“The digital cooler screens at Walgreens made me watch an ad before it allowed me to know which door held the frozen pizzas,”

we have 8 year old african children mining rare earth minerals so we can build this shit

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

the main reason this tech can proliferate is that the people who decide to insert ads into every area of our visual field are rarely within striking distance of the common person. these assholes all have personal shoppers/assistants, live behind walls, and we don't know what they look like. honestly, the only thing cool about any AR tech would be its hijacking by culture jamming leftists to identify/add callouts to our enemies (secret police/undercover cops, informants, ultra high net worth individuals, etc).

also, there's a great dystopian visual gag here, where it's like post apocalyptic and some plucky hero scavenger stumbles across a display fridge running on solar power with bottled water in it that is running at like 16K so it looks real and shifts with perspective, only for him to open the door and like it's empty or has a bunch of skulls in it and it's a trap set by cannibals or baddies.

"Sorry, you simply buying something doesn't create enough value for our shareholders."

What a fucking crock of shit. Absolutely no respect for anyone's time or dignity. Even being a good little consumer isn't enough anymore, you have to subject yourself to degradation and psychological manipulation even to participate in the basic market activities required of you to exist.

Every door like this is an assault on human decency and smashing them in with a hammer is a moral act.

in North Korea, the grocery store shelves are filled with images of food to give the illusion of prosperity

Cooler Screens says 90% of consumers it has surveyed prefer its digital screens to traditional fridges

Do you prefer to look at digital screens?
YES -> SKIP AD
NO -> WATCH AD, FREE TESTICLE SHOCK

Pretty soon all of these will display a Windows login screen or bash script with an error and the Walgreens minimum wage employees will have to write post-it notes about what's in the fridge

Neuralink 1,000% is going to be used to put ads in people's brains both awake and asleep.

Good on them. They were on the verge of bankruptcy with all the theft going on all the time. Now they have the money to put screens on coolers! Good to see them do better and crime on the decline.

My local Kroger did this, and it's gonna turn me into the Unabomber, I stg

soviet-huff Can we get past the bullshit need to buy things from and sell shit to other people already? Make technology that actually fucking matters, that's actually interesting and assists in national development, and frees up the common person's schedule to engage in leisure, so we can all get the fuck on with our lives already?!

It's boring as hell and annoying as fuck how commerce continues to chase after people and becoming an increasingly obstructive, invasive phenomenon. People don't want their lives to be plagued with ads! Why do you think daytime television is on its deathbed (apart from being an endless sea of reality TV)? If we need something, we'll fucking go looking for it.

It’s wild how we made cyberpunk dystopias real in the cringest way possible

If I ever find one of them I'm opening every one to check the inside and then making no effort to close it.

They have these at my local Walgreens; not only are they stupid AF and annoying, they actively make me to not want to shop there. Like, just a clear freezer door, I’ll scan my eyes over the products to see if there’s anything I want. With those, my brain just straight up nopes out of considering anything behind the doors, it gets dismissed as noise in the sea of advertising.

This is the fault of communism, somehow frothingfash

On top of everything else, it is a direct, systemic, and compounding additional waste of electricity. Everything about this is enshittification.

I've seen these irl. They are so fucking bright at every time of day that it literally hurts to look at them.

digital coolers at wallscreens kelly be looking like a PS2 game's texture for a vending machine, but irl

The freezers have front-facing sensors used to anonymously track shoppers interacting with the platform

Time to start wearing a hat with eyes on the front and side to mess with their gaze tracking software. Can't track where you are looking if your shirt has 10 pairs of eyes at different angles and heights.

But for customers who just want to peek into the freezer and grab their ice cream, Walgreens (WBA) risks angering them by ~~solving~~ a problem that ~~shoppers~~ didn’t ~~know~~ exist~~ed.~~