I hope that these things don't periodically switch from showing the actual products & prices to showing a full-screen ad for something. A movie theater near me does that with their screen-based menus. Very annoying to be trying to decide what you want and suddenly have the menu vanish.
It's a bit sad to think how wasteful these are. Not just the waste produced by producing the screens and powering them all day, but the fact that you can't reliably see what's in there by looking means people will just learn to open it and browse with the door open, letting the cold air out.
Edit: Also, does anyone know what the cameras are for, if not facial recognition or CCTV? I'm guessing it's eye tracking for market research. I suppose that could be anonymized and aggregated on-device in a privacy-preserving way, but you'd have to take their word for it.
They absolutely do. That's the main point of them in fact. Revenue for the supermarket. But really it's not a downgrade. Every package is designed to basically be an ad already.
> cameras > I'm guessing it's eye tracking for market research
It's possible the whole display is specifically for market research. Play with product placement and see what increases sales for the most profitable items.
> but the fact that you can't reliably see what's in there by looking means people will just learn to open it and browse with the door open, letting the cold air out.
Now that I know these exist, I kinda feel like being contrary and opening every single one to "look for" whatever it was I wanted.
One day someone will be hunched over on a sidewalk, dying of thirst, and a patrolling Nestle®-branded drone senses (using state-of-the-art machine learning "customer needs" technology) his predicament. The drone hovers there projecting a holo-ad about Nestles hot product "Nectar of Life" which is just water from the region's last remaining aquifer cut with brackish water from the coast. The ad ends with a map to the nearest vending machine and buzzes off for it's next engagement. The man, too weak to move, just sits there, nothing he can do except wait for another ad drone to come by.
Greetings citizen, this is RedFaceTwitBot 778 - my reinforcement ML model, combined with your latest interaction, matches your face expression with an uncontrollable anger toward Nestle® (score 97.8%) - would you like to join our "Capitalism is evil" page? First ten tweets are free and you can select from our collection of best anti-capitalist phrases (courtesy of Marxly, YC S2399).
The sad thing is, we engineers are building this dystopia. Maybe even fellow HN readers. Our next JIRA ticket in the queue is to shove another ad onto another previously unmonetized surface. Many of us are actively bringing about this world!
The engineer who built this grocery screen was probably highly compensated for it. The biz guys who just hi-5'ed each other for "crushing it" are too, and the entrepreneur is probably already a millionaire. Everyone's making money by being part of the problem.
I’m not a human psychology expert by any means but I’m afraid think this would probably still work in their favour.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is a thing because just having your brand name out there (even if it’s bad news) is better than it not being out there at all.
Fuck advertising and the greedy profit-driven place it comes from.
That alone is a huge benefit of this. Lack of clear pricing is such a big problem, keeping labels up to date - it's a labour intensive problem and 'labour' is a primary cost input for retail.
Of course, this aside from the actual sneaky things that they do.
If they don't jam these things with ads or confusion, I think it's going to work out well.
> Turns out that Monster energy drinks are found in the "no content" door.
So how did he find it? Obviously he went down the line of doors opening each one until he found it. If the doors were glass, he could have looked through each door instead of opening each.
I'll bet serious money the shop isn't paying a penny for this. They got sold on "cool, high-tech" display doors "at no cost to you". Or even, "WE'LL pay YOU to install these" (which would be some ad revenue split deal)
Seriously though, how does someone even come up with something this dumb? How does one go about thinking of and actually implementing this? How did the development process go through without someone interjecting "why the fuck are we spending $1000s on 6ft LEDs when we can just use glass?"
Some bean counter came up with the idea that they have a captive audience which they can force to watch ads.
I think this is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen. But to be honest, I won’t be surprised if this actually increases revenue since people are going to buy what they buy and it’s not like they will go to another store due to this.
I think I would go to another store due to this. I think that non-HN type people like my dad or my mom would probably go to another store due to this.
Not being able to see what's behind the glass makes it take longer to shop. People abandon webpages that don't load quickly enough - why wouldn't they abandon stores where you have to open each door on an aisle of refrigerators just to see what's available?
If everything works perfectly, if there are no bugs (like, y'know, the failed one in the pictures in TFA), if it correctly tracks inventory, and if the pictures that they use match what people are looking for... then it might work. In reality, it will not.
Recently, I ordered some hardware at Lowes for pick-up at customer service. The website said they had like 80 of these things in stock. I got a call an hour later from a worker saying they couldn't fill the order, though they could try it at another store. Apparently, the website's idea of their inventory, and the actual inventory haven't matched for any products since last summer. I expect this to be the case more often than not for these coolers.
Because changing stores is not as easy as clicking away from websites. This could be due to choice of items that are available, price, distance from home/office and so on. And, not to forget inertia/habits. Also, what’s behind those doors is only a part of the shopping list.
I think most people will be annoyed, curse it, and then get used to it.
I would love to be proven wrong since this is not the direction we should be going.
I think they are drink coolers without any moving parts (well I guess there's a compressor), not
vending machines. I bet there are cameras everywhere and you're expected to self-checkout. Or just check-out at a counter.
I recently bought something with self-checkout at an appliance store, so not groceries. Grabbed a thing of a shelf, scanned it at a touch screen terminal, payed for it with my contactless payment ring and just walked out. No human contact whatsoever. If that isn't future then I don't know what it.
I'd probably try to experiment with weird ideas like unsweetened beverages, carbonated coffee, carbonated tea, carbonated oat milk, and bitter flavours like orange peel.
Most people are incredibly dumb. This includes the rich and powerful; most of them just happened to be lucky enough to be born in the right place, at the right time.
Everyone here who’s worked for some moderately large corporation knows exactly why this was done: it’s a flashy pet project for some “labs” team in an otherwise boring retailer and maybe they’ll recoup some of the cost in ads, minus whatever they lose for it being an awful idea. Some charismatic product manager sold it to execs as “being the future of connected retail” or some other BS. In a few months they’ll be removed because it’s a stupid idea.
