Because EVERY SINGLE SQUARE INCH OF EVERY SURFACE MUST MAKE PROFIT.
I would complain and stop shopping there, and encourage others to complain as well. Hell leave the doors propped open to help people see what's inside, even though it'll run up their electricity bill and spoil the contents. Aslo remember to bring in one of those window-cracker car safety things and have a go at breaking the screens if you want to be even more rebellious.
I read about this, and it's the ads. Full wall animated ads.
I also instantly predicted this obvious outcome. And hope it happens go any place that installs them. Fuck billboards invading every inch of our lives.
It allows them to control the appearance and impression of the products more. A huge amount of store design is based around making the stuff appealing and thus increasing the chance you buy it.
Hence the huge pyramids of apples or the bountiful overflowing stock of vegetables. They’ll generally not even sell a half of what they end up stocking, but if they just stocked what people were likely to buy the shelves would look barren and off putting, and people may be less likely to come back there.
Even if a glass door on these fridges was perfectly functional and arguably better from the average person’s point of view, the screens give the marketing team more opportunities to spin their products. The goal of a store is not to provide you with what you want and need, but to convince you that you want and need things you don’t actually.
I wish they'd realize that many people don't give that much of a shit. Not that they don't give a shit, they give a shit... But just not as much as they think.
Old system: Haagen-Dazs pays the store a large slotting fee to be on the shelf of the freezer that's at about chest height. Ben & Jerry's pays slightly less to be one shelf higher or lower. Store brands and bulk ice cream go on the lowest shelves or above head height.
New system: Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's buy ads to be shown on the freezer door. They aren't like TV ads, they're just static displays of the containers of ice cream they want to market, but now instead of poorly lit, possibly ice-encrusted containers of whatever ice cream is currently available, they get to promote whatever ice cream they want you to buy. They probably still also have to pay for slotting fees, though these might be lower if the door is a huge screen.
I thought. If you change where the products are, or replace the products wkth different products. You can just keep it updated and change it over. But then I thought. Well, if you're replacing the products, then you've got the door open. Then it's literally no extra effort to just replace a piece of paper.
Whereas here, you'd actually have to change it from a PC, and make sure you put it all in the right place.
Better insulation; what others are saying is just what SEOs will do with it once implemented but AFAIK the main purpose is more efficient refrigeration.
To be entirely fair, the glass doors are terrible for refrigeration efficiency because the glass is far less insulated than the door with the screen is. It might actually save electricity by powering a screen that shows a picture of the product over a insulated door than just having a glass door.
This implementation looks ugly as heck of course but if there's a big enough energy efficiency gain I suppose it might be worth the trade off
Most people see the eye scanner stuff in Minority Report and recoil in horror. I see it and I'm like "hell yeah. Let me buy shit without doing anything but grabbing the thing and leaving."
Walgreens has them installed in 700 stores because a previous ceo signed a deal with a company that provided them.
The CEO of the company providing them? Was also a previous, different CEO of Walgreens. Sure looks like a buddy did another buddies startup a favor, likely for a kickback.
Any store installing that crap (it fortunately hasn't arrived in my country yet) will lose me as a customer. I know it won't hurt them, but I'm not dealing with shit like that.