Advertising has gotten so pervasive that it wouldn't be surprising to find out that marketers are trying to figure out a way to beam ads straight into our minds.
Until they learn how to do that, though, advertisers are taking advantage of every possible space to place ads, which now includes the refrigerator in your home, as one Redditor learned.
Posting in the r/a******design subreddit, the Redditor shared a photo of their smart fridge, which featured an ad for the television show Pluribus on the screen that read, "We're sorry we upset you, Carol."
They wrote, "Apparently my Samsung fridge has ads now. … How would I disable this? Might just return it and get a normal one."
Samsung confirmed in September 2025 that it would be testing a pilot program that placed ads on some Samsung Family Hub refrigerator models, leading to criticism online, which fellow Reddit users added to when they responded to this post.
"Real tech enthusiasts know to stay away from these awful things," wrote one person.
Another added, "I strongly suspect that they're going to be making this crap a standard feature on most fridges once they finish testing it on the early adopters. It will soon be hard to find a fridge that doesn't have it."
According to Fortune, people in the U.S. viewed only around 500 ads a day in the 1970s, but by 2023, they saw over 5,000 per day.
That's a whole lot of unwanted products and services inundating us as we go about our daily lives, which can have significant adverse effects on people.
The Michigan Journal of Economics studied the pros and cons of advertising and discovered that constant ads can negatively impact people's physical and mental health and promote negative stereotypes, among other things.
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Price 💰 Additionally, such ads harm the environment by constantly encouraging people to buy more than they need or want, resulting in excessive consumption. This leads to more unwanted goods being tossed into our landfills, which then contribute to the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
Hopefully, the backlash against Samsung will see this pilot program trashed, but until it is, you might want to consider returning any smart fridges in your home.
As one Redditor put it, "What in the dystopia?"
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