When the company that made these was analyzing their market, I have no doubt they were targeting this exact scenario knowing that even the stupidest products have a place to make a boring brick and mortar retailer think they’re doing technology.
As a rough estimate, what percent of US economic activity is large piles of money being tossed into a flaming dumpster for the sake of someone's ego? Because every year it seems higher.
Look at old Victorian clothes. Or even clothes from 50 years ago. Compare them to the clothes of today. Pretty different right? That's the cosmetics and fashion industry at work. You might not like it but at least they're causing real change. Contrast that with this invention which will no doubt go the way of the dodo without anyone even remembering it.
Eh, that’s also how projects happen at all, though. The failed ones seem like it was for the sake of someone’s ego. But you need a bit of ego, in a big corporate setting.
I think TFRC was an ego project, rather than an egoless project. Yet TFRC was a wonderful project that happened to work; if it failed, it might seem like an ego project with no point.
I don’t like saying “you need ego,” but it also seems true that you can’t find large corporate projects without it. Are there good counterexamples? I’d like to change my view.
Yes, however, tensorflow is not primarily an ad platform that forcefully replaces an alternative that no one asked for, while simultaneously silently advancing the police/corporate surveillance state at the explicit detriment of average citizens who had no say in the decision.
This is why it's important to try and negotiate for as much salary as you can, no matter what you do. Companies are lighting cash on fire all the time, they can afford it.
This. Once you see how the company spends money and how much they pay and effort they spend to hire an average skilled developer... It's empowering. Unfortunately lots of companies have just accepted high turnover rates and move forward. Imo they only do this because quantifying turnover costs is hard.
I agree, but I also meant literally whatever you do, because there are so many people who will work for 20 years never intentionally trying to increase their salary.
Doesn't every new innovation (produced by a corporation), good or bad, generally come from the experimental arm of said corporation (e.g, R&D division)? You have teams dedicating to maintaining the core business, and you have teams exploring areas along the fringe of your TAM.
HN's comments following Bitcoin's launch have made me acutely aware of how hostile we can be towards new ideas.
Your last point confuses me. Bitcoin has made some people richer, some people poorer, but it has not made the world a better place, nor found much use as a currency, and there’s still not a convincing case for blockchain as an important algorithmic invention.
Bitcoin came from an independent researcher. That's the polar opposite of a corporate research arm.
I'd guess that most innovation comes from startups and smaller companies that get acquired, or iterative product development that aligns with a company's primary focus (iPod, Office, Ford's electric pickup) and not from dedicated experimentation organisations.
Corporations are poorly setup to benefit from innovation anyway. The funding model doesn't encourage the right incentives, and true innovation becomes political. A classic example is Kodak's early invention of the digital camera, which was a threat to the companies cash cow.
Usually bad ideas die in a test phase. This is a pure money grab completely at the expense of the consumer. The question they asked themselves was, “how inconvenient can we make the shopping experience without alienating our customers completely, in order to extract more revenue at the expense of their experience in our stores?”
I thought the idea was that these would allow more insulation in the doors than glass, and that the energy use from the screen was less than the energy saved from cooling losses (but what is the payback from the manufacturing, shipping, install, recycling, repair etc?). I'm skeptical, but it is conceivably possible that it works out if the screens are very efficient, using off the shelf parts. Maybe.
Large panels like this emit heat. Any wins from better insulation are going to be offset by needing to keep the panel’s heat well away from the refrigerated contents.
Triple-paned glass insulates pretty well and for a fraction of the cost…
Triple pane glass with an e of .24 is still worse than 1.5" of polyiso foam. Glass is just not very good, even energy efficient glass is quite a bit worse than even basic insulation.
Either way they're doors. I'm guessing that increasing the frequency of door openings is an intended outcome of whatever they were thinking. A vending machine could be more energy efficient while providing exactly the same old consumer interaction disadvantages that are supposed to be a novel feature of this display.
Energy losses will be through the roof! To see what's actually behind half those doors, you have to open each one up instead of keeping the door closed and looking through it. Even when it's in "display the products" mode, are you really going to trust that it has the correct inventory configured when you're looking for your favorite beverage and can't find it? No, you're going to go down the aisle opening every single door to check for yourself.
If you insulate too good, the heat from display won't be able to escape, and you'll need a gap b/w screen and insulation, making the door even thinker. I'm pretty sure, by design, those displays are being cooled with the freezers behind them.
Plus you don’t need to open it to see product information (especially useful for visually impaired aka most people given how small those product labels are).
This is so exciting. I have to say, as soon as this pandemic is over, the first thing I'm going to do is attend a brand activation campaign or event and just... witness a brand generate awareness and build lasting connections with its target audience.
I do not blame cooler screen for selling this technology to anyone. But I want everyone to consider how much it takes to bring about a technology like this to a grocery store.
If this is any of the big chain groceries, the manager doesn't even have the authority to put a sticker on the glass door. This was vetted by hundreds of people and none of them thought... glass?
Business class tickets were purchased, hotels were booked, months of back and forth, daily meetings. Hundreds of thousands were spent on pilot programs like this one. Still no one thought... glass?
In my opinion, it's a silly idea. But I applaud the person who had this silly idea, built a company around it, got deals with screens, door, glass, and cameras manufacturing companies, and then convinced a grocery chain to buy this for their store.
I would really, really love to have been in that sales pitch meeting.
Edit: What bothers me the most about this, is that it will actually work. Any surface where eyes may fall on, will be replaced with an ad.
Yes. People see something dumb and decide the designers and business people involved are idiots. But often the business people and designers have very different goals and know that it's dumb. But they don't think it being dumb conflicts with their goals.
This is how the entire advertising industry works. Including digital and experiential marketing. I have personally set millions of customers' dollars on fire building doodads like these.
Yes but a short video of a person eating a delicious slice of that frozen Delicio Pizza surely will get your mouth watering. And if they can also tell you soap is on sale you may buy that before you leave. They know you need soap because the last time you bought some on your loyalty card was 2 months ago.
> They are directly advertising the products literally inside the case.
