Walgreens Replaced Refrigerator Doors With High-Tech Smart Screens, But There’s a Problem

Replacing the glass doors of Walgreens‘ refrigerators and freezers with digital screens didn’t raise too many eyebrows at first. However, these new additions to the drugstore chain became more of an issue than expected.

Walgreens’ Smart Screens: From High-Tech Promise to Legal Battle

Walgreens entered into a 10-year contract with Cooler Screens Inc. to facilitate these high-tech door replacements in 2019. Subsequently, the improved digital screens were to assist the retailer in seeing what products were purchased most and to entice customers with targeted advertising for particular products.

According to a Bloomberg report, Walgreens has since tried to pull out of the agreement early and is now locked into a legal battle to remove the screens from its stores and return to the former glass freezer fronts. Greg Wasson, a former Walgreens employee who served as chief executive officer of the pharmacy from 2009 to 2014, co-founded the Cooler Screens startup and is suing his former employer over a contract dispute.

He claims that Walgreens’ former CEO Roz Brewer, who stepped down in 2023, was looking to remove these high-tech devices, which she reportedly committed to installing at 2,500 store locations.

Part of the reason is due to the fridges’ technical performance. Bloomberg stated, “Their digital planograms could be adjusted over the internet, but they depended on store staff to physically stock goods accordingly. Too often, customers opened a door projecting rows of milk only to discover soda or empty shelves instead. The internal cameras were supposed to detect and dim out-of-stock items, but they were inconsistent. And that was when the screens worked at all: Walgreens was plagued with ‘dark doors,’ blackened or distorted displays that Cooler Screens’ remote monitoring system showed as functioning properly.”

Additionally, per the Chicago Tribune, Wasson’s lawsuit stated, “After visiting stores in which Smart Doors had been installed, Brewer decided that she did not like the way they looked, purportedly comparing the screens to ‘Vegas’ in a derogatory way.” In the suit, Cooler Screens alleged that Walgreens fabricated reasons to terminate the contract by citing safety defects with the Smart Doors that didn’t exist.

Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It’s Now a $200 Million Fiasco

A startup promised the pharmacy chain its high-tech coolers would track shoppers and spark an in-store ad revolution.https://t.co/J3xQVXy5lf

— Truth in Advertising (@TruthinAd) January 16, 2025

Cooler Screens is seeking $200 million for breach of contract and wants to prevent the retailer from removing the screen technology from its stores.

As of June 2023, Cooler Screens had thus far spent $45 million making and installing doors for 700 stores, $88 million on doors that hadn’t been installed, and over $100 million on third-party vendors to “support the Walgreens relationship,” according to CSP Daily News.

Medium reported last year that Walgreens claimed that the product “failed to meet its contractual obligations.” Therefore, the company’s decision to terminate the contract was based on experience with the product in the stores it was already installed within.

According to Bloomberg, in December 2023, the Cooler Screens team also “secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so smart doors affected in each of these stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether.” The doors were offline for a week before Walgreens was able to get a temporary restraining order against the startup to force it to restore the data feeds.

This Isn’t the First Legal Issue Cooler Screens Technology Has Experienced

In a case filed in Illinois in 2022, Cooler Screens was brought into litigation by a woman named Rebecca Roberts, who filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming they violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.

The document states, “Plantiff brings this action for damages and other legal and equitable remedies resulting from the illegal actions of Cooler Screens in capturing, collecting, storing, and using the Plantiff’s and other similarly suited individuals’ biometric identifiers and biometric information without first obtaining informed written consent or providing the requisite data retention and deconstruction policies, in direct violation of BIPA.”

Cooler Screens also has contracts in place with Kroger and Circle K. Thus far, neither of those companies has filed any litigation against the technology company.