Most people tend to look for comfort in their most visited stores.
They like the bodega to have the same things, the supermarket to be arranged the usual way and the pharmacy to have exactly what they need.
No one wants any of those things to stress them out — or surveil them with robots placed inside freezers that then offer you things you neither asked for nor wanted.
However, customers at Walgreens (WBA) are getting that exact thing and, judging by the reactions on social media, absolutely hating it.
So What Happened to the Doors?
The fracas all began when customers at the pharmacy began noticing that the regular cooler and freezer doors, which are transparent and show you what's inside, had been replaced by digital screens.
So instead of just seeing the milk that is in there, you instead would see an image of milk on the tablet-like screen that is now the door to the cooler.
It also sometimes makes you watch an ad before you could open the door.
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Except often it wasn't correct, so that when customers opened the doors, they didn't see milk — they saw lots of other products, but then had to go around opening other doors to actually find the milk or whatever they were looking for that day.
That minor irritation was enough to send social media spiraling into a frenzy of aggrieved tweeting and just overall grumpiness.
However, enterprising Walgreens customers who were particularly annoyed by these new screens were absolutely appalled when they realized that not only were these doors annoying, they were also watching them and recording data.
That means that while customers are standing there, looking at the screen to see what they want, the door itself, made by Cooler Screens Inc., was taking in their age, size, gender and more to figure out what to offer them on the screen itself.
That sent Twitter roaring off into an entirely different directional outrage, which is perhaps more understandable to the average person.
What Was Walgreens Thinking
Dubbed "smart" screens, Walgreens innovation was actually profiled in the Wall Street Journal months before the average customer began hating them.
In the profile, both retailers who sell things at Walgreens and Walgreens executive themselves, said that having a screen that notices and reads you is actually good for advertisers and shoppers, because it will then offer you things you didn't know you wanted.
One example given was that many shoppers didn't know Walgreens sells beer, so beer companies were pleased to make that more obvious on screen.
“[It] gives us the ability to dynamically influence the shopper at the point of purchase and get them to add beer to the basket,” said Brooke Roller, senior marketing manager of the small format channel for MillerCoors, in a statement to the Journal.
So What Can We Expect of Walgreens Coolers Now?
In response to the outrage, the pharmacy chain has pointed out it does post a privacy notice on its doors/screens.
That provoked precisely the sort of reaction from Twitter and already-disgusted Walgreens customers as one might expect, because it turns out that the privacy notice is actually quite small and often high up and hard to read.
It is unlikely the store will get rid of a massive investment in new technology. But thus far, it is also proving unlikely that customers that dislike the smart screens will forget it anytime soon — and now they have added even more things about the pharmacy chain that bother them as well.