Well, yeah, but glass would be just as effective and much cheaper. So they're doing something in addition to that.
If the requirement was "display the goods we have for sale" then glass beats this thing in virtually every way. Cheaper, minimal maintenance, no firmware updates, and most of all: familiar.
But these are going to be:
* Tracking consumer interest ("eNgAgEmEnT")
* Swapping between content display and billboard-style advertising
* Changing prices dynamically depending on weather, foot traffic, historical "engagement", national ad campaigns ("all Coke products 50% during the World Cup!"), etc.
* Pretending there's still Red Bulls in there when there aren't.
* Pretending those Red Bulls are on the 3rd shelf, right, when the stocker actually put them on the 4th shelf this time. (He forgot to read the updated Planogram email)
It's dystopian crap, I want nothing to do with it.
In a land with true capitalism these wouldn't exist because every single store with them would instantly lose all their customers. The only reason this exists is because America doesn't have a true free market or capitalism (because that's impossible) and stores are using their market position to force customers to shop there even though they would prefer not to. What are customers going to do? Go to the other massive grocery store that's miles away? Or maybe shop at the boutique that has half the selection at a markup.
Call it what you want, I just called it future because it's already reality for some, clearly.
I don't know about you, but for me the amount of ads I see decreased compared to some points in the past. I don't watch TV, I listen to music using a streaming service with a paid subscription, I actively look for interesting stuff to buy, but not because I've seen an ad. Probably because I haven't seen any recently, because I block them.
People buy some stuff on Amazon not because they were advertised a particular brand, but probably because they needed something and searched for it, compared between options, you know. This is our present. Ads on coolers in supermarkets might be just a swan song of a dying way of selling products. Is Amazon less scary that this though? Really?
Then why is it that influencers are raking in the dough? Is Madison Avenue just desperately seeking any product placement? Someone's definitely spending ad revenue on TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook.
My media consumption is similar to yours, but I think we're the outliers, or maybe we just slipped between the generational cracks of an evolving but still very consumerist society.
You got me there. Couldn't even begin to understand people who are growing up with social media.
Honestly I think targeted ads that are actually interesting to the person they are intended for is the only sane way out of this. No one likes ads that aren't relevant. If I'm going to be tracked and targeted, then at least don't annoy and bore me to death.
I know I personally would just avoid any store with these, I already hate the fast food animated Menzies where they rotate between menu and ads and I don’t go to those places
I think the future is a lot closer to something between Instacart and Amazon Go. This is what dying companies do to eek out a little more revenue at their last few customers' expense. Companies that rely on "innovations" like this for the future will not survive.
Well, yeah, but glass would be just as effective and much cheaper.
I'm not sure. Home fridge doors didn't traditionally have glass because it doesn't insulate as well as, well, insulation. Glass is also a leaking point in houses. Especially if they were replacing older, less efficient units, they might use less power, and seem cheaper in the long run. Bonus points if the price changes and sale tags are electronic and require less work.
The other thing these do, at least with the ads, is provide moving images. Humans notice these, so it is likely that more folks notice the drink coolers due to the movement on the screens.
They already track consumer interest - loyalty cards, regular purchases, and credit cards selling data does this.
Coke tried changing prices dependent on whether: Folks have outcried over that. The others, though: This is normal store stuff. Foot traffic is pretty predictable, and has already been accounted for. Sports events? Known if it drives your sales. Historical engagement? Probably shows in the inventory.
In general, if a planogram is updated, someone goes and changes it. I cannot think of a reason for the door to update before someone has the planogram completed, and any company large enough to have those screens now would do this (I worked at CVS, and generally was assigned planograms). Even new item reports have to have a code for completion. And most folks put most things up correctly so long as there is some sort of label there (and there probably is so long as inventory and ordering controls use barcodes).
I wouldn't call a pure index of product locations in the cooler an "ad," any more than it's an "ad" when you look through the glass and see the logo on the Coke bottle you want.
When it breaks the index function to display a full-height animated Coke bottle, that's an ad.
It's not a crazy idea and this likely a prototype and prone to bugs. Transparent displays have been a hot item for a while. The tech has been around for years but it's expensive and has had issues with brightness. They also need to tune the UX to be valuable and not too distracting. I think these will become ubiquitous in 10 years.
There are pictures in the tweet of completely black screens, presumably malfunctioning or otherwise “off” screens so pretty clearly (heh) not transparent.
It's an ad platform plain and simple; that's the whole value proposition. So I imagine every pitch, every meeting was about that. And every store that uses it will be doing it to get a cut of the ad revenue. It's true that it's lousy at being glass, but that's like saying smallpox blankets were a lousy way to make friends with Native Americans. The shittiness of it, in other words, was the goal all along, and any resemblance to glass or to helping you in any way was just a concession made to conceal its true nature and hopefully get you to accept it.
Except that moving inventory, and to a lesser extent generating repeat business, is more critical than ancillary ad revenue. If The screens don’t work or the ads aren’t effective, and I don’t open the door to get those high-margin also-bought drinks than they definitely do not achieve the store’s goal.
The shoppers are already in the store, presumably to buy from their list. Now the store gets a cut of an ad and the profit from the sale it makes. The digital delivery is going to be amazing for A/B testing of ads because they are going to have near immediate feedback. It's pretty clever in a dystopian hellscape kind of way.
Counterpoint: all else being equal, I'd rather not have these because I think they'd be annoying, so if one of my local grocery stores were to install them I would then give more of my business to the other (largely interchangeable) ones going forward.
You're right that I wouldn't rage quit and leave without doing my shopping the first time I saw these, but I also might not be back. Sure, I'd learn to live with it if every grocery store were to get on board, but in that scenario not having them would become a major competitive advantage.
Some people really care about pricing, others don't.
There are 'bargin' stores in my area, and higher end stores. The higher end stores have lots more bio stuff to buy, and other fancy goods, but also stock major brands of everything else.
Even though the product is the same, the pricing is 15% average more expensive for those common products. I suspect they get away with it, because you're already there, and I never see a full shopping cart there.
