Startups’ Tech For Displaying Ads On Walgreens Cooler Doors Is On Fire…Literally
from the bzzzt dept
We tend to talk a lot around here about advertising, given how closely intertwined tech and digital industries tend to be with ads and the like. And frankly, given how often we’ve beat the drum that advertising is content and content is advertising, it’s become all the more clear in these modern times that good advertising really is useful if not also entertaining, while bad advertising is far worse today in comparison to bad advertising from times past.
But when the advertising is wrong, or the platform cumbersome to use, doesn’t work, or even (for example) occasionally sparks a fire, that takes it all to a whole new level. I’ll preface this by saying that we’re going to talk about a lawsuit for which I have not seen the court filings, because the website for Cook County Illinois, where you’re supposed to be able to look up case filings, is broken beyond repair. So we’ll have to rely on Wall Street Journal’s reporting on this, covering startup Cooler Screens lawsuit against Walgreens for exiting a contract between the two companies.
A test by Walgreens of technology that replaced some cooler doors with digital screens that play ads has ended in acrimony. The digital screens’ vendor, Cooler Screens, is suing the pharmacy chain, saying that Walgreens obstructed an agreed-upon nationwide rollout of the internet-connected doors and demanded their removal from stores, according to court documents.
Walgreens, meanwhile, says the technology from Cooler Screens didn’t work. The retailer said it ended its agreement with the vendor in February, according to the court documents.
“Customer experience is a top priority for Walgreens, and we terminated our contract with Cooler Screens earlier this year due to their failure to meet contractual obligations,” Walgreens senior communications director Emily Hartwig-Mekstan said.
I’ve actually seen these things in production, having a Walgreens I visit on occasion a couple of blocks from my office in downtown Chicago. I never really paid much attention to them, but did notice on more than one occasion that the contents of the cooler didn’t match what was on the digital front of the cooler door. It’s been an occasional annoyance for a couple of years now.
But that doesn’t appear to be the extent of the issues with these Cooler Screens. The screens are supposed to show a variety of things when someone walks up to them, cycling between targeted ads for goods within the store, information about items that are on sale, the content within the cooler itself since you can no longer see through the door, and the pricing for that content. They look something like this GIF, taken from Cooler Screens own website:
But according to Walgreens, there are all kinds of problems with these screens, including some dangerous problems that make them decidedly less than cool.
But technical issues meant the simple act of grabbing a soda from a smart cooler could be fraught with frustration and even danger, according to court documents filed by Walgreens with the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois.
The doors’ digital screens regularly froze or went dark, preventing customers from seeing what was available inside, and some even sparked and caught fire, according to the court documents. The screens also often showed the wrong products or prices, or didn’t show when products were out of stock, according to the documents.
For its part, Cooler Screens is blaming Walgreens for all of the above. It says the fires were due to poor electrical work and bad coolers. The stock and pricing problems are said to have been Walgreens’ fault for not providing accurate information to Cooler Screens to display. The lack of ad revenue Walgreens was able to collect was due to it not allowing the full rollout of the product to all 2,500 contracted stores and only to 700 of them due, well, you know, the fires and the wrongness and all of that.
But there’s such a thing as QA testing and this doesn’t seem to be working at all. And I can tell you, being in the technology industry myself, that you don’t agree to roll out a product to a customer without doing the due diligence to ensure it will work properly. Yes, there are things that a customer may be responsible for, but you don’t agree to put a product in place that could start a fire if the customer hasn’t held up its end of the bargain, period, paragraph.
Notably, Cooler Screens, which has Microsoft as a backer, also isn’t sharing some of the relevant information when it comes to its performance metrics.
Microsoft-backed Cooler Screens said it has not removed its technology from Walgreens stores. It declined to comment on its roster of advertisers and current clients, although it said it operates a nationwide network of nearly 11,000 screens. Gregory Wasson, a former chief executive of Walgreens, is one of Cooler Screens’ co-founders.
CVS Health had tested Cooler Screens’ technology in a small number of stores, but no longer has them installed in any of its locations, a spokesman for the pharmacy chain said.
I suppose something could come of the lawsuit that would change my mind on this, but this has all the stink of a vendor not doing its job properly and now trying to enforce its contract anyway.
Filed Under: advertising, displays, retail, screens
Companies: cooler screens, walgreens
Comments on “Startups’ Tech For Displaying Ads On Walgreens Cooler Doors Is On Fire…Literally”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Crazy insane idea; just make it regular plexiglass. No screens. No advertisements. Walgreen is a company worth billions, they don’t need revenue from ads.
