First on some testbench, developing software, power supply, (physical) install procedures, etc. With that done, one would expect to outfit a few stores to see how they work IRL. But no:
"The initial round of installations in 2018 reached 10,300 screens in 700 stores."
As part of a $200 million plan to cover 2,500 stores.
From testbench to fitting 10k screens across 700 stores, without intermediate testrun in a few stores?!?
On the plus side: if this crashes & burns (pun intented) then it's mostly VC going up in smoke. Hopefully eating profit from Walgreens who dared to go into consumer-hostile territory. And showing other chains not to do this.
Also the difference between the firms' marketing research & actual reception by consumers is baffling. Probaby:
"Or perhaps the surveys backing this data were only ever collected in the first two days following installation at Walgreens locations adjacent to dispensaries holding free pre-roll promotions."
Of course regular shoppers are not Cooler Screens' customers. Or even chain owners(?). The brands they sell advertising space to, are.
There could be 1 consumer-friendly use: looking up label info, ingredients, nutritional value, vegetarian / vegan / halal etc, perhaps compare with alternative products. Without having to open door & grab product. Only a small screen per section would suffice. But nope...
The whole concept is just bad all around. Perhaps it's good thing this initial roll-out was poorly implemented.
I work in digital signage. We don't do these, but we do have other products aimed at retail.
Most of these displays are powered by run of the mill Windows machines. Often they are just standard off the shelf hardware, which when packed in an enclosed space with other electronics, and wrapped with cardboard, doesn't last too long. Even the screens are often just standard bigbox store TVs, although some manufactures do make displays specifically for digital signage (for 10x the price).
We have our own hardware running a custom Linux distro, and it's designed to operate in these sorts of environments. However not all accessories are. Right now we are trying to figure out what to do with a camera which is only designed to operate in environments under 50c where we keep having hardware failures.
The budget for installations like this most likely comes from the marketing department. So instead of paying for print ads with no idea how well they convert, the money is spent on digital signage which can at least track basic data like the number of impressions. Unfortunately in this case, it's probably treated like a win as they get more analytics data than they did before (impressions, door opens, open time).
I used to work digital signage in retail, though almost no refrigeration. And yes usually we backed our signs with normal small form factor pcs. Mac minis, nucs, raspberry-pis.
We were demoed these screens by one of those display providers (probably Planar) probably 8 years back... If these are the 'transparent' door displays my understanding is that they are essentially just normal displays without backlights/or that foil backing. They were pretty experimental at the time and they were seeing if we had any room to experiment with them (we didn't at the time)..
We did a bunch of experiments around 'ad tracking' displays in store by mounting cameras as well and writing basic opencv code that detected people looking at the display with mixed results.
I also worked in digital signage a few years back. We had a similar kind of refrigerator in our office, likely with an LG screen. The door/screen was transparent glass like the old fashioned ones and a layer of LCD. The upside of that kind of design is that the see-through door still works if the screen is off. And of course, you actually would see the real contents of the refrigerator once it's digital signage content deactivated (e.g. detected people by camera). On top of that, depending on the animation you would see through darker parts of the door to get a peek of the actual products inside (useful if you're unsure what you're looking at).
IIRC we displayed our office calendar on it, among other things.
On the other hand, the screens in the article seems to have made away completely with the glass, leading to completely opaque, black rectangles if they are not running. What a mess.
probably more readable though. With the displays at the time you could see through even the blacks it was like 50% transparent when displaying a totally black screen. Means you could see through it but the images you put on the display needed to be fairly simple and .. id dunno 'blocky' because depending on what was behind the glass it could get very visually confused.
> Right now we are trying to figure out what to do with a camera which is only designed to operate in environments under 50c where we keep having hardware failures.
What's really surprising is that there are no humans at Walgreens who can call out obviously bullshit customer surveys knowing that they're wrong. The company behaves like a zombie with no one really in control.
The emperor really has no clothes, but customer surveys say otherwise.
One VP introduces this idea, does "case studies" designed to make it look good, rolls it out, distorts the statistics to show that it's a win, collects a bonus, and then moves on.
A second VP recognizes that it's bogus, removes the program, distorts the statistics to show that it's a win, collects a bonus, and then moves on.
If a third VP were to pop up and point out that it's stupid, they would be vilified for standing in the way of progress and eventually ousted, or just leave out of disgust because of the company's stupid ideas.
This insight has caused me to essentially be blackpilled at my BigCorp job: Nothing means anything. No one is even trying to do a good job, and naively trying to do so one's self will probably just result in a PIP aka being fired.
Big tech is BS in exactly the way parent poster described but "doing a good job" doesn't usually get you PIP'd AFAICT. Just means you stay the same level for not rushing out half-baked features and very, very slowly people will realize you don't suck but it still won't help you get promo.
I'm not in Big Tech really, just a standard BigCo. IME doing anything productive in an enterprise environment means pulling out at least some legacy cruft constantly. Anything else means it accumulates faster than you can remove it. Unfortunately, almost every bit of cruft has someone that looks after it, so this naturally makes you enemies. The only realistic way to keep ones job is to constantly add to the pile, never remove from it.
VC money going up in flames has a tendency to kill their other invested-in companies through increased pressure to become the unicorn that digs them out of the hole. Hopefully this VC doesn’t invest heavily in anything actually good.
First on some testbench, developing software, power supply, (physical) install procedures, etc. With that done, one would expect to outfit a few stores to see how they work IRL. But no:
"The initial round of installations in 2018 reached 10,300 screens in 700 stores."
As part of a $200 million plan to cover 2,500 stores.
From testbench to fitting 10k screens across 700 stores, without intermediate testrun in a few stores?!?
On the plus side: if this crashes & burns (pun intented) then it's mostly VC going up in smoke. Hopefully eating profit from Walgreens who dared to go into consumer-hostile territory. And showing other chains not to do this.
Also the difference between the firms' marketing research & actual reception by consumers is baffling. Probaby:
"Or perhaps the surveys backing this data were only ever collected in the first two days following installation at Walgreens locations adjacent to dispensaries holding free pre-roll promotions."
Of course regular shoppers are not Cooler Screens' customers. Or even chain owners(?). The brands they sell advertising space to, are.
There could be 1 consumer-friendly use: looking up label info, ingredients, nutritional value, vegetarian / vegan / halal etc, perhaps compare with alternative products. Without having to open door & grab product. Only a small screen per section would suffice. But nope...
The whole concept is just bad all around. Perhaps it's good thing this initial roll-out was poorly implemented.