When Supermarket Freezer Doors Have Screens With Ads – Slashdot

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…In the olympics of stupid ideas
There is an old saying: “I know I am wasting half my advertising dollars, I just don’t know which half.”
I’d really like to know how much of this crap has been actually measured for efficacy. Do these disruptive screens actually generate more revenue than the stores lose to annoyed customers? I’ve grown an active aversion to products that push intrusive advertising, and would guess I am not alone. Ads that go from annoying to actively hindering my normal daily life are a bridge way, way, too far.
The ever expanding flood of ads everywhere surely has reached the points where it is no longer half the advertising dollars being wasted, but more like 90%. It wasn’t too long ago that a number of companies tried pulling their online ads from various services only to see zero change in sales. Maybe marketing departments need to get more rigorous before just slapping screens with ads wherever humanly possible.
I’ve grown an active aversion to products that push intrusive advertising, and would guess I am not alone.
As always, every day brings us one step closer [youtube.com].

Do these disruptive screens actually generate more revenue than the stores lose to annoyed customers?
Stores don’t even need to annoy or lose customers for this to be a bad idea. Hiding products from the view of customers is going to reduce sales even if customers don’t feel annoyed.
I’d upvote you if you weren’t already at +5.
When people go shopping they usually have a list of things they need. They are going to do what they can to check off the ‘Tea’ line on the list, but if the tea is actively hidden they will eventually give up and try to get it somewhere else, thinking the store has stopped carrying tea.
I just wait for these displays to get hacked and show illegal or disturbing content.
That would probably put an end to that foolishness.
The best thing to put on them is facts about how badly the businesses who have them behave– tax avoidance, worker abuse, funding odious causes that actively harm people… That both avoids allegations that you’re damaging people’s fragile little minds, and puts the companies in the position of having to prove the messaging false if they want to argue about it in the public sphere.
How predictable, modded down for opposing the orporatocracy. Why do the boot lickers get so many mod points?
The root issue is that some idiots/administrators (yes I know that’s redundant) wanted to both let the customers see what’s behind the doors and advertise related products elsewhere within the store. Actually fairly reasonable assuming they can do it at a cost less than any extra products they can sell by doing that. But obviously, that isn’t the case.
Material better insulating than glass can save electricity if they can sort out how to prevent obstruction of what’s inside. But I don’t think advertising does that.

if they can sort out how to prevent obstruction of what’s inside. But I don’t think advertising does that.
They could just not put a giant 4K screen. A screen the size of a sheet of paper is already a good opportunity to advertise related products to the customers who get close to the fridge, while not obstructing the contents significantly.
or if the 4k screen depicted what’s inside instead, along with adverts
The screen would depict what should have been in the fridge, not what actually is. A transparent door, on the other hand, can’t get out of sync.

The screen would depict what should have been in the fridge, not what actually is.
The solution to this has been invented quite a while ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org]
You only need a special device looking at what’s inside. I hear they even put such devices on phones nowadays!
You can have a layer of glass, a few millimeters of air, 2nd layer of glass. That’s pretty well insulating, with the air layer being wide enough to hinder conduction but so narrow that convection is mostly blocked. Vacuum would be even better (nothing but radiative transfer) but unsafe given how roughly these fridges are handled.

This just screams that someone found a solution that no one had. You can look through the glass to see the contents. The screens add friction to this, and friction reduces sales.
Part of their misguided idea is that you’ll have to open every damn door to find stuff, and maybe just maybe you’ll buy an additional thing or two.
The truth is that it’s just another place to get someone to pay for ads. No one cares if they work or not, you get to sell ads, and that’s what’s really important.
Regardless, this is one of the worst ideas in recent tech ‘innovations’.

