A few years ago, shoppers at major grocery and convenience stores started to notice something strange: The doors to the stores’ refrigerators and freezers were covered with digital screens. Actually, “notice” is putting it gently. With their eye-catching animations, pop-up ads, and noisy audio, the screens were imposing—and that’s when they worked correctly. When the screens were broken (which was often), they created an inconvenient and irritating obstacle for everyday shoppers, who just wanted to grab their energy drink or their ice cream without hassle.
Today, Walgreens—one of the earliest adopters of the technology—is waking up to the fact that the screens were a costly disaster. Not only are consumers annoyed by the displays that block their view of actual, in-stock items and scream ads for juice at them, but the screens themselves are an expensive service provided by CoolerX, formerly known as Cooler Screens. At the turn of the decade, Walgreens had signed a contract with CoolerX to install 45,000 “smart doors” across hundreds of its US locations; now it’s desperate to get rid of the displays altogether.
As shoppers have cheekily observed on social media, ad-laden freezer door screens are unnecessary at best and wastefully disruptive at worst. When they’re operational, they illustrate where certain products should lie on the shelves behind them, along with those products’ price tags. Essentially, it’s a digitized version of what shoppers might see through a traditional glass door, except with animated, audio-enabled ads smack-dab in the middle of the display. (Good luck figuring out where your favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor is when an ad for the brand covers three shelves’ worth of product.) But the doors are often inoperational. Thanks to glitches, frozen screens, and power issues, shoppers are often required to open blacked-out door after blacked-out door to find the product they want.
Walgreens started to realize the screens were more hassle than they were worth in 2023, at which point it attempted to excuse itself from its deal with CoolerX and have the screens removed. CoolerX responded by suing Walgreens for $200 million and insisting that its screens stay in place. Worse, CoolerX CEO Arsen Avakian allegedly attempted to punish Walgreens for its transgression in a much sneakier way.
According to a Bloomberg report published Thursday, Avakian ordered his team to “cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores” in Chicago on Dec. 14, 2023. This caused the screens in each store to blackout, rendering them useless. Walgreens employees responded by filing online service requests with CoolerX, which reportedly marked each request as “resolved” without an actual solution or response. In the meantime, they taped paper signs onto the doors, hoping shoppers would find their way around on their own. It took a week for Walgreens to catch on to what it now refers to as CoolerX’s “December attack”; once the brand obtained a temporary restraining order from a judge, CoolerX was required to turn the data feeds back on.
“This was a brazen pressure tactic intended to harm Walgreens’ business and customer reputation during the busy holiday shopping season and force Walgreens to capitulate to [CoolerX’s] demands,” Walgreens’ lawyers said. More than a year later, Walgreens is still locked in a legal battle with CoolerX, demanding that it be allowed to remove the unreliable screens without financial penalty.
But does this mean Walgreens is going back to transparent glass doors? Not necessarily. While some Walgreens locations switched back to traditional glass last year, the brand is reportedly experimenting with its own fridge and freezer door screens, over which it would presumably have more control. Though Walgreens is capable of recognizing that other disruptive shopping experiences hurt sales, it appears to be stubbornly hanging onto its dream of a screen-mired frozen food aisle.
