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