You can thanks capitalism for poisoning our cities, towns and soil with an extremely dangerous neurotoxin (lead).

FUHHK YEWW ahm GATORADIN’

It's honestly the corpse of a retail store being dragged along by a perfectly healthy pharmacy. Every rx sold, regardless of what the customer pays, nets Walgreens the full value of the script. So when grangran runs to Wallygreens to pick up her no cost diabeetus meds, walgreens gets the full 1000+$. And that's every script sold, every hour of every day.

Look what they own and look what assets are being held. They're what I like to call a shell company

I live in a very small city with a Walgreens and 2 CVSes, all within a mile or so of each other, and they all seem pretty busy. We also have a Walmart, a medical supply store, and a small neighborhood pharmacy, as well as two grocery stores. I think how busy your local drug store is is pretty variable. We do have a college in town and also a pretty active main street with a lot of shops and restaurants that bring in a lot of tourists and people from neighboring towns and bigger nearby cities.

But like, we have kind of a lot of CVSes and Walgreens around here and they all seem to do well enough. I don't think it's just that we're in a college town. Though, again, we do have a lot of colleges in general.

When I walk through my house I have sweet motion activated lights and doodads that I have spent hours tweaking and I enjoy thoroughly.

In the bathroom I use a switch.

Not everything needs to be "smart"

But think of the ads we can’t play! THE ADS!

i’ve got an ad-blocking DNS on home network and my phone, i use youtube revanced, i’ve even got a fucken apk patcher to strip ad shit out of mobile games. it’s WILD to me how tolerant people are of ads. like anytime someone’s showing me a video on their phone and an ad plays, i have to do a little mental math on whether it’ll be annoying or mutually beneficial to just start playing the video on my phone instead.

and it takes such little effort to get rid of them! i’m constantly offering to teach people how to use patchers or revanced, folks are just like “nah it doesn’t bother me” MAN, HOW? sponsorblock alone is a goddamn godsend, sometimes more than 30% of a video is just ads and self promotion! how does anyone happily throw away their time like that‽

I feel this so hard. Ads and PtW are slowly becoming the only business model because we have stone-age-level impulse control. Hopefully, someone like the EU eventually unfucks it and we switch to micropayments to cover server costs.

The only way it could get worse is if they started banning anyone too poor to properly whale.

If it helps, they also lock a lot of product, requiring employees to come and help customers directly.

https://eurweb.com/2025/walgreens-theft-prevention-struggle/

It's like they made their stores as hostile as possible to shop in.

And money! Customers pay for these atrocities.

You weren't kidding! This is a rollercoaster ride of incredible twists and turns!

The problem, according to three former Cooler Screens executives and a former Yahoo executive, was that their clients thought of the screens as “shopper marketing,” an old-timey ad category that covered in-store promos like the balloons or cardboard displays that clerks hang over cases of beer. Spending in this area was far lower than the more lucrative digital ad rates Avakian hoped to charge. One of the former Cooler Screens execs says that Avakian wanted marketing dollars well above what the industry was willing to pay and that his lieutenants could be preposterously condescending on calls with the Yahoo sales team, which at times devolved into shouting matches. “The Yahoo people hated them!” this former exec says. “Their MO was to ride them [Yahoo] like Secretariat.” (A Cooler Screens spokesperson says that this description is inaccurate and that Avakian’s relationship with Yahoo executives remained positive.)

Condescending calls with Yahoo sales team. Fucking hilarious.

I imagine it's less fun for employees.

You know what else they could have done, as a compromise? Make the ad screens partially transparent, by stippling the pixels, or by having glass sections, or by turning the LCD completely transparent for part of its refresh.... there are many ways to not be anti-consumer garbage meant only to jump in front of eyeballs.

But how do I serve real time ads?