Why does this startup exist? Why did anyone buy into this? Is Walgreens run by actually functionally braindead mental patients? You don’t need a TV to see what products are available or not available. If they’re there, they’re available. If they’re not available, ask an attendant. Even Toom could do this. I don’t understand.
Re:
You won’t find the proper locker of a product that is down to few pieces easily, then. A picture of them is a better visual aid than some small scripted sign. And the small print on packages regarding the ingredients could make for a healthy dose of on-demand magnification.
And plexiglass isn’t the greatest see-through material: the illumination inside of the lockers may be better spent on its surface.
So there is potential for improvement regarding usefulness and energy.
However, “potential for improvement” is not the same as “improvement”, and plexiglass doors should be the actual benchmark to beat, not to disregard. By a significant margin. You cannot offset the required cost by third-party ads since unrelated information will directly kill the usefulness.
The doors need to be enough of a driver to primary revenue that the store will be willing to pay for them because people prefer the provided help.
A full-size opaque non-live display will not do the trick. If the light goes on inside only with door opened, and maintains a photograph from last time the light was on, keeping tabs on the products so that I can ask any door “where do I find product X” and it pinpoints the aisle and shows a current snapshot so that I know whether that is worth the trouble, we are talking.
Well, except for the people who want the product behind the doors I am blocking with my query.
The plexiglass benchmark is not to be underestimated.
Re: Re:
Is it common to have plexiglass doors on grocery freezers? I’ve mostly noticed them being made of actual glass. (Though I only tend to notice the material when it’s broken, so it’s possible I’ve overlooked a lot of plexiglass.)
As for using pictures to show item locations, it’s a good idea—also for the employees who need to restock the freezers (who tend to use paper printouts showing the desired layout). A label on the shelf’s edge is probably best for everyone: readable with the door open or closed, and visible when the product’s gone.
Re:
There are Reddit forums specifically on Walgreens pharmacies. The pharmacists and technicians who work there might agree with you on “brain dead”. Barely functional technology, bad staffing decisions, terrible pay scales, the whole works.
Well said.
and plexiglass doors should be the actual benchmark to beat, not to disregard. By a significant margin. You cannot offset the required cost by third-party ads since unrelated information will directly kill the usefulness.
I think that the installation costs of these types of advertising systems tend to be mostly covered by the company that makes them, with the promise of profit sharing in exchange for the locations and exposure.
The fact that they actually block customers from seeing what’s in the cooler is…fucking idiotic. Is one expected to stand there and wait for the screen to cycle through its presentation of options, interspersed with ads from third parties?
If I walked into a store and saw those large, nearly floor to ceiling screens, there’s a pretty good chance I would just see them as advert screens, ignore them, and continue looking for a glass front fridge before walking out, trying to figure out why the store no longer stocked refrigerated items.
Wouldn’t most people just treat these things like teenagers treat regular refrigerators at home? Walk in, swing it open, and just browse, sparing not one iota of concern for the electricity wasted as the fridge warms up?
I guess it’s been long enough that retailers have forgotten that wasted energy and warm fridges were 90% of the motivation for glass doors in the first place.
Is it far fetched to think that your new internet connected fridge with video door thingie will not be subjected to endless ads?
Re:
I rather doubt that the contract allows Walgreen to install adblockers on the doors.
/insert Ron Burgundy “I don’t believe you” gif here
It takes only a minute or two of thought to make many of the flaws evident. If you actually believed in customer experience, you wouldn’t have even signed the contract.
Re:
“Customers are experiencing ads, so give us money to put your ads on our freezer.” Customers being happy about easily finding products isn’t the only possible meaning of “experience”.
here's my idea...
When I walk into Walgreens or any store, I know what I want, so putting up ads of stuff on cooler doors doesn’t work for me, it just obscures what I’m looking for.
How about if I use the Walgreens’ app to say “I want to buy X, Y and Z” and the ads tell me exactly where those things are?
Oh screw it, I’ll buy it off Amazon. I think I’m reinventing a technology that already exists here.
Re:
There are stores that have this feature, such as Home Depot. But what business-person could resist the temptation to accept money from the maker of X′ to suggest you buy it instead of X?
not made clear
Are these Special unit for SALE to customers, or Only display to SHOW this small frig?(I dont see a list of consumer complaints)
If these are for customers, WHY do you want an integrated Internet device you CANT CONTROL?
