Rather, it throws out a series of guesses and confidence values of a person's age, gender, and race, and allow the planogram (and OOH advertising) to change dynamically based on that information.

Which is not necessarily great, but also an entire order of magnitude less invasive than every interaction any casual user has on the internet with any ad ever. Or, frankly, with any POS system recording a repeat purchase from your credit card, from which motivated vendors can back into the rest of the demographic data.

I'm not excusing it, but while the error reads "facial recognition", it's more "stereotyping enablement platform," which, while only marginally better, is probably still better.

It's also hilarious to think of the thing displaying the green M&M if you're a "probable" woman, and the red or yellow M&M if you're a "probable" man, and seeing how long it'd take for anyone to correlate the change.

In theory they can do something like "Why do you look so sad? Maybe a Mars can cheer you up!". This can be done while being GDPR complient but people don't like that. It creates a feeling that everything is watching you.

Privacy is not about hiding things, it is about controlling what you want to show.

I'm not saying it's not used as a racist trope. I'm saying it's amazing how Americans managed to be racist enough to make such a non-issue racist.

Check, check, check. Yum! TIL that I could pass for black in America. OK, maybe not.

Unfortunately grape soda is almost impossible to find in Madrid, I've only tried it a couple of times, first in Rota Base, and loved it.

Because of this, it became associated with black people, and thereby with criminality, low education and poverty among the dominant culture that created this sort of pattern-matching.

> Albino student: "Hey, where'd you get that watermelon?"

> Student with watermelon: "Dude, I'm black."

I think it was around then I first learned of the watermelon / friend chicken stereotype (I didn't get why everyone laughed when he said this), but "grape soda" is a new one to me.

And you're a European? As a fellow European (balkans) I can comfortably say that many European cultures are racist as hell, to a degree that would make even quite a few Americans blush. I'd be careful about feeling any superiority over supposed European sophistication even in Western Europe.

Ask nearly anyone there about gypsies, jews or arabs in a context where they think they can speak honestly and privately. The kind of shit that gave Europe at least one huge holocaust and god knows how many pogroms before that hasn't entirely gone away, it's mostly just better camouflaged and with some of its sharper edges cut away.

I guess the European equivalent would be the racism against gypsies with the distinction being that it's less prominent for simple demographic reasons owing to us trying to genocide them for centuries. Of course this makes it all the more shocking to Americans when it does come up because of how flagrant it is.

But yeah, Europeans are no less racist than Americans. I'd go even so far as to say milquetoast non-racism (e.g. corporate DEI, the typical "one of each color" groups of people in stock images etc) is more widely accepted in the US than here in Europe given how many racist comments I see any time an ad includes a brown person. I think however that that has less to do with being less racist and more with being more "politically correct" (in the original sense -- i.e. saying what you're supposed to say, not what you believe).

The whole notion of not even being allowed to see the same ads as your fellow man in a public space because you are involuntarily shunted into some kind of cohort is disgusting, regardless of what is being used to decide that.

Imagine walking somewhere and seeing all the digital ad screens around you switch to basket ball events or Kentucky Fried Chicken where they were showing tailor made suits just a second before. (Or ads for a pre-emptive rectal exam or mobility aids.)

I don't see how it is. The mere processing of my personal information (age, gender, race – doesn't matter that it's only a guess/estimate) without my explicit consent or any contractual need should already represent a violation of GDPR.

Is a picture of my face necessary to sell me a chocolate bar ? I would say not, and if they take it without asking consent before I would say that it is not GDPR compliant.

They improve absolutely nothing from a buyer's perspective. Every step of the transaction is made worse. You can't glance at the entire inventory. You never know how much of an item is left. The machine does not reliably know how much of an item is left. Every interaction lags. And in return I get ads and mini games. Just so some C-suite cretin (guess what the C in C*O stands for) can show his little cretin friends how innovative his farts are.

It is late. I am hungry. My train departs in 2 minutes. Please, I just want a bloody Snickers.

These companies are a blight.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/12/business/walgreens-freezer-sc...

Countless hours wasted and it is still worse than a glass panel in every way.

Not unlike orchestrating a dozen microservices and three Dooms worth of code to render a simple form to the three users a typical application has.

“This is the future of retail and shopping,” Avakian said.

