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Comment by ExoticPearTree | Hacker News Reader

My belief is that is more about convenience than anything else.

It is also worth looking at why this is so, which most likely stems from the lack of technically inclined staff in every location and the cost of having a tech going from store to store everyday to deal with POS, back office computers, amd any other kind of device.

Now, can you secure all this? For the most part yes, but it is quite expensive to do it. Maybe they will do it now or they will go with “it cannot happen to us twice” thinking and not do anything substantial about it.

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It's not just about having tech inclined staff, but just the whole staffing strategy in general. Most grocery stores et. al. try to staff as cheaply as possible and try to have their workers do as much as possible during their shift. This means that there's no extra time available that they're not shelving products, or sitting at the register.

Rather than have extra staff at the store to do stuff like monitor fridge performance, it's better to have them report stuff centrally and have someone or some tool monitoring thousands of fridges across the entire chain. This way you can send out repair teams and plan maintenance more efficiently.

We all have fridges in our homes.

Why would managing fridge temps be a job that requires more than a few minutes a day at most ?

How hard could it be ?

I suspect when you load a big fridge with lots of room temperature product (does that happen?) the fridge struggles to maintain adequate cold. Though that still seems like something the fridge itself could handle locally.

Surely, these fridges weren't doing inventory tracking? (Or were they?)

Don't forget the fridge is also opened probably 3 times a minute on average during business hours. The use profile is entirely different to home.

Exactly.

If a fridge is being opened frequently, the amount doesnt matter but lets pretend frequently means many times an hour, shouldnt a human be able to spot the fridge is warming up because it doesnt look or feel as cold as normally ?

Or perhaos they could look at a thermometer...

Sounds fun. Perhaps you would like to volunteer for thermometer duty at your local supermarket.

If there were actually people wandering around supermarkets manually checking fridge temperatures in 2026, everyone on HN would be saying how easy it it ought to be be to avoid all this pointless manual labor using modern technology.

Fridges are manually checked where I work. And logged. It is very, very, pointless manual labor, but big.corp won't pay for an offsite solution. Approx 3,000 walk-in fridges across the company, about 1,000 of them also have walk-in freezers.

Because being smart is not about avoiding work, its about failing well when things go pear shaped.

Its the same thign that separate good cars from the best. They both drive well enough at normal speeds in normal conditions. The best cars save your life when the others make you a cripple or dead in some unfortunate chance bad luck event.

Supermarkets operate on razor thin margins. They rely on being smart and avoiding work to make a profit. I don't think they are going to be persuaded to do a bunch of extra manual work, and tolerate increased electricity bills, just on the off chance that there's a once-in-a-generation cyber attack.

I think, in classic HN style, you're massively underestimating the complexity of a domain that you have no experience with. There's a whole academic literature on optimizing this:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=supe...

The software running on fridges should, obviously, be secure (just like any other software should), but air gapping the fridges, and winding the technological clock back a couple of decades, isn't a realistic proposal.

Home fridge, like all home appliances, is basically a toy version of the professional one.

Most fridges at home don't have hot gas defrost cycles, toxic Ammonia refrigerants and store tens of thousands of euros worth of food in at any time.

They usually require scheduled service teams maintaining them who have tight SLAs (because a supermarket without fridges loses a lot of money per day) so making sure you have remote access to it so you can bring the right parts with you is probably useful.

There is a video game where you can unlock a thermostat which grants you extra points if you go back to it and readjust the temperature once in a while. Everyone hated it and kept mentioning just how ludicrous it is that a device called a "Thermal Static" somehow works by inputting thermal changes as opposed to thermal targets, prompting the developer to agree that was the stupidest idea they had and they would be changing it.

This game is nsfw.

Are you implying french fridge makers in real life are stupider than porn?

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