Would make for a GREAT addon to a security system or baby monitor. Otherwise I dont need to be adverted AT HOME unless you are cutting the price in half for the unit.
While I hate the idea of pulling the ads on/near the cooler, I can’t help but wonder…
Why not just mount screens above the coolers? If they wanted to be clever about it they could incorporate it into the store signage for that section (i.e. putting a picture of a product that would be in that section on the screen and rotating every few mins).
Re:
But that wouldn’t sell the far more expensive and cool, cool technology of large display cooler doors.
Even stupid bespoke advertising monitors can’t be that cool.
Re: Re:
…well, not literally cool, with them being on fire and all. But that’s just a minor detail, right? I’m sure they’ll eventually put out an update to fix it.
Now what would be useful:
An app that sends my shopping list and gets the GPS coordinates of the respective goods so that my mobile plots a path through the shop where I pick up stuff.
And if the shop is clean out of stuff and I check for the rest at shops I rarely if ever visit, or the shop rearranged everything for the umpteenth time so that it takes a month until I know by myself where everything is: no problem, just pass the remaining list to the other shop’s app.
Privacy nightmare? You bet. It could be defused to some degree at the protocol level. Problem is that nobody would be interested in supporting a system allowing for privacy.
Re:
Walgreens is actively against privacy: “Access Denied / You don’t have permission to access “http://walgreens.com/” on this server. / Reference #18.ae79ca17.1696772386.20205fa3″ (That’s when trying to view it in Tor Browser. Heaven forfend we learn their privacy policy or the location of their closest store.)
That would make it difficult to develop a third-party app that privately pulls data from Walgreens and their competitors, many of which do the same thing. A first-party app would, at best, direct you to the next-closest Walgreens if your preferred one were out of a product.
If your phone can accurately track your position within a large store (that is, away from any windows), it’s probably not doing that via GPS. Without specialized receivers, the signals tend to be too weak. Also, if you find you the store difficult to navigate without computer assistance, it probably needs to be redesigned.
Re: Re:
There are limits to what design can achieve. Frequent annoyance of mine is looking for fresh yeast. It cannot be together with other baking products since it needs to be refrigerated. It doesn’t have relevant food group relations with other refrigerated items, and the total offered amount takes up a rather small volume.
Consequently, every supermarket has its own hard to discover location for it. It’s not a revenue driver: it reliably is the cheapest refrigerated item to be had. Indeed my backup discovery strategy is to just scan the shelf price tags and look for the telltale minuscule amount: that is particularly useful if yeast is actually sold out and you want to make sure you have not just overlooked it.
Re: Re: Re:
Yes, it’s hard to discover, and I don’t see a good way to fix that with design. But the design to make it easy to find is trivial: any kind of sane numbering/lettering system. So your phone (or a stack of printed pages hanging at the end of each aisle) could tell you “the yeast is in fridge 5, door A, second shelf from the bottom; near the pickles”—without needing billions of dollars of satellites, and a specialized inertial navigation system and/or high-sensitivity GNSS receiver.
(That’s one area where I think Home Depot gets it wrong: what most people would perceive as one long aisle, from the front to the back of the store, actually has an entirely separate numbering system for the back sections. And not something simple like 101 for the front section and 201 for the back.)
Fact here
The cooler layout is set up by employees. If the screen location and pricing doesn’t line up, it’s the employee’s fault.
These doors have the ability to be a major cut into environmental issues. Knowing where the items are, what they cost, without opening the door.
The doors are better sealing and hold cold air better than clear glass doors, even with the heat from the tech running the screens. That’s a fact, coolers maintain their temperature better with these doors. This reducing the cost of cooling.
It is the store employee who put the item in the wrong spot. It is the store employee who didn’t enter the correct, or changed, price.
This mess is caused by the retailer, not the screen provider.
Re:
Oh, I don’t know about all locations, but
Some of the trial screen and stock systems tell you how many of a product are in the shelf. I’d you need 5 and they have 1, yo don’t need to open the door to look around.
Again saving energy.
Re: a poor substitute
Assume that they consume no energy, give off no heat, and work perfectly.
Best case, they reflect what is inside, to wit, a shelf full of goods with prices on the shelf. You have successfully replaced a glass door with technology. Not seeing a benefit here.
But what if they work as intended? If they rotate through adverts and showing inventory, I am seeing a screen of adverts where I need to see goods from which to choose. That is a clear degradation of service to the store’s customer.
The mitigation is worse: instead of looking through glass doors to find my preferred beverage, I now have to open the doors one at a time until I find the right one. And if it takes me a moment to decide, as I hold the door open, the refrigeration has to work harder.