The also have baggers. The bargin store does not.
My point? The bargin store might shave even more off, with enough ads. And those people buying full carts?
Might be even happier with the savings.
I think as with many things, those struggling with money can't care one iota (not don't, but can't), and just do what saves the most, no matter the cost to society, or themselves.
Makes sense. As I said, all else being equal I'd rather not have these. Presented with a situation like Kindle devices, in which the ad-supported item is cheaper, the choice is a little harder.
Thinking more about the product, there's probably also a long-term vision wherein it becomes more useful than it is today. e.g. maybe it automatically handles tracking quantities and greys out the item photo when it's out (and alerts them to restock), shows prices in a more user-friendly way than regular shelves, makes promotions more prominent (but hopefully not too obnoxious), slightly reduces labor costs (by automatically updating prices), and allows various user interactivity such as clicking an item to see metadata like nutrition and ingredients. It's easy to make fun of something at an early stage when we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but 10 years from now this may become a repeat of the infamous Dropbox thread.
You can buy eink shelf labels that have radios in them for the self updating pricing and promotional pricing features. Not sure if they make ones that can handle being in fridge/freezer though (condensation is huge problem in those environments).
I've heard of these, but never seen them in use (Quebec). Probably due to risks, as local law says (when using barcodes, without prices on each prooduct):
Rules of the Accurate Pricing Policy
If the pricing error involves a product that costs $10 or less, the product is given to the customer free of charge.
If the pricing error involves a product that costs more than $10, the merchant must sell the item at the advertised price and give the consumer a $10 discount.
If the same pricing error occurs for identical products during the same transaction, the merchant must sell each product at the advertised price, but the $10 discount only applies to one product.
Mistaken updates, or hacking, could be quite costly. Maybe this risk is just perception, but...
We've grown up and shopped in a time without these. But the long game is different. If these become ubiquitous or even just common, I'd bet few people care after a couple generations. For example, imagine how ugly telephone poles were to people when first built. But I, having grown up with them everywhere, don't even notice them. They're background noise.
Of course, I'm not thinking this ad-glass company is really playing a long game. They've just happened to move a piece earlier than most.
"The shoppers are already in the store, presumably to buy from their list. "
This isn't really how it works.
If it worked that way then lighting, music, display organization, cleanliness, shelf space, brand, packaging etc. 'would not matter'.
All of those things matter, immensely, at any real scale.
The kinds of comments I'm seeing here are a little bit uncomfortable in this regard, indicate a kind of lack of self-awareness as to consumer (i.e. our own) behaviours.
This is just one of any number of studies [1]
THE EFFECT OF SHELF DISPLAY ON PURCHASING DECISION
"The final results show that, even though the students know that they should act like rational buyers who choose products according to their intrinsic value, when describing how they act in real situations, they admit to behaving differently, in the sense that they are influenced in one way or another by marketing policies ..."
This is not revelatory or controversial, we've known this for a long time.
These 'fancy displays' have a very obvious advantage purely in terms of their clarity and impact, and of course the reduce pain of having to constantly tweak tags and pricing.
Distracting advertising and any kind of privacy invasion would be a drawback obviously. As would possibly the cost.
But this looks like a really obvious opportunity to test for retail.
My worry would be not so much any of the stated issues here, but that there would be a new kind of war for retail space and that brands would bid on the size of their placements on the screen, as opposed to their slot on the shelf. Just ugly and unnecessary operational overhead.
I suspect the downvotes are because your comment could be shortened to “My worry here is that this will inconvenience the marketing drones, distracting them from maximizing our suffering as they burn the planet down”.
I don't think my comment could be shortened to that because the primary thrust points to the nature of how people react to in-store presentation and how that affects us.
Almost all of the commentary on this board is missing 'the most obvious points' from a consumer retail perspective.
Issues such as privacy, invasive advertising are obviously relevant, but if we are 'thinking retail' this is going to be about shopping experience and operational overhead.
In terms of impact, experience, clarity and reducing labour input costs - it really has so many upsides.
Far from being a 'bad joke' ... just the opposite it's a pretty neat concept. This is not fodder, it's very possibly the future.
I must be one of the few people who actually do know what they want when they go into the store. I want juice, eggs, butter, milk and cheese. Or I need cat food. That’s what I get. I often have wander about the store, but it is extremely rare that I get something other than what I have chosen to get.
There are cameras built into the doors, and one of the images in the Twitter thread shows heat maps being displayed on the screens, presumably conveying information about what the consumers were looking at on the screens.
Ads may not have been the only value proposition here, in other words. Data that can be used to improve merchandising may be equally valuable.
I could see one case where it does make sense - stores after the gate in airports, where there are more people walking by and seeing the advertising than there are customers coming in looking for a specific product. In any place like a grocery store where customers have clearly come in looking for specific items, it makes zero sense.
I would imagine that the other benefit to this besides advertising is dynamic pricing. The prices are listed on the screen, and can thus be updated at will. They might raise the price of a bottle of Coke with the temperature outside, for example. Doing this with old school price tags requires manual labor. This would be much easier.
Why not just charge the existing products for access to premium shelf space and classify that as advertising revenue? I don't see the point of putting ads in between the customer and what was already effectively an ad (i.e. the packaging/product itself).
Think about ads being contextual, e.g. for complementary products, or unrelated to the products inside at all but briefly reminding about new stuff, promotions, sales, etc.
Imagine thus screen showing navigation help ("where is milk?"), product data("is it sugar-free?") and other such things momentarily.
We’ll just have to wait for Apple to purchase a premium grocery chain and rebrand it as an ad-free, privacy-respecting grocery store. Too bad Whole Foods is already taken.
> Edit: What bothers me the most about this, is that it will actually work. Any surface where eyes may fall on, will be replaced with an ad.
Until someone finds out every screen has the same default password. And a few supermarkets are forced to shut them down because what was displayed was way, way worse than ads...
