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...

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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'm not sure what that means. These already are ads. 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.

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).

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.

Now that I think about it, I have not seen those TVs since the 90s. Maybe they drove the retail workers mad.

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.

I'm sure it came up. Customer experience vs revenue for in-store billboards. Ad revenue won.

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.

Everyone thought "glass". The whole project, from the grocery store point of view, was about testing an alternative to glass doors.

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.

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.

Me too. I could do with getting a bit of extra cash handed to me in a brown envelope.

With AR you don't even need surfaces.