So far I am seeing no benefit to anyone saving the screen vendor who is trying to sell my eyeballs. My suggestion would be that Cooler Screen take its screens, fold them to size, and insert them where they shall have no risk of exposure to sunlight.
Re: Re:
“Fold them to size”? Where’s the fun in THAT? I say we help them out by finding their CEO and giving him a demonstration of your concept, minus the folding. I would even volunteeer my services, along with those of four of my friends. Their help would likely be required to help restrain said CEO, since we would be performing the insertion with the screen in a SIDEWAYS orientation.
Re: Re:
I was attempting to sosge the “but not here” that will surely come up.
i cant speak for all locations and all rollout designs
. But have dealr with a few of the company’s trial setups.
I worked with a company that did digital POS and Kiosk work for Walgreens in the past and have friend’s within the company still. And the digital doors were interesting, so I leans on a few friends to get as much info and hands on play time as I could.
Let’s start with the doors. Which are triple insulated self venting doors. Vs the single pain clear glass.
From the data the company sent to trial users, the doors show a 10-25% reduction in thermal leakage costs.
The idea of adverts in my experience is misleading in this article. Based on interacting with the system at multiple Walgreens other Chicago area independent locations that have them:
Advertising on the doors switches to an inventory display based on proximity. Meaning you walk within 2 meter of the door and it switches to displaying the product, quantity, and price.
The door (ideally) shows you what is in the cooler unit, how many per item, the cost of the item, and the location.
Ideally a combination of competent employees stocking correctly, and a lack of lazy scum customers putting things in the wrong place, would lead to an overall reduction in cooling cost.
While also being a billboard for other store sales and information.
Re: Re: Re:
Okay… but triple- and quadruple-glazed windows are available these days, and could presumably be installed on a freezer door. A comparison against single-pane glass is hardly fair, and even then, you’re talking about a 25% reduction in “thermal leakage” at best. What’s the basis for saying a 25% reduction in grocery-store freezer leakage could have a “major” environmental effect? And I suspect that’s a best-case figure, when the doors are closed overnight; in reality, people open the doors so often during business hours that I doubt anything more than double-pane glass could be justified.
Refrigerant leakage from grocery stores is apparently a real concern (an Environmental Protection Agency PDF says they leak 25% of refrigerant annually, on average). As for heat going through open or closed doors/windows, well, stores still have lots of fridges and freezers with no doors—just an air curtain to keep the cold in. And the ones with doors normally have like 3 or 4 adjacent full-height doors that all open to the same area.
Without seeing realistic numbers, I’m sceptical that opaque doors could give any improvement worth talking about.
“Cooler Screens” are reminiscent of the shitty automobile rear-view mirrors that were common for many years that proclaimed “objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear”. Just another example of corporations shoving inferior CRAP down our collective throat rather than make any effort to fix it. I suspect that the hidden agenda here is to carve out space for some COMMERCIALS on these screens, otherwise why would they bother going to all this trouble?
Re:
A) objects ARE closer than they appear. That message is localised but in mirrors in most countries. That’s not a crap product/ it’s a fact of science in optical interpretation of a forward facing pair of eyes!
Second. This is no different than the giant posters they put on doors for sales.
Except,
Now you don’t need to open the door to see what’s behind the advertising. It switches to inventory automatically.
Again, that saves energy.
Re: Re:
It’s true, but you’re missing the point of why they’re like that. In the U.S.A. and Canada, objects in the driver-side door mirror are not closer than they appear—laws requires an undistorted mirror there, unlike some other countries—and so it lacks that warning. We could easily put the same type of mirror on the passenger side, but people would consider that “crap”: the field of view would be too narrow. So the mirror is distorted to provide a wider view, and the size-distortion is an inherent optical side-effect.
Re: Re: Re:
Uh, hey, you know….
Wow(. Never payed attention or noticed if the basics were there like lights, oil, doors, I just got in and drove. Never put much thought into the mirror
But now with you saying it… yep,
I remember a few here and there that didn’t have the notice. Lmao
Re: Re: Re:
My pet peeve is backup video my wife’s Subaru has. Pain to backup in a tight space, some is due to auto brake. (fun sound when brake engages for no apparent reason.
Safety first.
Cooler door product is just poor design or not understanding store foot traffic. Stores are a nightmare of product fighting for space and steering shoppers to stuff they probably don’t want.
so, dashing in the pharmacy for drinks is the simplest thing this product got wrong.