Now, everyone suddenly knowing what the hell is goatse... I think this sounds comparable to how everyone (less) suddenly learned what the hell is Uber.
yeah and now that everything is cloud connected and controlled by a corporate office far removed from the actual stores. I cant wait until thee freezer isle of some national chain starts displaying goatsx on every door some holiday weekend and its hours before it fixed.
> and then convinced a grocery chain to buy this for their store
I wouldn't be surprised if it was the other way around: The startup that produces these doors probably pitched them for free to this store, perhaps offering a cut of the ad revenue. If the startup is well-funded, they may have even paid the store up-front to let them install the doors.
Given that these aren't widespread and the product is prototype quality, the startup likely needs a few pilot installs to show their investors and prove their product out. Assuming they're funded, getting some of these installed ASAP is their top priority. Trying to sell them would only slow that down.
No one thought “glass” because the outcome was predetermined.
Employees do not care about financial or literal waste.
They only meme in mind when they go to their job for “make money”.
I goto meetings with a vision and zero fucks about the implementation all the time. Why you expect that to be different otherwise in the same culture is beyond me.
Based on other "ad in store" similar displays I suspect this will go unused in a couple of months, maybe years
You have to sell the media to someone. This is not like the type of self-promotion posters that come with some products, this is a separate thing entirely.
This might conflict with supermarket deals with the beverage manufacturers. It might make it harder to sell some brands.
So either the ad space vendor is aligned with those interests and the ad buyer has an interest in buying this space (which might be hard to justify) I don't see it lasting too long.
Oh yeah and guess what happens if the fridge needs maintenance and is not owned by the store... Something has got to give there.
Very much this! Everyone thought glass. Not only was this about testing alternatives to glass, everything would have had their cost and possible revenue compared to glass - or possibly, to the cost of running their aging glass-doored fridge units, the decals they print for the front, and the employee hours spent on them.
Its pretty stupid with sports drinks, but I could see this being perhaps practical in a frozen food aisle. I often open the freezer, take out a product to read its nutritional facts, then put it back. I guess now I could just tap?
In between the two times this image was circulated, I visited a store and watched as a pair of people opened a glass door, held a long conversation, the closed that now totally frosted/condensed door which was now impossible to see anything through.
Which presumably cleared on its own in a few minutes as the air circulated inside. While this technology makes it impossible to see what is behind the door 100% of the time forever, by design.
This is obviously a comically idiotic idea, but ... hmm ...
If someone had taken this and put it in a museum as an art installation, I would love it. Thinking about it like that ... it tickles something in my brain. Using those absolutely huge, gorgeous screens, using our most sophisticated technology ... just to display a flat, bland, skeuomorphic representation of a completely mundane part of the human experience: the convenience store fridge section. I dunno, I'm finding it hard to describe what I feel thinking about this as a piece of "art". It would definitely make quite the statement. The size and scale of it is what takes it to another level.
There is an art installation in Las Vegas[0] which is basically a grocery store from an alternate, mildly dystopian, dimension. This would fit in perfectly there.
I've seen the "unsettling supermarket" concept last year in a museum in Tallinn, Estonia. It's a shelf where most but not all products have the wrong brand. Coca-cola soap, Tampax cookies, Snickers canned fish, Evian ketchup and so on. I thought it was a really neat idea to make me think about the huge simplification of "brand" and what is really happening behind and around a product.
In the '90s I was in a technology based art class at CMU. An artist talked about a project they wanted to do: a music streamer, but it would use GPS to know it's location, and play music from the local culture, to keep you connected to your surroundings.
An app-based solution using GPS, local DJs, and music that was royalty-free by local musicians (aiming to get recognition, live shows, and sell merch) could be a huge hit...
I remember seeing this Cooler Screens startup idea a while back and thinking "this is terrible, I hope it never catches on". The facial recognition marketing alone is like a dystopia.
They have these in my local Walgreens and I hate them. I think the drink coolers were stocked for maybe a week after they were installed. Since then it’s been 50/50 if the product the screen is showing is actually behind the door. I don’t think the store employees are able to keep on top of stocking without being able to see what’s in the case.
You've got to put on your homo economicus hat and think outside the box of social norms and common decency. The solution is to find something that's the right size to prop the doors open. Then prop the door of each section that you're comparing, so that you can see products and ponder each one. After you pick something out, pay it forward by leaving the doors propped so the next person has an easier time. For full credit, make sure to wear a mask to defeat the facial recognition cameras.
There's an angle that the company making these didn't think of. That's exactly the kind of critical use case you miss when you don't do enough testing.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how it went. Sometimes it will show items as out of stock on the screen but it seems to miss about 2/3rds of what's actually depleted when you open the door.
And yeah, the creepy little camera on the top of all of them makes me very pleased to have an excuse to wear a mask inside the store.
This concept could actually be nice to present a pretty interface for products wrapped in plain, cheap packages (or no packages at all and served to customers in reusable containers).
Solutions always breed more problems. The trick is to have a solution that, on balance, solves a more costly problem than it creates. These doors do not feel like they solve any customer problems (I have never needed an electronic UI to see through glass) and instead give birth to a huge maintenance burden that the retailer will not be willing to meet.
You're making the assumption that retailers want solutions for their customers. They don't. They want customers to buy their stock.
This is about selling more stock. It's also about selling the attention of their customers to manufacturers of their stock. A customer at the store is two things, one is a buyer of the store's stock, the other is inventory to be sold to manufacturers.
Grocery stores are self-service warehouses that sell access to their shelves to manufacturers.
That's why manufacturers pay the stores for shelf access (eg middle vs upper/lower) and why staples like milk are at the back of the store, while good looking fruit and vegetables are at the front.
Brick & mortar retail is trying its very hardest to kill itself.
The bigger a tremendous fucking hassle it is to go to the store instead of ordering online, the fewer people are going to come in.
Supermarket window: "we now use anti-shoplifting face and license plate tracking" [e.g. auror.co ]
Supermarket aisle: can't see any products, have to open every door to look at actual products instead of TV ads
Supermarket aisle: e-ink price labels; can no longer flip up to see how much the thing cost before it was on "sale".
