisle of video games, that had tear-off pick-tickets (think co
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Probably just really, really, cheap "engineering" overall. As can often be found when some "great" (but really stupid) idea is put into practice.
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Why couldn't they just have tried this out in a few locations to test it out before jumping head first into the whole thing?
Seems like a huge investment into untested technology.
Re:Wait (Score:4, Insightful)
At first I thought it was interesting...but like the article said, I soon found what was on the door was NOT representative of what was in the cooler.
Not long after that, the screens were glitching....another time in the store some of them were just turned off...
Most recently past month or so...they'd removed them and replace with plain glass doors.
This really sounds like a solution in search of a problem....I mean, it's EASY with a glass door to readily see what's in stock and what you'd like to drink, etc....why fsck with the electronic representation of what it thinks is in there?
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It's often said that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the public but it just isn't true. People know when they're being badly done by and they respond.
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But surely after you open a couple of doors and don't find what you are looking for, you are going to give up and try a different shop?
In other words, even if you were attracted by what they were advertising, if it isn't actually behind that door, it isn't going to convert into a sale.
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It has a refrigerator on one side, and still caught on fire. That is some real fail there.
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It has a refrigerator on one side, and still caught on fire. That is some real fail there.
Condensation is a harsh mistress.
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But you know about that up front.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Caught fire? Da hell?
That's what caught my eye; and the subtlety of it....
"...showed incorrect inventory, occasionally caught fire; caused one store to explode from the shock wave from a short circuit. No biggie. Until it comes to the money, then it's Wal War MMLXII."
Re: Wait (Score:2)
At the quantity in question is it really shocking there was 1 or 2 incidents?
It's not a good thing, but they had a lot of screens.
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Well with a name like Arsen Avakian, are you surprised?
Re:Wait (Score:4, Informative)
The cooler door company was co-founded by Greg Wasson....drumroll.....former CEO of Walgreens.
He was also CEO of Walgreens when they were touting Theranos. This is gangster on gangster violence.
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That's gangsta! These were installed in the walgreens near me, one of the "flagship" low-carbon stores. It has 2 windmills, a sophisticated heat pump energy storage system, natural + low wattage LED lighting and these screens on the refrigerator doors. I thought these screens might be a way to optimize fridge use or something, but they were not kept up to date with inventory and most people's reaction was negative. They're gone now AFAIK.
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... one of the "flagship" low-carbon stores. It has 2 windmills, a sophisticated heat pump energy storage system, natural + low wattage LED lighting and these screens on the refrigerator doors...
Hairpin turn from the topic here, but I wonder if similar genius was involved in hanging 400W space-heater plasma displays, notorious for their burn-in issues too, over the Low Carbon Whole Foods checkouts to display which register numbers are open... You can still feel them radiating heat when you walk under, but at least now they look like hell.
Re:Wait (Score:5, Funny)
Humans don't know how to send power through hinges reliably yet.
It's always the hinge wires. Or DNS.
Re: Wait (Score:2)
More like Da Frost.
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My guess: someone forgot that thermal cycling between sub-freezing temps and room temperature every time the door is opened means the cold back side of the door gets very wet.
Terrible idea (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody must have been looking at the video display on a gas pump and thought, "Hey, I've got an idea for something even more annoying!"
What kind of sadistic bastard came up with this, and that kind of idiot at Walgreens bought in?
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I hope this experience motivates Walgreens to avoid repeating this mistake, and that other major chains follow suit.
I generally don't cheer when others suffer, but in this case, the suffering may ultimately serve the greater good.
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How about smart displays embedded into all the floor tiles themself? There could be a touch screen on your shopping cart where you enter the items you want, and the floor lights up with different advertisements, patterns, and arrows to tell you where you should go to first for the closest item on your list or for a surprise discount on items you may want.
Re:Terrible idea (Score:5, Funny)
r/FoundSatan
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How about we don't enshittify the entire store, and if someone needs directions to where a product is in the store, they use a database lookup from a smartphone app to just get the location from the planogram that every chain retail store creates to tell the employees where to stock shit, and plot it on a map of the store?
