Grocery stores infamously have some of the lowest margins in all of retail and typically hover in the 1-3% range. As a sector they have about zero room for inefficiency and have to be this aggressive about chasing operating cost reductions.

The increased profits that have occurred in recent decades have landed with the big food companies, not with the retail chains selling their products at very little margin.

Yeah, I worked at one during that time. The amount of food we threw away on a regular basis was incredible.

Except that in this case, the possibility of something like this probably is worth it, because system vulnerabilities are solvable problems, while ignoring the ability to improve system efficiency is a static stance. A lot of things have driven up the price of groceries since that time. You mention "comparable or lower inflation adjusted prices", but this hides the fact that the inflation adjusted basket of groceries in the US is near inflation (105% vs a baseline of 94%), while the input costs to that supply chain (like labor, and diesel) have gone up faster. The efficiency isn't doing nothing, grocery prices would almost definitely be higher without it.

I think it's an interesting question.

I would be interested to know what the damage caused by this attack is compared to savings over a system where thermostats need to be adjusted on-site.

That's the work that goes into hiding the "other half" of the inflation (i.e. the 2x diff between reported inflation and what you can actually see in your life).

How would you stay in business if your competitor was offering 20% off your prices because they had better logistics and tracking? Ask consumers to eat the cost due to their latent demand for, uh, inefficient delivery and food spoilage?

You don't need remote command and control to tell you if your single truck chiller is working, you can just go look at the thermostat. But a company needs it to confirm that the chillers are working and at a safe temperature across all 1,000 trucks in their fleet.

What am I missing? Of course the user cares if their food has been stored at the proper temperature from production to transit to the shelf. They don't care that this specific implementation clearly had a security vulnerability, they just want to check out and get back to their lives (and not get sick), but there's no way this whole setup was completely unnecessary to produce that desired outcome, flawed or not.

Maybe we throw it all away and go to 1990s-style grocery chain management, hire a bunch of people, and costs go up while reliability and monitoring shifts to humans. But that doesn't mesh with consumer expectations on price, which is probably how the whole system originated.

But you’re going to adopt a platform that meets the needs across your enterprise, so the capability is often there even if one situation may only call for monitoring.

Further, once you have hundreds or thousands of devices, “just call someone to turn it up/down/off” doesn’t scale.

And you know what the customer needs? Or is this just a personal feeling. There’s multiple people from the industry chiming in on these threads as to why this is needed.