cooler screens

tags

Adtech Bubble

Notes

I laughed at this comical, ridiculous-on-its-face "innovation" in retailing, falsely confident that it would not cross the desert

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these were the good days, the first phase of the Cooler Screen's invasion, when they were both limited in number and merely mediocre.

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Despite my leftist tendencies I am hesitant to refer to "late-stage capitalism." To attribute our modern situation to such a "late stage" is to suggest that capitalism is in its death throes, that Marx's contradiction has indeed heightened and that some popular revolution is sure to follow. What is to say that things can't get worse?

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Some Walgreens employee has printed a sheet of paper, "TEA" in 96-point Cambria, and taped it to the wall above the door.

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Surely, things can't get much worse. Surely, these must be the latter days.

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There must have been some sort of untoward influence, corruption by exposure to a Bad Element. Somehow, computers got to him.

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Avakian, researching the branding and presentation of his packaged premium teas, was dismayed at the appearance of retail beverage sections. "Where is the innovation?," he is often quoted as saying, apparently in reference to the glass doors that have long allowed shoppers to see the products that they might decide to buy.

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reported that "a big barrier for MillerCoors is that half of shoppers aren't aware beer is available in drugstores." I find this a little surprising since it is plainly visible next to the other beverages, but, well, these days it isn't any more,

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entirely disrupt this tie between placing products and placing advertising.

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purpose of the Cooler Screens is therefore one of disintermediation and disconnection.

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The actual products in the store aren't the important thing; the money is in the advertising space.

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The screens are, at least anecdotally, frequently wrong in their front-facing display of what is and isn't in stock. Generally they present the situation as being much better than it actually is. That this provides a degree of cover for Walgreens faltering ability to keep Gatorade in stock is probably a convenient coincidence.

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the poor performance and reliability of the Cooler Screens is not only a contention by Walgreens but also a firm belief of probably every Walgreens customer with the misfortune of coming across them.

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as a customer approaches they are supposed to turn on and display a graphical representation of the products in the cooler that is similar to—but much worse than—what you would see if the cooler door was simply transparent.

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It is ironic, given the name and purpose of the cooler screens, that they are not at all cool. In fact they run very warm, hot to the touch. I cannot be entirely sure of my own senses but in a recent trip to a Walgreens I swear that I could feel the heat radiating from the Cooler Screens as I approached the section, like an evening walk approaching a masonry wall still warm from the day's sun.

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I suspect they have a thermal problem. The whole system probably worked fine on a bench, but once manufactured and mounted with one face against an insulated cooler door, heat accumulates to the point that the SoC goes into thermal throttling and gives up on real-time playback of 4K video. The punishing temperature of the display and computer equipment leads to premature failure, and the screens go dark.

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One of the strangest parts of Cooler Screens, to me, is Cooler Screens insistence that consumers like them. I have never personally seen someone react to Cooler Screens with anything other than hostility.

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Everyone is in agreement that this is a bad situation.

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Cooler Screens shares no information on the methodology used to collect these metrics.

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