That way it's "opt-in" for the customer without being a ridiculously expensive and obtrusive shit show, and can be done with shit the retailer already does?
Re:Terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you know, have signs with big letters telling people what is in the aisle. No need to get technology involved at all. People are already staring at their phone screens while walking through a store, no need to encourage the addiction.
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When I was a kid we'd just flag down a member of staff and ask them. Hell, had to do that recently in a newly built store when they'd for some reason put the meatballs in a fridge next to the vegetable section.
Re: Terrible idea (Score:2)
Re: Terrible idea (Score:2)
This defeats the reason milk is always put at the back of the shop. Anything that helps customers is generally bad for profits.
Re: Terrible idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually there's a much less sinister reason for the milk being at the back. The entire back wall can be re-stocked from the storage side and without interrupting people choosing their items. The items that move fewer units get shifted out to the side walls, where someone has to restock them from the customer-facing side.
Re: Terrible idea (Score:5, Informative)
As the poor kid that had to re-stock dairy back in the 90s I can 100% confirm. Behind the milk is the entire dairy cooler. You don't want to waste precious storefront on a big walk-in cooler. Oh the milk soaked, wet, cold feet....
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With mandatory dance times.
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And yet again, the about only things people can ever think of for augmented reality (outside of a few industrial use cases) is directions and advertising.
AR isn't just headsets.
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If you want a floor that lights up and changes color, go to a nightclub or borrow their methods. This is a solved problem.
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Re: Terrible idea (Score:2)
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Re:Terrible idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Naa, they will simply try again, this time probably "with AI".
The greedy assholes behind that idea seem to still have their jobs, after all. They are likely incapable to admit they were at fault here, so they will do it again.
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I hope this experience motivates Walgreens to avoid repeating this mistake, and that other major chains follow suit.
I generally don't cheer when others suffer, but in this case, the suffering may ultimately serve the greater good.
I thought they were monetarily struggling and going out of business if they didn't close enough stores. I guess this is a write-off item... or something....??
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and that kind of idiot at Walgreens bought in?
Well based on what was said in TFS it seems Walgreens had a contractual profit obligation for these panels. That doesn't seem like a bad idea for Walgreens, and did seem like they covered their asses somewhat.
Hopefully the idiot company that started this goes under though.
Re:Terrible idea (Score:4, Funny)
Eh, some upper management had 'Advertising Initiative' on their yearly plan and so this happened.
They shoulda made the door screens available for gaming, so remote players could make customers watch them play.
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This is some Nepo baby's cash cow (Score:5, Insightful)
So you have to ask yourself why they did this in the first place and I would bet money somebody's brother-in-law or some such or somebody's body on another board of directors as a controlling stake in the company that made these screens.
It always annoys me how Americans we'll have an absolute conniption fit over the slightest government corruption but private companies can run roughshod over everyone and everything and we just shrug our shoulders... I mean so long as nobody who's rich loses any money. If that happens then people go to jail for decades
Re:This is some Nepo baby's cash cow (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like they would have known that locking everything up was going to cost them more sales than they ever lost and shoplifting.
Funny thing, one of the shops here (Europe) locked the liquor cabinet (only hard stuff) about two years ago. Lasted all of around 6 months because sales essentially vanished. None of the competition even tried it. I bought something from it once, and it took them more than 5 minutes to find the key. That already tells the whole story.
Re:This is some Nepo baby's cash cow (Score:4)
There is no way this wasn't tested and found to be lacking. You don't just roll out something like this with 200 million dollars to every store.
You don't know the details. It seems that these weren't bought and owned by Walgreens, it seems that they were just rending space on doors to another company who had a contractual profit agreement. Yeah you would roll this out if your wrote the contract in a way that pushes the risk to the other company. Not everything is about nepotism, even though it may look like it to the ignorant outsiders.
