Walgreens' ad-screen fridge doors ended in dueling lawsuits and blacked-out stores

Cooler Screens installed internet-connected 'smart doors' on Walgreens refrigerators: glass panels that showed images and prices of the products behind them, plus advertisements. According to Bloomberg, as reported by Fortune, about 10,000 doors went into hundreds of US Walgreens stores, with plans for 35,000 more. Before the dispute, Bloomberg reported, the panels often flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products, and Walgreens told Fortune it terminated the contract because Cooler Screens failed to meet its expectations and contractual obligations.

Cooler Screens sued Walgreens for $200 million in June 2023 in Cook County, Illinois, alleging breach of contract, and Walgreens countersued for monetary damages. In December 2024, Bloomberg reported, Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian's team secretly cut the data feeds to doors at more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The doors 'glazed over with white pixels' or blacked out, so shoppers could not see what was behind the glass. Avakian said it was the only way to make Walgreens respond to overdue invoices for maintenance and internet fees.

Walgreens' lawyers called the outage a 'brazen pressure tactic' timed for the holiday shopping season and suggested it hurt the chain's business in its last quarter. A Walgreens spokesperson said the company was pleased all the Cooler Screens doors had since been removed and that it looked forward to showing in court how the vendor breached the contract.

Cooler Screens sued for $200M (June 2023) and Walgreens countersued; doors went dark at 100+ Chicago-area stores in December 2024 and were removed.

Walgreens put third-party digital screens on a core part of the store, so product visibility depended on the vendor's data feed.

The screens reportedly flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products before the blackout, per Bloomberg's account.

The contract dispute over invoices and exit terms was not settled before the relationship broke down.

The vendor could switch off the displays remotely, and did, as leverage over unpaid maintenance and internet fees.

Putting a vendor's screen between shoppers and your product makes its uptime your uptime; a rollout is only as safe as the exit terms and the payment dispute process.

As of Fortune's January 2025 report, the lawsuit and Walgreens' countersuit were still pending and Walgreens said all Cooler Screens doors had been removed. The article gives no verdict or settlement figure, and the $200M is the vendor's claim, not a finding.