If this is our future of "education", these parasitic, data grubbing companies can fuck right off along with any larger company that supports them.

Nothing whatsoever about this in the least bit improves the time you spend grabbing something from a cooler. It's blatant enshitification of a very basic buying task that need not involve any further interface, and it so obviously does nothing but try to squeeze more money from said basic interaction for nobody's benefit except Walgreens, the companies paying for their grubby little digital visuals, and the scum-loaded company that's selling this garbage to them.

I can almost imagine a future in which even the tissue of toilet paper comes covered in "engagement" ad visuals impregnated into its material through some sort of micro-display technology. At last in that case it would get exactly the engagement it most deserves and afterwards go where it really belongs.

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We spent all this money to replace inefficient open refrigerators with glass door ones just to undo it for advertising...

It's the "good ads" argument -- this machine can guess your age/gender and offer up items most purchased by your demographic, all the while feeding that data back to the vendor. Who wouldn't love that? :-/

More seriously, this has been a standard capability in vending machines, fast food menu systems, and digital signage in general for over a decade. Check out this ad from 2012 for Intel's AIM Suite for an example of how this stuff is pitched: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KdMIp2vQjG8

"Is the viewer a teenage girl? Then change to content to highlight a back-to-school shoe sale a few doors down. Is it a senior male? Then why not tell him about the golf club sale at the sporting goods store?"

But those cameras aren't there because of the vending machine. That is just a convenient platform. This is about ads, and tracking, and data brokering. We had digital ad screens placed on the platforms at train stations in the Netherlands with a camera hole a few years ago, and the advertising company swore that those cameras would not be activated, for now, until the legal side was resolved, or until they could get away with it without anyone noticing.

It feels icky.

Whereas classic vending machine inventory systems requires an human person to track the re-fills or sales.

A happy medium would be no stupid cameras, but with electronic tracking and reporting of what is sold. That has to be a thing that can be done, right?

I wouldn't trust this automatic data for shit. When's the last time you used a vending machine that did not have any problems? The classic meme of people beating on a machine because something got stuck. How is that inventory managed? Does the inventory decrement every time someone pushes buttons to vend an item? Is it tracked by weight? Who enters the weight?

This seems like a system ripe for abuse by the manufacture on needing maintenance like the McDonald's soft server machine.

Sorry?

You order by the # of the item.

This is recorded in NVRAM/sent to cloud nowadays.

There is absolutely no need to involve any human being in the process of tracking sales.

The guy with a clipboard counting how many Diet Coke cans are missing hasn't been the way these things are managed since probably 2003.

That's exactly how the vending machines at my workplace operate. No screens or weird tracking (as long as you avoid the stupid "pay on your phone with our app" option). The machine knows exactly how many of what items it has dispensed and when without any of that nonsense.

I'm fine with a machine taking my observable physical characteristics and using that to select ads for me. I'm also fine with ads that are not so much targeted as self-selected.

It's the use of non-observable, non-public info to build and reference an advertising profile where I start to object. It's creepy, and the ads are somehow less relevant.

> "Customizable UI design - Product selection can be extended to include products not physically in the machine. Consumers can store them in Invenda Wallet [a mobile app] and redeem them somewhere else."

Somehow managing to turn a convenience-driven impulse buy into an additional chore to redeem later.

At the end of the day, there must be some angle I'm not understanding or these features wouldn't actually drive sales. I wonder if the idea is to vend digital products? Drive traffic to nearby physical stores through some kind of targeted digital coupon? Has anyone seen this kind of thing in the wild?

But even that is madness.

I think the era of vending machine is mostly over, but nobody is admitting it.

Why? Aren't they more practical than ever?

"Oh, those are just all the snacks I badly wanted but were out of stock in the vending machine and I can redeem them at some vague time at some vague location. Why, did you want to buy them?"

Place it somewhere where there are enough people that haven't tried it before and trick them into buying something they don't want. No one will ever use it more than once.

The most scammy make it so you can only load the card in multiples of ten but the machines all cost prime amounts.

But at least this practice does make their spying ways more obvious.

Speaking only for myself, this would not be long-term profitable for the vending machine company, as the cost of them fixing the boot-sized hole in the machine would be far higher than the $2 they stole from me.

/s but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hwnGrn3go