Walgreens Is Testing ‘Smart Coolers’ with Cameras to Analyze What You Going to Do Before You Know



Walgreens is piloting a new line of “smart coolers”, which are refrigerators with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and then identify them by gender, age, and even income to predict their choices. They also use ‘iris tracking’ that creates data on what you look at. At present, these ‘Cooler Screens’ do not use facial recognition to identify specific shoppers but probably will do so in the future. -GEG

Walgreens is piloting a new line of “smart coolers”—fridges equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. On January 14, the company announced its first trial at a store in Chicago in January, and plans to equip stores in New York and San Francisco with the tech.

Demographic
information is key to retail shopping. Retailers want to know what
people are buying, segmenting shoppers by gender, age, and income (to
name a few characteristics) and then targeting them precisely. To that
end, these smart coolers are a marvel.

If, for example,
Pepsi launched an ad campaign targeting young women, it could use
smart-cooler data to see if its campaign was working. These machines can
draw all kinds of useful inferences: Maybe young men buy more Sprite if
it’s displayed next to Mountain Dew. Maybe older women buy more ice
cream on Thursday nights than any other day of the week. The tech also
has “iris tracking” capabilities, meaning the company can collect data on which displayed items are the most looked at.

Crucially,
the “Cooler Screens” system does not use facial recognition. Shoppers
aren’t identified when the fridge cameras scan their face. Instead, the
cameras analyze faces to make inferences about shoppers’ age and gender.
First, the camera takes their picture, which an AI system will measure
and analyze, say, the width of someone’s eyes, the distance between
their lips and nose, and other micro measurements. From there, the
system can estimate if the person who opened the door is, say, a woman
in her early 20s or a male in his late 50s. It’s analysis, not
recognition.

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