why do they have doors with screens telling you what’s behind the door when they could just have glass
Cameras above each door to gather data.
Ads on the doors.
Because EVERY SINGLE SQUARE INCH OF EVERY SURFACE MUST MAKE PROFIT.
I would complain and stop shopping there, and encourage others to complain as well. Hell leave the doors propped open to help people see what’s inside, even though it’ll run up their electricity bill and spoil the contents. Aslo remember to bring in one of those window-cracker car safety things and have a go at breaking the screens if you want to be even more rebellious.
I read about this, and it’s the ads. Full wall animated ads.
I also instantly predicted this obvious outcome. And hope it happens go any place that installs them. Fuck billboards invading every inch of our lives.
“We have determined that we’ll be able to fill 80% of the user’s display with advertising before inducing seizures” ~Nolan Sorrento, Ready Player One
To kill the planet faster you dummy.
So they can show ads for 2 minutes, and whats actually behind the glass for about 5 seconds.
It allows them to control the appearance and impression of the products more. A huge amount of store design is based around making the stuff appealing and thus increasing the chance you buy it.
Hence the huge pyramids of apples or the bountiful overflowing stock of vegetables. They’ll generally not even sell a half of what they end up stocking, but if they just stocked what people were likely to buy the shelves would look barren and off putting, and people may be less likely to come back there.
Even if a glass door on these fridges was perfectly functional and arguably better from the average person’s point of view, the screens give the marketing team more opportunities to spin their products. The goal of a store is not to provide you with what you want and need, but to convince you that you want and need things you don’t actually.
I wish they’d realize that many people don’t give that much of a shit. Not that they don’t give a shit, they give a shit… But just not as much as they think.
For real, these digital displays never change what I went in there to get. I look for the section labeled with the thing I want, I get it, I pay, I leave. Not once have I gone “damn that fake Sprite covered in fake condensation looks so refreshing, I think I’ll get that instead.”
I guess it has to work on some level though, or those no way they’d be paying for those instead of simple panes of glass
It’s subtle. No one is looking at the fake condensation covered sprite and saying “aw man, this one looks so much more refreshing!” It’s all happening behind the scenes. You gravitate towards the one well lit, stacked up so that it’s easy to grab. Easy to see labels.
The insides of coolers are kinda gross looking if you let even a little bit of maintenance slip. Frost, condensation on the inside, weird rollers that don’t like to put the label outward if it wasn’t stocked properly. Shitty florescent lights. Being able to eliminate that just gives the store a lot more control over the all-critical first impression.
It’s subtle, or it might not be real at all.
AFAIK, nobody has ever proven that those kinds of ads actually work, or at least they haven’t managed to attach a dollar value to the ads. But, everyone is afraid not to do it. Also, to a certain extent, advertising is also a prestige thing: you’re not doing it just for your (potential) customers, but also to flex on your competitors.
I’m not even talking about ads, really. Just item presentation. Making your stock of the exact same item more appealing than another places, or making one brand of an item more appealing influences people to buy that one, as opposed to the other.
The idea is the same with the digital displays. You don’t have to worry about what the item itself actually looks like, within reason, it’s always going to appear at first glance to the customer to be clearly labeled, bright, fully stocked, and ready to grab.
You say that but in theory the numbers disagree cause theyre still spending on it
Yah, these kind of things don’t tend to work as well as marketing people think. The influence is marginal, and mainly a grift on the part of the company selling them.
It’s also another revenue source.
Old system: Haagen-Dazs pays the store a large slotting fee to be on the shelf of the freezer that’s at about chest height. Ben & Jerry’s pays slightly less to be one shelf higher or lower. Store brands and bulk ice cream go on the lowest shelves or above head height.
New system: Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s buy ads to be shown on the freezer door. They aren’t like TV ads, they’re just static displays of the containers of ice cream they want to market, but now instead of poorly lit, possibly ice-encrusted containers of whatever ice cream is currently available, they get to promote whatever ice cream they want you to buy. They probably still also have to pay for slotting fees, though these might be lower if the door is a huge screen.
