Walgreens Regrets Replacing Fridge Doors With Smart Screens, Creating Techno-Dystopia Vibes

Back in 2020, Walgreens entered into an agreement with a startup company called Cooler Screens Inc. to replace the glass doors of the company’s refrigerators and freezers with glitzy, shiny digital screens that would track customer shopping habits and display targeted advertising to juice revenue. Now, according to Bloomberg, Walgreens is locked into a legal battle to get the screens out of its stores before they devolve further into a deeply dystopic hellscape.

The digital door debacle has been something of an ongoing cold war for the pharmacy giant that most consumers probably didn’t notice, save for the pitch-black screens that blocked out their view of what was in Walgreens fridges. It all started when Walgreens tried to pull out of its 10-year contract early—and for a pretty legit reason. Instead of reliably displaying items that were in stock in the fridge, the screens reportedly regularly flickered, crashed, showed the wrong products, and occasionally caught on fire. (You know what *does* reliably show what is in stock without concerns of spontaneous combustion? Regular glass doors.)

While Walgreens and Cooler Screens went back and forth in court, with Walgreens fighting to exit their agreement early and remove the screens and the startup pushing back for breach of contract, Cooler Screens launched its own retribution campaign. According to Bloomberg, the company intentionally cut the feeds to screens located at more than 100 Walgreens locations, leaving them blacked out and forcing consumers to have to open every single door to try to find what they were looking for.

This seems as good of a time as any to note that the absolute best-case scenario for these doors was that they would accurately display what appeared behind them while sucking up consumer shopping habits and enabling Walgreens to run “dynamic pricing” to gauge shoppers in real-time.

The “smart doors” are just one of a number of missteps that Walgreens has taken in recent years which have made the retailer increasingly hostile to shoppers. On the company’s first-quarter earning call yesterday, CEO Tim Wentworth conceded that placing things like deodorant and toothpaste behind lock and key has resulted in fewer sales. When you lock things up … you don’t sell as many of them,” Wentworth said, per CBS News. “We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively.”

Walgreens decided to place most of its inventory behind locked plexiglass displays in response to what it called a growing trend of organized retail theft. That turned out to be, at best, a massive overstatement of the problem. More than likely, the company manufactured the narrative as it was closing stores and firing workers to cut costs to garner sympathy and duck blame.

Here’s a pitch for Walgreens execs: Ditch the digital doors for glass that people can see through, stop trying to wring out every dollar you can with targeted surge pricing, cut the padlocks and make the items on shelves accessible, and rebrand it as a new “minimalist” shopping experience. Or maybe you can keep falling for faux innovations and pour hundreds of millions of dollars into gambles like Cooler Screens and Theranos. Seems like that’s working out great.