This just screams that someone found a solution that no one had. You can look through the glass to see the contents. The screens add friction to this, and friction reduces sales.
Part of their misguided idea is that you’ll have to open every damn door to find stuff, and maybe just maybe you’ll buy an additional thing or two.
Forcing everyone to open the door instead of at a glance “window shopping” also means that those freezers will have to work much harder to keep the temperature down to safe levels. It’s a huge waste of electricity, and if the “aging” freezers can’t quite keep it may it decrease food safety. Stores aren’t going to make many friends when the new setup results in them getting half-melted ice cream.
If this becomes a thing here, I’ll make it a habit to prop open the door with some handy box of frozen food, until it goes away. One anti-social turn deserves another.
Good idea! Jam all doors open with super-glue in the hinges!

The screens add friction to this, and friction reduces sales.
The screens also add to the stores’ electricity usage and cost. Firstly, they are putting out heat next to the cool area and they will result in the doors staying open for longer as people hunt for items that they could previously see through the doors.
Came here to say exactly this, and to give some real-life examples.
Lately at a grocery store near me, for some odd reason the lights have been out in all of the frozen food section. It is off-putting, unattractive, and impractical. It makes choosing a frozen pizza or ice cream difficult. So one must open the door to get a better look inside, which of course wastes a lot of energy while one just looks around.
Adding to such an energy-wasting scenario is having the freezer door glass frost-up after opening the

While rows of glass were a little claustrophobic at first as I was used to the open air feeling of the old freezers
Dude, you’re not supposed to be climbing into the things!
Covering the (perhaps unengaging) marketing with another marketing concept. Getting a little meta there. Maybe little ouroborofic.
Boggles that there’s already a mature, established industry dedicated to designing and placing packages for just the purpose you state. To be seen and desired and selected and purchased.

Now if you’ll excuse me. =Peers around engagement device to grab some veg-medley.= Which was…on the list. Not just popping into my mind at the freezer door.
Sorry I had to open each one t

I’m not buying it; because I don’t know it’s there. Seeing a product on a shelf should be all the advertisement you need to sell your product. Also, if I am at a grocery store I don’t want to see car ads, movie ads, or political shit.
LOL! Display ads for weight loss clinics on the frozen junk food freezer doors!
Now, a small display built into the glass that DOESN’T obscure the product… something you could use to throw up a notice of a special or identify the contents of the cooler from a distance, that might be worth it.
Then again, that might get people through your store faster, and usually they want to make you wander a bit so you’re more likely to make impulse purchases.
Home Depot does this with “smart” pricetags on appliances. They don’t move, and they’re always up to date. I don’t hate these one bit. I just look for yellow background that says “this shit’s 40% off”. I don’t like the CEO’s politics, but I don’t like ANY CEO’s politics, so I can’t hold that against anyone in particular.
Just wait until they discover that means they can use ‘surge’ pricing!
Then, there is the slowdown of everyone looking in the freezer and opening doors one by one. One person may do so, then there is a line that person causes, so more and more start following suit until effectively the freezer doors are always open. I already see people fighting in the grocery stores around people who just hold the door open snd stare blankly into the abyss, so this will just make the problem worse.
Never shop at Krogers. Thanks for the heads up.
In the past I worked on a couple promotional ad campaigns that utilized a cooler/vending machine with an LCD display but it was specifically a transparent/translucent LCD where you can either have any black or white appear clear(-ish, there is some haze) specifically because it had that dual ability and didn’t lose the ability to see inside and in fact overlay relevant details against the items inside.
Examples
https://www.planar.com/product… [planar.com]
https://prodisplay.com/lcd-led… [prodisplay.com]
Looking at these articles and eve
These screens are quite large and OLED is quite expensive.
The door is fully opaque.
I just read Cooler Screens’ FAQ and what it says is that the contents are displayed on the screen, they have cameras on the back of the display to check the stock so the screen can be updated, and there are some proximity sensors on the front so that it can detect people for the purpose of showing them ads (or not showing ads when they get close, it wasn’t clear) and measuring “dwell time”.
In theory this is a reasonable thing
Yeah for sure they are pricey (especially the OLED, bad example on my part, I’ve used that exact screen, its around $14K) but my estimation was the large transparent scenes are pricey because they are low volume, the method of manufacture is not all that different from a standard LCD, it has a different setup of layers and polarizers so someone with volume contract could in theory get the price dropped.
I think people would be still be not super pleased at having a transparent display blasting ads at them bu
If these could provide meaningfully good augmented reality experiences, I wouldn’t hate them – I even might like them – but I just know that some fuckwit is going to use them for evil, so if they’re never built that’d be great.
If they are made, they’ll inevitably be used to display German scat porn over the chocolate ice-cream one day, and I look forward to mocking that event on social media with everyone else. With a little luck, they’ll be regulated into a smold