Supermarket aisle: e-ink label is down, no idea how much product costs
Supermarket checkout: always scans shit at the wrong price
Plus we've got covid, drive time, smaller selection, unknown stock levels [sold out].
Any old man could tell you giving a shit about your customers' experience is going to benefit you in the long run. But no. It'll be too late by the time they realize what they've done.
If you think these are the things killing brick-and-mortar retail when it would otherwise succeed, then you should be founding a company doing the exact opposite of these things and capture the market.
This was always the problem with capitalism based on short-term gain, it will inevitably sacrifice loyalty for a quick buck. The same will happen or is already happening to online stores who do the same, eg by showing ads.
That said, at some point a failing business will realize the end is coming and cash out as much as possible, accelerating its own end in a calculated profit maximization scheme. Brick and mortar stores might as well self-destruct if they also believe they're going down anyway... It's not like anyone works there for the fun of it.
I'd argue that the design of cities to optimize for nothing and emphasize driving long distances to the store is a greater contribution, but I see your point ;) Though that's not retail's problem, that's the city's problem.
It takes me 5 minutes to walk to my grocery store at most. Hard to beat
396 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadIt's a bit sad to think how wasteful these are. Not just the waste produced by producing the screens and powering them all day, but the fact that you can't reliably see what's in there by looking means people will just learn to open it and browse with the door open, letting the cold air out.
Edit: Also, does anyone know what the cameras are for, if not facial recognition or CCTV? I'm guessing it's eye tracking for market research. I suppose that could be anonymized and aggregated on-device in a privacy-preserving way, but you'd have to take their word for it.
* the second one is supposed to show the next stations and connections, except for when it doesn't and shows ads.. for many minutes at a time.
https://twitter.com/RunDaltonRun/status/1408566439833788423
It's possible the whole display is specifically for market research. Play with product placement and see what increases sales for the most profitable items.
Now that I know these exist, I kinda feel like being contrary and opening every single one to "look for" whatever it was I wanted.
One day someone will be hunched over on a sidewalk, dying of thirst, and a patrolling Nestle®-branded drone senses (using state-of-the-art machine learning "customer needs" technology) his predicament. The drone hovers there projecting a holo-ad about Nestles hot product "Nectar of Life" which is just water from the region's last remaining aquifer cut with brackish water from the coast. The ad ends with a map to the nearest vending machine and buzzes off for it's next engagement. The man, too weak to move, just sits there, nothing he can do except wait for another ad drone to come by.
1. waywaywaybackmachine/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27637963
Brawndo is the product the drone would be advertising.
The sad thing is, we engineers are building this dystopia. Maybe even fellow HN readers. Our next JIRA ticket in the queue is to shove another ad onto another previously unmonetized surface. Many of us are actively bringing about this world!
The engineer who built this grocery screen was probably highly compensated for it. The biz guys who just hi-5'ed each other for "crushing it" are too, and the entrepreneur is probably already a millionaire. Everyone's making money by being part of the problem.
Probably force-repeat the ad.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is a thing because just having your brand name out there (even if it’s bad news) is better than it not being out there at all.
Fuck advertising and the greedy profit-driven place it comes from.
Of course, this aside from the actual sneaky things that they do.
If they don't jam these things with ads or confusion, I think it's going to work out well.
> Turns out that Monster energy drinks are found in the "no content" door.
So how did he find it? Obviously he went down the line of doors opening each one until he found it. If the doors were glass, he could have looked through each door instead of opening each.
Probably the fact that you can't see the cheaper alternatives anymore without opening the door.
https://twitter.com/RunDaltonRun/status/1408566439833788423
The ads pay for these.
I think this is one of the stupidest things I’ve seen. But to be honest, I won’t be surprised if this actually increases revenue since people are going to buy what they buy and it’s not like they will go to another store due to this.
Not being able to see what's behind the glass makes it take longer to shop. People abandon webpages that don't load quickly enough - why wouldn't they abandon stores where you have to open each door on an aisle of refrigerators just to see what's available?
I think most people will be annoyed, curse it, and then get used to it.
I would love to be proven wrong since this is not the direction we should be going.
What else would you do?
I recently bought something with self-checkout at an appliance store, so not groceries. Grabbed a thing of a shelf, scanned it at a touch screen terminal, payed for it with my contactless payment ring and just walked out. No human contact whatsoever. If that isn't future then I don't know what it.
The only downside is the diarrhea. :p
When the company that made these was analyzing their market, I have no doubt they were targeting this exact scenario knowing that even the stupidest products have a place to make a boring brick and mortar retailer think they’re doing technology.
I think TFRC was an ego project, rather than an egoless project. Yet TFRC was a wonderful project that happened to work; if it failed, it might seem like an ego project with no point.
I don’t like saying “you need ego,” but it also seems true that you can’t find large corporate projects without it. Are there good counterexamples? I’d like to change my view.
HN's comments following Bitcoin's launch have made me acutely aware of how hostile we can be towards new ideas.
I'd guess that most innovation comes from startups and smaller companies that get acquired, or iterative product development that aligns with a company's primary focus (iPod, Office, Ford's electric pickup) and not from dedicated experimentation organisations.
Corporations are poorly setup to benefit from innovation anyway. The funding model doesn't encourage the right incentives, and true innovation becomes political. A classic example is Kodak's early invention of the digital camera, which was a threat to the companies cash cow.
Because this has zero benefit for shoppers.
[1]: https://twitter.com/RunDaltonRun/status/1408573096756269061
Triple-paned glass insulates pretty well and for a fraction of the cost…
If this is any of the big chain groceries, the manager doesn't even have the authority to put a sticker on the glass door. This was vetted by hundreds of people and none of them thought... glass?
Business class tickets were purchased, hotels were booked, months of back and forth, daily meetings. Hundreds of thousands were spent on pilot programs like this one. Still no one thought... glass?
In my opinion, it's a silly idea. But I applaud the person who had this silly idea, built a company around it, got deals with screens, door, glass, and cameras manufacturing companies, and then convinced a grocery chain to buy this for their store.