And then you open it to find an off-putting empty shelf with a half opened sandwich from the other side of the store…
Now you don’t have to make sure everything is stocked neatly. But I think they are bullshit and will not buy from them.
I thought. If you change where the products are, or replace the products wkth different products. You can just keep it updated and change it over. But then I thought. Well, if you’re replacing the products, then you’ve got the door open. Then it’s literally no extra effort to just replace a piece of paper.
Whereas here, you’d actually have to change it from a PC, and make sure you put it all in the right place.
I think it’s about keeping the inside items labels facing the front and looking clean and maybe better than the actual product looks on the shelves.
Kind of like how a burger looks better on the ads than in real life.
But if they’re not stacked neatly, you’re wasting 2x the energy after I open the door because then I have to search for it.
The CEO is doing a favour for one of their friends who is the CEO of the display door manufacturing company
they’re not actually worth it, any potential benefits are outweighed by the cost and mainenance of the massive displays and the software needed.
Better insulation; what others are saying is just what SEOs will do with it once implemented but AFAIK the main purpose is more efficient refrigeration.
[brovoice] imagine the savings from using just painted fiberboard when everyonetm has ar glasses on!
If only there was some kind of transparent material we could make freezer doors out of so you could see what was in them.
Unfortunately this isn’t Star Trek.
ironically, transparent aluminum is real
Yeah, we call it “ruby” for red, “sapphire” for not-red, and more generally “corundum”
To be entirely fair, the glass doors are terrible for refrigeration efficiency because the glass is far less insulated than the door with the screen is. It might actually save electricity by powering a screen that shows a picture of the product over a insulated door than just having a glass door.
This implementation looks ugly as heck of course but if there’s a big enough energy efficiency gain I suppose it might be worth the trade off
You can make insulated glass doors fairly easily. Just sandwich a gas between layers of glass. Look at any modern window for an example.
Still not as insulating as a thick door with the manufacturer’s choice of insulation material. Double/triple pane glass is far better than a single pane window but a window is still a window
Then how would you be able to hide a camera for facial recognition?
Or display ads on the screen to eke out a little extra cash?
Because glass was too complicated.
It’s so they can use facial recognition to determine which products you are most interested in
They can simply count which products are being sold more / run out of stock more quickly.
(But I get that they probably bought into the hype of AI)
It doesn’t store your personal face but it can detect what you are most interested in buying giving corporations better data on how products should be priced. I still think it’s gross
how products should be priced
So grimace and recoil in horror at everything, got it
More importantly, it gives them demographic information (sex, age, race, etc). Can’t get that from just sales figures.
Get that good surge pricing going for everything.
You look drunk? Prices go up 30% while they flash booze ads at you.
Stoned? Cheetos are 250%. Two giddy teenagers looking for condoms? Price them sky high motherfucker!!
Don’t give them any ideas…
The company apparently uses AI to process faces to determine gender, approximate age and mood in order to try and figure out which products the person might want.
I learned this while trying to find tech specs for uhhh… research purposes.
They don’t need a screen for that tho
Where are these, so I can never see them in person
Walgreens has them installed in 700 stores because a previous ceo signed a deal with a company that provided them.
The CEO of the company providing them? Was also a previous, different CEO of Walgreens. Sure looks like a buddy did another buddies startup a favor, likely for a kickback.
The current Walgreens CEO canceled them, and is being sued for it.
Its walgreens CEOs all the way down.
sounds about right, no one actually thinks this is a good idea, at least not after seeing one of them installed.
it’s just money laundering or whatever the technically correct term is
aren’t these the people who bought theranos crap too
as socrates once put it:
the meat riding is insane
They’re in the bad place
hahaha… babe… us… we are right here, yeah///
One of my local markets (a Kroger brand) has these. They’re even more unpleasant in person.
SEPHIROTH
It just works so well!
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Plot twist: that’s not paper
This is 100% what those new transparent OLEDs will be used for.
If only there was some technology that would let us see through glass
The good news is one they’re replaced if you can score a working unit for little to free it’ll make a awesome TTRPG table.
Any store installing that crap (it fortunately hasn’t arrived in my country yet) will lose me as a customer. I know it won’t hurt them, but I’m not dealing with shit like that.
