151–160 of 397 posts
This way, the shelf can always look full while needing less restocking.
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As a rough estimate, what percent of US economic activity is large piles of money being tossed into a flaming dumpster for the sake of someone's ego? Because every year it seems higher.
Well you can take the entire cosmetics and fashion industry for the total for one. Serving human agency includes shallow and bad ones too.
Everyone here who’s worked for some moderately large corporation knows exactly why this was done: it’s a flashy pet project for some “labs” team in an otherwise boring retailer and maybe they’ll recoup some of the cost in ads, minus whatever they lose for it being an awful idea. Some charismatic product manager sold it to execs as “being the future of connected retail” or some other BS. In a few months they’ll be rem…
As a rough estimate, what percent of US economic activity is large piles of money being tossed into a flaming dumpster for the sake of someone's ego? Because every year it seems higher.
I think TFRC was an ego project, rather than an egoless project. Yet TFRC was a wonderful project that happened to work; if it failed, it might seem like an ego project with no point.
I don’t like saying “you need ego,” but it also seems true that you can’t find large corporate projects without it. Are there good counterexamples? I’d like to change my view.
The year is 2050 and your dingy old toaster has finally given up it's last crumbs. You hop onto Amazon in hopes of finding a suitable replacement as there's no longer any box stores you can travel to. Dumb appliances have been phased out and newer internet connected appliances have taken over. It's better for the consumer they claim. Not wanting an overtly fancy contraption you pick a no frills unit that includes a t…
Samsung fridges have machine vision systems to catalog their contents, then combine the data with data from samsung smart TVs. That way, they can be joined against your tv watching habits. This is all to better target ads.
If you disable it, then it breaks the demand response function on the fridge, indirectly killing polar bears and other living things.
They cost as much (or more) than non-connected versions.
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Shades of both Philip K Dick and Frank Herbert here. This is one of the best SF short stories I've read for a while.
“Please drink verification can.” The sad thing is, we engineers are building this dystopia. Maybe even fellow HN readers. Our next JIRA ticket in the queue is to shove another ad onto another previously unmonetized surface. Many of us are actively bringing about this world! The engineer who built this grocery screen was probably highly compensated for it. The biz guys who just hi-5'ed each other for "crushing it" are…
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It's an ad platform plain and simple; that's the whole value proposition. So I imagine every pitch, every meeting was about that. And every store that uses it will be doing it to get a cut of the ad revenue. It's true that it's lousy at being glass, but that's like saying smallpox blankets were a lousy way to make friends with Native Americans. The shittiness of it, in other words, was the goal all along, and any res…
I could see one case where it does make sense - stores after the gate in airports, where there are more people walking by and seeing the advertising than there are customers coming in looking for a specific product. In any place like a grocery store where customers have clearly come in looking for specific items, it makes zero sense.
I think part of the reasoning behind this is also that people are less likely to buy from a half-empty shelf. That's why markets put so much effort into constant restocking. This way, the shelf can always look full while needing less restocking.
I have to imagine there is a bit of a micro-emotion when you go from seeing the bright, shiny, fully stocked screen to the (potentially) mostly empty shelves behind it. I can imagine it wouldn't halt the purchase or anything, but even picturing it in my head, I can feel myself getting crestfallen at the empty shelves inside.
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Depends on where you live. I don't think I'll be seeing those in quite a while personally, but in the land of unbridled capitalism... You tell me.
In a land with true capitalism these wouldn't exist because every single store with them would instantly lose all their customers. The only reason this exists is because America doesn't have a true free market or capitalism (because that's impossible) and stores are using their market position to force customers to shop there even though they would prefer not to. What are customers going to do? Go to the other massiv…
I don't know about you, but for me the amount of ads I see decreased compared to some points in the past. I don't watch TV, I listen to music using a streaming service with a paid subscription, I actively look for interesting stuff to buy, but not because I've seen an ad. Probably because I haven't seen any recently, because I block them.
People buy some stuff on Amazon not because they were advertised a particular brand, but probably because they needed something and searched for it, compared between options, you know. This is our present. Ads on coolers in supermarkets might be just a swan song of a dying way of selling products. Is Amazon less scary that this though? Really?