I would really, really love to have been in that sales pitch meeting.
Edit: What bothers me the most about this, is that it will actually work. Any surface where eyes may fall on, will be replaced with an ad.
I'm sure it came up. Customer experience vs revenue for in-store billboards. Ad revenue won.
I'm not sure what that means. These already are ads. They are directly advertising the products literally inside the case.
Now that I think about it, I have not seen those TVs since the 90s. Maybe they drove the retail workers mad.
Well, yeah, but glass would be just as effective and much cheaper. So they're doing something in addition to that.
If the requirement was "display the goods we have for sale" then glass beats this thing in virtually every way. Cheaper, minimal maintenance, no firmware updates, and most of all: familiar.
But these are going to be:
* Tracking consumer interest ("eNgAgEmEnT")
* Swapping between content display and billboard-style advertising
* Changing prices dynamically depending on weather, foot traffic, historical "engagement", national ad campaigns ("all Coke products 50% during the World Cup!"), etc.
* Pretending there's still Red Bulls in there when there aren't.
* Pretending those Red Bulls are on the 3rd shelf, right, when the stocker actually put them on the 4th shelf this time. (He forgot to read the updated Planogram email)
It's dystopian crap, I want nothing to do with it.
This is what the future looks like though. Welcome.
> This is what the future looks like
Is it though? Is it impossible for us to stop? Or is this premature defeatism?
I don't know about you, but for me the amount of ads I see decreased compared to some points in the past. I don't watch TV, I listen to music using a streaming service with a paid subscription, I actively look for interesting stuff to buy, but not because I've seen an ad. Probably because I haven't seen any recently, because I block them.
People buy some stuff on Amazon not because they were advertised a particular brand, but probably because they needed something and searched for it, compared between options, you know. This is our present. Ads on coolers in supermarkets might be just a swan song of a dying way of selling products. Is Amazon less scary that this though? Really?
My media consumption is similar to yours, but I think we're the outliers, or maybe we just slipped between the generational cracks of an evolving but still very consumerist society.
Honestly I think targeted ads that are actually interesting to the person they are intended for is the only sane way out of this. No one likes ads that aren't relevant. If I'm going to be tracked and targeted, then at least don't annoy and bore me to death.
I'm not sure. Home fridge doors didn't traditionally have glass because it doesn't insulate as well as, well, insulation. Glass is also a leaking point in houses. Especially if they were replacing older, less efficient units, they might use less power, and seem cheaper in the long run. Bonus points if the price changes and sale tags are electronic and require less work.
The other thing these do, at least with the ads, is provide moving images. Humans notice these, so it is likely that more folks notice the drink coolers due to the movement on the screens.
They already track consumer interest - loyalty cards, regular purchases, and credit cards selling data does this.
Coke tried changing prices dependent on whether: Folks have outcried over that. The others, though: This is normal store stuff. Foot traffic is pretty predictable, and has already been accounted for. Sports events? Known if it drives your sales. Historical engagement? Probably shows in the inventory.
In general, if a planogram is updated, someone goes and changes it. I cannot think of a reason for the door to update before someone has the planogram completed, and any company large enough to have those screens now would do this (I worked at CVS, and generally was assigned planograms). Even new item reports have to have a code for completion. And most folks put most things up correctly so long as there is some sort of label there (and there probably is so long as inventory and ordering controls use barcodes).
It can easily be made to detect if someone is near and making their choice, but otherwise they can be part of a larger ad.
Something like https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ
When it breaks the index function to display a full-height animated Coke bottle, that's an ad.
You're right that I wouldn't rage quit and leave without doing my shopping the first time I saw these, but I also might not be back. Sure, I'd learn to live with it if every grocery store were to get on board, but in that scenario not having them would become a major competitive advantage.
There are 'bargin' stores in my area, and higher end stores. The higher end stores have lots more bio stuff to buy, and other fancy goods, but also stock major brands of everything else.
Even though the product is the same, the pricing is 15% average more expensive for those common products. I suspect they get away with it, because you're already there, and I never see a full shopping cart there.
The also have baggers. The bargin store does not.
My point? The bargin store might shave even more off, with enough ads. And those people buying full carts?
Might be even happier with the savings.
I think as with many things, those struggling with money can't care one iota (not don't, but can't), and just do what saves the most, no matter the cost to society, or themselves.
Survival first. Rent first. Savings first.
Thinking more about the product, there's probably also a long-term vision wherein it becomes more useful than it is today. e.g. maybe it automatically handles tracking quantities and greys out the item photo when it's out (and alerts them to restock), shows prices in a more user-friendly way than regular shelves, makes promotions more prominent (but hopefully not too obnoxious), slightly reduces labor costs (by automatically updating prices), and allows various user interactivity such as clicking an item to see metadata like nutrition and ingredients. It's easy to make fun of something at an early stage when we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but 10 years from now this may become a repeat of the infamous Dropbox thread.
Rules of the Accurate Pricing Policy If the pricing error involves a product that costs $10 or less, the product is given to the customer free of charge.
If the pricing error involves a product that costs more than $10, the merchant must sell the item at the advertised price and give the consumer a $10 discount.
If the same pricing error occurs for identical products during the same transaction, the merchant must sell each product at the advertised price, but the $10 discount only applies to one product.
Mistaken updates, or hacking, could be quite costly. Maybe this risk is just perception, but...
Of course, I'm not thinking this ad-glass company is really playing a long game. They've just happened to move a piece earlier than most.
This isn't really how it works.
If it worked that way then lighting, music, display organization, cleanliness, shelf space, brand, packaging etc. 'would not matter'.
All of those things matter, immensely, at any real scale.
The kinds of comments I'm seeing here are a little bit uncomfortable in this regard, indicate a kind of lack of self-awareness as to consumer (i.e. our own) behaviours.
This is just one of any number of studies [1]
THE EFFECT OF SHELF DISPLAY ON PURCHASING DECISION
"The final results show that, even though the students know that they should act like rational buyers who choose products according to their intrinsic value, when describing how they act in real situations, they admit to behaving differently, in the sense that they are influenced in one way or another by marketing policies ..."