It always annoys me how Americans we'll have an absolute conniption fit over the slightest government corruption but private companies can run roughshod over everyone and everything and we just shrug our shoulders...
Same reason we would get angry at the government sending police to beat you up but don't give a shit if you cut yourself for your own pleasure. Why should any American give even one iota of a fuck about what happens to a private company contractually between another private company? I thought this was land of the free?
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BINGO!!
That doesn't line up (Score:3)
Remember the loss isn't just the cost of the equipment there is that The loss is all the lost sales. They would have known all of this going in.
Again it is possible that apps a fuckinglutely every person who runs Walgreens is an incredible moron who cannot do even the most basic reasoning. It is possible that when they were presented with reports
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I can see how the marketing meeting went. There are many people who go in just for a drink or something quick and sometimes linger around the frozen food section on what to get. So why not show them an add!
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Upper management has to justify their office space footprint somehow.
Goofy advertising gambits and cutting labor costs are the two easiest paths.
..."sit unused in a Texas warehouse" (Score:3)
All I take from this debacle is there are eventually gonna be a bunch of really cheap huge displays to hack for cool maker/art projects.
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based on walgreen's current show of competence, I bet they sit there for 10 years and then they throw them away to save in storage costs.
...as long as there's a tax write-off and they haven't filed for bankruptcy by then. Or maybe this is the beginning of the plan to have a reason to close more stores. *ducks*
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They'll be written off to sit next to a few Atari ET cartridges soon.
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[New Mexico open landfill gate]
Re:..."sit unused in a Texas warehouse" (Score:4, Insightful)
Sitting next to redbox machines?
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Would be a good mod for Cyberpunk 2077.
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All I take from this debacle is there are eventually gonna be a bunch of really cheap huge displays to hack for cool maker/art projects.
...could use them as a base for pottery projects. You just have to wait until the right moment for the kiln to unpredictably activate.
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Which apparently are quite brittle and even catch fire when half of it it exposed to freezing temperatures.
Yeah, no thanks.
And nobody with a clue is surprised (Score:2)
Bad idea is bad idea, no matter what technology it uses. I am surprised they found any revenue increase at all. Probably just a bad measurement...
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What I want to know is how many stores they tried this in before finding out that it was a stupid idea. The sensible thing is to try it in a handful of stores, not only to shake down the hardware issues, but to find out if it was even worth the effort. Even a hundred stores should have been more than enough to drop this turkey of an idea.
Cooler Screens had already installed 10,000 smart doors at Walgreens locations across the country and had plans for 35,000 more
At one point, Cooler Screens went so far as to cut the data feed to screens at 100 stores in the Chicago area.
So they had 100 stores with this just in the Chicago area alone. Holy crap what a bonehead move. Just another reason to replace your middle management with AI!
This was stupid (Score:2)
What about for consumers fridge displays? (Score:2)
Give me a standard dock on my fridge that connects to power and a WiFi antenna. Let it run a tablet with a bistable paper-white LCD touchscreen. Or not, but I like the low power always-on of that.
There are all sorts of apps you could run on that, things you'd use. Family calendar, email, streaming radio, recipe book, VOIP speakerphone. Control any smart home stuff you have.
But another ad location in a commercial fridge that stops me from seeing what's behind it? Bah!
Re:What about for consumers fridge displays? (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you are why things continue to get more shitty every quarter. There is zero reason, or need, to connect your refrigerator, or any appliance, to a network. Ever. For any reason.
The only thing an appliance should do is what is was created to do. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Exactly.
They were doomed from the start... (Score:2)
You walk through forests of metal aisles in search of something to slake your thirst. After far too long a time, you finally see a row of magical doors...all displaying fleeting images of enticing beverages. Fleeting because the image is soon replaced with an advertisement, taking almost twice as long as usually to actually find what you're looking for...
You finally manage to spy
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The sad part is, they didn't provide any more information than the transparent glass doors. Why do I want to see a picture of what's allegedly in the refrigerator when I can just look through the glass door and see what's actually in there?
