Back in 2020, Walgreens made a deal with a startup company called Cooler Screens Inc. about replacing the glass doors of the company’s refrigerators and freezers with shiny, glossy digital screens that would track customers’ buying habits and display targeted advertising to juice revenue. Now, according to BloombergWalgreens is embroiled in a legal battle to get the displays out of its stores before they further turn into a deeply dystopian hellscape.
The digital door debacle was something of an ongoing cold war for the pharmaceutical giant that most consumers probably didn’t notice, except for the pitch-black screens that blocked their view of what was inside Walgreens’ coolers. It all started when Walgreens tried to pull out of its 10-year deal early — and for pretty good reason. Instead of reliably displaying items that were stocked in the refrigerator, the displays reportedly flickered regularly, crashed, displayed the wrong products, and occasionally caught fire. (You know what *reliably* shows what’s in stock without fear of spontaneous combustion? A plain glass door.)
As Walgreens and Cooler Screens went back and forth in court, with Walgreens fighting to end its contract early and remove the screens and the startup countering for breach of contract, Cooler Screens launched its own campaign of retaliation. According to Bloomberg, the company intentionally cut feeds to screens located at more than 100 Walgreens locations, leaving them blacked out and forcing consumers to have to open every door to try to find what they were looking for.
This seems as good a time as any to note that the absolute best-case scenario for these doors was that they would accurately display what’s behind them while sucking up consumer shopping habits and allowing Walgreens to run “dynamic pricing” to gauge customers in real time.
The “smart door” is just one of a number of missteps Walgreens has taken in recent years that have made the retailer increasingly customer-hostile. During the company’s first-quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Tim Wentworth admitted that putting things like deodorant and toothpaste behind bars has led to fewer sales. When you lock things up … you don’t sell them as much,” Wentworth said, according to CBS News. “We proved that pretty convincingly.”
Walgreens decided to house most of its inventory behind locked Plexiglas screens in response to what it called a growing trend of organized retail theft. It turned out, at best, a massive exaggeration of the problem. It is more than likely that the company manufactured the narrative as it is closing stores and laying off workers to cut costs gather sympathy and blame ducks.
Here’s a suggestion for Walgreens CEOs: Ditch the digital glass doors that people can see through, stop trying to squeeze every dollar you can with targeted price increases, remove the padlocks and make the items on the shelves accessible, and rebrand it as a new “minimalist” shopping experience. Or maybe you can continue to fall for fake innovations and invest hundreds of millions of dollars in gambles like Cooler Screens and Theranos. That seems to work great.