According to Walgreens, the screens froze or went dark, showed incorrect products or prices, and even sparked and caught fire in some instances. Cooler Screens, on the other hand, blamed what it called Walgreens’ aging and poorly maintained electrical and refrigeration infrastructure for the technical difficulties.
I rather doubt that “poorly maintained electrical and refrigeration infrastructure” was responsible for displays which “froze or went dark, showed incorrect products or prices, and even sparked and caught fire…”.
That said, there’s plenty of stupid in evidence on the part of both parties who went ahead with such a hare-brained scheme when it had several kinds of “fail” written all over it from its very conception.
If I was forced by a lack of viable options to shop in a store with these odious screens insta

Showing the wrong products or prices screams user error.
Could be network failure, too. Or just really dumb software, but we know they’re having hardware problems.
Yeah thanks but I have a TV at home I can watch, no need to go to the grocery store.
” Cooler Screens is now suing Walgreens, claiming the pharmacy chain obstructed a nationwide rollout of the technology and demanded its removal from stores.”
Does anyone not see this as a win-win situation? If Cooler Screens wins, the screens will be removed… and Walgreens apparently wants to remove the screens anyway.
This whole concept just seems like a breathtakingly stupid idea.
Sure, they could put a big screen with an advert in front of it.
It seems our society is made of ads built on top of ads. Eventually someone has to buy something beyond what they would normally buy for this system to work. I find it difficult to believe that the level of ad revenue is really proportional to any increase in consumer spending.

… printed a sheet of paper, ‘TEA’ …
I get it, half the customers open the door, then spend 30 seconds deciding what they want. Black doors means they open every door then start thinking. I suspect the cost of the displays, the cost of refridgerating them, the cost of customers opening every door, will be way more than the few dollars/hour increase in sales, all this work generates.
Another interesting point: those fuckers are heavy. It’s very easy to tug them hard enough to open a glass door, only to have a telescreen swing all the way past the point where it latches open. Leaving it that way is one way to voice one’s displeasure with this misfeature in a way that will be felt in the pocketbook.
Look into Cooler Screens and Walgreens leadership, and note something.
Note the grift? Walgreens should be suing Cooler Screens.
I can’t wait until hackers start displaying porn on these things. Got milk?
If I ever encounter one of these I will be curious if it is easy for a customer to disable. Maybe there’s a cable in the hinge of the door that can be disconnected, or cut. If I can’t disable them nicely, I will damage them as much as I think I can get away with, and encourage other to do so as well.
When I see these things, I’m tempted to walk over to the hardware aisle, go pick up a hammer, and then make holes in every fucking telescreen I see in the cooler aisle.
I mean, I don’t, ’cause I’m not an asshole, but I can’t say I’m not tempted.
I would never, ever, under any circumstances, buy anything that sits behind one of these screens. There isn’t a single thing in the grocery store you absolutely need, just skip buying anything behind them, buy something else that isn’t hidden instead, and this idiocy will go away.
This will only continue if idiots that think they need that one exact product from that one store keep buying them from behind these screens.
… I’ll just keep the freezer doors open longer. Will the revenues from those ads pay for the higher electric bills?
Personal ads are going to follow you everywhere.
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