They were as annoying as hell. Glad to see them gone.
Good, good. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The displays will probably get recycled into showing ads at bus stations and the like. This isn't good news, but chances are that if there's any income potential there, it would happen anyhow. May as well use up the surplus hardware.
Good (Score:2)
'nough said.
Yeah, these were shit (Score:5, Informative)
I met a fair number of these in Walgreens. They have motion detectors on them, so they just sit there being black until someone walks by, then it shows a sort of virtual image of what's supposed to be where in the cooler, and prices.
It was never accurate, and you couldn't see through them, so you had to open every door to find what you want. Instead of just, you know, looking through glass, finding the thing, and opening that door to get it.
Just further enshittification of the real world, "Wow, we could put a big screen here! And show ads on it!" I'm glad it crashed and burned (though sad I never got to see an actual crash or burn, that'd be amusing) and it's good to see glass doors back.
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There are a load of industrial displays hitting the used market soon. Only catch fire occasionally.
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Sure, I'll buy some if they put 'em up for fire-sale... Perhaps replacing whatever cheapest-possible-electronics in there with my own stuff might even solve the combustion issue.
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Or it may not even be necessary. The fire problems could easily be related to the constant motion or the constant cold/warm cycle from opening the door constantly. Think about how much the regular glass ones condensate when you hold them open. Once you close them back they're all fogged over. On these things all that condensation is on electronics.
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Maybe, but it sounds like a massive waste of energy TBH.
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"Wow, we could put a big screen here! And show ads on it!"
Personal opinion, anytime you hear, "We'll make money on advertising," they're probably not going to succeed.
Complexity to the Moon (Score:2)
Stop making everything more complex just because we can.
Walgreens customers obviously are paying for this fiasco.
Marketing departments gone awry (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the sort of thing where the marketing department wasted a quarter of a billion dollars and yet somehow nobody lost their job over it. I've seen this time and time again. I've worked on the implementation on similar idiotic schemes where hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars are spent, thinking that if they can just grab one extra piece of information and target one specific ad, they can magically turn it into a money-printing machine.
Bill Hicks had the best idea for marketing people.
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Put someone high up was able to check off being pro-active and get their yearly bonus.
Walgreens fell for Theranos too (Score:5, Insightful)
Walgreens fell for Theranos too. Maybe they should avoid high-tech stuff for a while
Going for gold... (Score:2)
...in the olympics of stupid ideas
We don't need displays on refrigerator doors
We don't need most so-called "smart" appliances
We need reliable appliances that last a long time and are repairable when they fail
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Agreed. We need twice as efficient insulation on our refrigerators far more than we need them to have a microchip or display of any sort.
We don't need to control every single little thing in our house from our phone. I mean lightbulbs; there are Wifi lightbulbs. Wifi lightbulbs that require an active connection to the cloud (unless you DIY a local server). Who in their right mind thought that was a good idea?
Prof. Patrick Winston at MIT was prescient in the mid-1980s when he derided the idea of, "a micro
The management are morons (Score:4, Insightful)
Origin story (Score:2)
Now those screens could be the start of an affordable gaming tables startup
This is so fucking funny (Score:2)
The ONLY people wanted this (Score:2)
The ONLY people wanted this were the manufacturers of these TV-doors and the numbnuts at Walgreens who were gullible enough to think this was a good idea.
I guarantee you that no customer ever said "I wish I had to open a glass door to see what was behind it."
Nobody rides for free. (Score:2)
No value for money at the big box Pharmacies (Score:2)
I avoid these stores like the plague. The prices are too high, and the amount you get for the price seems small.
I a grocery store pharmacy.
Burying the lede a bit (Score:2)
Hey this thing that is supposed to be cold.. why is it burning??
ain't broken don't fix it (Score:2)
Try shopping in your own damned stores. (Score:5, Insightful)
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When the CEO is named Arson Avakian they should have expected a few fires.
I looked it up.. The AI screwed his name up. It's actually Bic Avakian. /s