Because EVERY SINGLE SQUARE INCH OF EVERY SURFACE MUST MAKE PROFIT.
I would complain and stop shopping there, and encourage others to complain as well. Hell leave the doors propped open to help people see what's inside, even though it'll run up their electricity bill and spoil the contents. Aslo remember to bring in one of those window-cracker car safety things and have a go at breaking the screens if you want to be even more rebellious.
I read about this, and it's the ads. Full wall animated ads.
I also instantly predicted this obvious outcome. And hope it happens go any place that installs them. Fuck billboards invading every inch of our lives.
I thought. If you change where the products are, or replace the products wkth different products. You can just keep it updated and change it over. But then I thought. Well, if you're replacing the products, then you've got the door open. Then it's literally no extra effort to just replace a piece of paper.
Whereas here, you'd actually have to change it from a PC, and make sure you put it all in the right place.
It allows them to control the appearance and impression of the products more. A huge amount of store design is based around making the stuff appealing and thus increasing the chance you buy it.
Hence the huge pyramids of apples or the bountiful overflowing stock of vegetables. They’ll generally not even sell a half of what they end up stocking, but if they just stocked what people were likely to buy the shelves would look barren and off putting, and people may be less likely to come back there.
Even if a glass door on these fridges was perfectly functional and arguably better from the average person’s point of view, the screens give the marketing team more opportunities to spin their products. The goal of a store is not to provide you with what you want and need, but to convince you that you want and need things you don’t actually.
I wish they'd realize that many people don't give that much of a shit. Not that they don't give a shit, they give a shit... But just not as much as they think.
For real, these digital displays never change what I went in there to get. I look for the section labeled with the thing I want, I get it, I pay, I leave. Not once have I gone "damn that fake Sprite covered in fake condensation looks so refreshing, I think I'll get that instead."
I guess it has to work on some level though, or those no way they'd be paying for those instead of simple panes of glass
It's subtle. No one is looking at the fake condensation covered sprite and saying "aw man, this one looks so much more refreshing!" It's all happening behind the scenes. You gravitate towards the one well lit, stacked up so that it's easy to grab. Easy to see labels.
The insides of coolers are kinda gross looking if you let even a little bit of maintenance slip. Frost, condensation on the inside, weird rollers that don't like to put the label outward if it wasn't stocked properly. Shitty florescent lights. Being able to eliminate that just gives the store a lot more control over the all-critical first impression.
AFAIK, nobody has ever proven that those kinds of ads actually work, or at least they haven't managed to attach a dollar value to the ads. But, everyone is afraid not to do it. Also, to a certain extent, advertising is also a prestige thing: you're not doing it just for your (potential) customers, but also to flex on your competitors.
I'm not even talking about ads, really. Just item presentation. Making your stock of the exact same item more appealing than another places, or making one brand of an item more appealing influences people to buy that one, as opposed to the other.
The idea is the same with the digital displays. You don't have to worry about what the item itself actually looks like, within reason, it's always going to appear at first glance to the customer to be clearly labeled, bright, fully stocked, and ready to grab.
Yah, these kind of things don’t tend to work as well as marketing people think. The influence is marginal, and mainly a grift on the part of the company selling them.
Better insulation; what others are saying is just what SEOs will do with it once implemented but AFAIK the main purpose is more efficient refrigeration.