This is not revelatory or controversial, we've known this for a long time.
These 'fancy displays' have a very obvious advantage purely in terms of their clarity and impact, and of course the reduce pain of having to constantly tweak tags and pricing.
Distracting advertising and any kind of privacy invasion would be a drawback obviously. As would possibly the cost.
But this looks like a really obvious opportunity to test for retail.
My worry would be not so much any of the stated issues here, but that there would be a new kind of war for retail space and that brands would bid on the size of their placements on the screen, as opposed to their slot on the shelf. Just ugly and unnecessary operational overhead.
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
(Upvoted; thanks for the insightful comment.)
Almost all of the commentary on this board is missing 'the most obvious points' from a consumer retail perspective.
Issues such as privacy, invasive advertising are obviously relevant, but if we are 'thinking retail' this is going to be about shopping experience and operational overhead.
In terms of impact, experience, clarity and reducing labour input costs - it really has so many upsides.
Far from being a 'bad joke' ... just the opposite it's a pretty neat concept. This is not fodder, it's very possibly the future.
Turns out there's a huge chunk of the population who cannot waste a single cent on what marketing dept has to say
The notion of 'consumers can't afford' doesn't really make a lot of sense.
The marginal cost of most of these things is very small.
In places where people are super price sensitive, maybe, but most people are not that.
Most people have some marginal flexibility which means an openness to buy things that can provide them more value.
Ads may not have been the only value proposition here, in other words. Data that can be used to improve merchandising may be equally valuable.
Think about ads being contextual, e.g. for complementary products, or unrelated to the products inside at all but briefly reminding about new stuff, promotions, sales, etc.
Imagine thus screen showing navigation help ("where is milk?"), product data("is it sugar-free?") and other such things momentarily.
Until someone finds out every screen has the same default password. And a few supermarkets are forced to shut them down because what was displayed was way, way worse than ads...
I wouldn't be surprised if it was the other way around: The startup that produces these doors probably pitched them for free to this store, perhaps offering a cut of the ad revenue. If the startup is well-funded, they may have even paid the store up-front to let them install the doors.
Given that these aren't widespread and the product is prototype quality, the startup likely needs a few pilot installs to show their investors and prove their product out. Assuming they're funded, getting some of these installed ASAP is their top priority. Trying to sell them would only slow that down.
Employees do not care about financial or literal waste.
They only meme in mind when they go to their job for “make money”.
I goto meetings with a vision and zero fucks about the implementation all the time. Why you expect that to be different otherwise in the same culture is beyond me.
You have to sell the media to someone. This is not like the type of self-promotion posters that come with some products, this is a separate thing entirely.
This might conflict with supermarket deals with the beverage manufacturers. It might make it harder to sell some brands.
So either the ad space vendor is aligned with those interests and the ad buyer has an interest in buying this space (which might be hard to justify) I don't see it lasting too long.
Oh yeah and guess what happens if the fridge needs maintenance and is not owned by the store... Something has got to give there.
Me too. I could do with getting a bit of extra cash handed to me in a brown envelope.
Everyone thought "glass". The whole project, from the grocery store point of view, was about testing an alternative to glass doors.
I would bet that lots of people did think glass but were convinced by the social inertia that glass must have some issue that makes it inferior.
With AR you don't even need surfaces.
If someone had taken this and put it in a museum as an art installation, I would love it. Thinking about it like that ... it tickles something in my brain. Using those absolutely huge, gorgeous screens, using our most sophisticated technology ... just to display a flat, bland, skeuomorphic representation of a completely mundane part of the human experience: the convenience store fridge section. I dunno, I'm finding it hard to describe what I feel thinking about this as a piece of "art". It would definitely make quite the statement. The size and scale of it is what takes it to another level.
But yeah, instead this is reality...
0: https://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/visual-arts/...
It’s like connecting VR goggles to a front facing camera, so you can watch what you would see if you took of the headset.
As art, I’m kinda digging it too.
Another student said: "You mean, a radio?"
IHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia
"the company owns more than 850 full-power AM and FM radio stations in the U.S., making it the country's largest owner of radio stations. "
The answer no doubt was “think of the ads” and “our AI guy (there’s always that one AI guy) is working on a model to help detect low stock”.
And yeah, the creepy little camera on the top of all of them makes me very pleased to have an excuse to wear a mask inside the store.
The technology could improve the customer experience, but of course customer experience is secondary to insights, tracking, and ads.
This is about selling more stock. It's also about selling the attention of their customers to manufacturers of their stock. A customer at the store is two things, one is a buyer of the store's stock, the other is inventory to be sold to manufacturers.
Grocery stores are self-service warehouses that sell access to their shelves to manufacturers.
That's why manufacturers pay the stores for shelf access (eg middle vs upper/lower) and why staples like milk are at the back of the store, while good looking fruit and vegetables are at the front.
The bigger a tremendous fucking hassle it is to go to the store instead of ordering online, the fewer people are going to come in.
Supermarket window: "we now use anti-shoplifting face and license plate tracking" [e.g. auror.co ]
Supermarket aisle: can't see any products, have to open every door to look at actual products instead of TV ads
Supermarket aisle: e-ink price labels; can no longer flip up to see how much the thing cost before it was on "sale".
Supermarket aisle: e-ink label is down, no idea how much product costs
Supermarket checkout: always scans shit at the wrong price
Plus we've got covid, drive time, smaller selection, unknown stock levels [sold out].
Any old man could tell you giving a shit about your customers' experience is going to benefit you in the long run. But no. It'll be too late by the time they realize what they've done.
That said, at some point a failing business will realize the end is coming and cash out as much as possible, accelerating its own end in a calculated profit maximization scheme. Brick and mortar stores might as well self-destruct if they also believe they're going down anyway... It's not like anyone works there for the fun of it.
It takes me 5 minutes to walk to my grocery store at most. Hard to beat