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Comment by solyin | Hacker News Reader

The benefit is the same as making websites remote controllable. A person then doesn't have to drive in to flip a switch, which means fewer people are needed to operate more systems, saving the company money.

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Switch to do what? If food is in it you can't change anything. If food isn't in it then why is it running or why wasn't it defrosted when it was emptied?

If you home refrigerator could be defrosted remotely, in what scenario would you ever do that?

Presumably the grocery stores are already staffed by at least one employee capable of flipping a switch, no?

Stores are now installing e-ink price tags to save labor updating price labels. They're not going to turn back from centralized HVAC/fridge monitoring and control.

Unlike fridge remote control (note, not remote monitoring but remote control) e-ink price tags actually make a good deal of sense. The prices are already managed centrally so it reduces the labor to needing to accurately document which piece of hardware is at which shelf location as opposed to needing to manually check that each tag has the up to date price. (TBF OCR is now good enough and mobile SoCs now powerful enough that you could probably automate most of the traditional task but that wasn't historically the case.)

No they are doing it so that they can change prices more quickly and thereby extract more profit. Next (or already current) step is adjusting prices dynamically based on nearby customers.

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