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Back in 2020, Walgreens contracted a startup called Cooler Screens Inc. to replace the glass doors of the company’s refrigerators and freezers with bright, shiny digital screens that would track customers’ shopping habits and display ads aimed at juice revenue. now, According to BloombergWalgreens is fighting a legal battle to remove the displays from its stores before they turn into a deep dystopian hellscape.
The digital door debacle became part of an ongoing cold war for the drugstore giant that most consumers likely didn’t notice, except for black screens blocking their view of what was inside Walgreens refrigerators. It all started when Walgreens tried to get out of their 10-year contract early and for a pretty legitimate reason. Instead of reliably displaying the items in stock in the fridge, the screens are said to regularly flicker, crash, display the wrong products and occasionally catch fire. (You know, the *What? Regular glass doors that reliably show what’s in storage without the problem of self-combustion.)
While Walgreens and Cooler Screens have been going back and forth in court, with Walgreens fighting to get out of the deal early and remove the screens, and the startup pushing back for breach of contract, Cooler Screens has launched its own punitive campaign. According to Bloomberg, the company intentionally cuts off feeds from displays at more than 100 Walgreens locations, dimming them and forcing consumers to open each door to find what they’re looking for.
This seems like a good time to point out that the absolute best-case scenario for these doors is that they accurately display what’s behind them as consumers pick up on their shopping habits, allowing Walgreens to apply “dynamic pricing” to gauge shoppers. real time.
“Smart doors” are just one of a series of missteps Walgreens has made in recent years that have made the retailer even more hostile to shoppers. In the company’s first-quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Tim Wentworth admitted that putting things like deodorant and toothpaste behind lock and key had resulted in lower sales. When you close things up … you don’t sell a lot of them,” Wentworth said. According to CBS News. “We’ve proven that pretty conclusively.”
Walgreens has decided to put most of its inventory behind locked Plexiglas displays in response to what it calls a growing trend of organized retail theft. This is, at best, a a massive exaggeration of the problem. Most likely, the company made up the story as it was closing stores and laying off workers to cut costs gain sympathy and blame.
Here’s a suggestion for Walgreens executives: Ditch the digital doors for the glass that people can see, stop trying to squeeze every dollar you can out of targeted markup, cut the padlocks and make the items on the shelves accessible, and rebrand it as new. “minimalist” shopping experience. Or maybe you can continue to fall for fake innovations and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on gambles like Cooler Screens. Theranos. This seems to work great.
