[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.
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.