Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It’s Now a $200 Million Fiasco.
Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It’s Now a $200 Million Fiasco.
Where the fridge cases were previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door-size computer screens instead. These “smart doors” obscured shoppers’ view of the fridges’ actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer: ads.
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These internet-connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens Inc., frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often, they caught fire. But store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10-year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler Screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US locations like this one. It planned to install 35,000 more.
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On Dec. 14, Avakian’s team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat, and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through one by one. Some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, “assorted sports drinks & coffee.”
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Sometimes you can have a thing that isnt a computer. Sometimes you can just have a glass door. I promise it's okay.
When I walk through my house I have sweet motion activated lights and doodads that I have spent hours tweaking and I enjoy thoroughly.
In the bathroom I use a switch.
Not everything needs to be "smart"
I have my bathroom fan turn on if the lid has been open more than 45 seconds ... some things you just don't (yet) know you need to be smart :-D
For me, all of our lights are smart (some bulbs with smart switches that talk to the smart bulbs and some just smart switches), but, everything needs to be able to function like it's dumb ... nothing needs an app to function. The wall switches will function as expected ... home assistant adds additional functionality, voice commands add extra functionality, but, it all works as you'd reasonably expect it to if you just go and hit the wall switch.
Okay I'll admit the fan thing is clever..
In tech, SMART is an acronym. I shit you zero nots, this is for real.
Self Monitoring And Reporting Technologies
Fuck SMART everything. I am fundamentally at odds with telemetry, what is it up to half our mobile data plans are lost to advertisers? W.t.f.
@AbraNidoran@beehaw.org already took care of what SMART means and is good for, so, I'll address what the spirit of your message instead.
For me, _almost _nothing in my house phones back anywhere with telemetry. Sure, anything that uses WiFi needs the network to run, but almost nothing has access to the actual internet because it's on a VLAN that specifically blocks internet access.
If you plan out the equipment you buy, you can ensure it's safe (the absolute easiest way to do that would be to only buy z-wave or zigbee equipment since by design that's a completely offline ecosystem, unless you buy a controller for it that requires the internet). With WiFi, I basically only buy stuff that can be flashed to ESPHOME, which removes its online requirements and puts a completely different firmware on the devices ... this is more work than most people would want to do though, but you can always buy devices that were already flashed by someone else. IIRC, there are even some devices that come that way from the factory and use ESPHOME as an option. Or, they're devices where I bought the sensors and microcontrollers and wired them up myself and put ESPHOME on the microcontroller.
For me, I love walking into a room and the lights turning on. If it's night, the lights are red to not jolt me awake. Later in the night, they're dim and a bit more orangey rather than bright white. These are QOL improvements that I would not want to go back to not having.
My garage doesn't have any of the standard RF "clickers"/4-digit-code-panels connected because they're garbage, but I have a relay sitting on it that I can remotely trigger and open the garage. I have motion sensors so that if no one has been in the garage for the last 5 minutes and the door is open, it'll close the garage door (this was because people kept forgetting it was open.) I have sensors to let me know when the windows are open at the same time as the heating/air conditioning to try and prevent burning money. None of this is internet enabled, but it is controllable over my network and my network is accessible over my VPN.
If the humidity is high in the bathrooms, it assumes someone is taking a shower and turns on the exhaust fans if they're not already on. This can help prevent mold from growing. There are some real benefits to things being smart and I do 100% agree with you that apps that send data to companies on when we're home/away and all that are BAD, but, if you plan ahead you can have your cake and eat it too, but the number of choices for equipment you'll have will be lower, but at least your stuff will keep working regardless of internet access and regardless of whether the company that made the equipment is still around or not.
That SMART acronym is for internal computer drives, has been in use since about 1995, and is a wonderful thing - the drive keeps track of how many errors it encounters reading, how many bad sectors on the drive, how many hours it's been powered on, and a whole bunch of other stats.
And then, you, the user (/sysadmin) can, while sitting at the computer, get a report of all these stats and notice if the drive is starting to fail so you can plan a replacement instead of it just dying unexpectedly.
Someone might have made an acronym for "smart" light bulbs, but it would be completely unrelated to the internal computer drive acronym.
Hey thanks for fleshing that out for me. That takes me back, makes me think of sitting in my room listening to RATM I just downloaded and burned off Napster and defragging the computer.
I miss the Internet of old. Before everyone got on it. We had hope then
Same, I'm running homeassistant. Things that are out of the way like PC under desk get WakeOnLan from HA, or chandeliers, and grow lights for my wife's indoor trees get smart treatment. Kitchen lights are switches, because if I'm in the kitchen I will be by the switches and opening phone to launch HA app and scroll to a smart light button would take much longer.
I've got small dumblights that are motion-activated and run on AAA batteries. Bought one for the bathrooms specifically so getting up in the middle of the night to take a leak doesn't involve turning on the full light. They worked well enough (and they were cheap enough) that we now have like 6 in various places.
But think of the ads we can’t play! THE ADS!
Have they tried subscriptions? I've heard it's the next big deal after ads.
Install electrochromic glass. Sell Walgreens Prime subscriptions that will allow you to turn off ads and untint the glass.