The Supermarket Superstardom of Marty the Robot

This is, apparently, a common reaction among Stop & Shop’s adult customers. There is a vast array of internet theories, some cheeky and some perhaps less so, about his broader purpose (someone on X compared Marty to Skynet from the Terminator movies) and his immediate motives (“I can’t get a real date but every time I’m in S&S he follows me,” someone recently wrote on Instagram).

Marty, I can confirm from his handlers, is not watching you—at least, not in the way you think. He is not tasked with spotting shoplifters or tracking human behavior. He was originally hired for one job: to relieve store associates from the repetitive task of checking the aisles for spills. A few years later, he went to “college”—as Stop & Shop executives like to say—to pick up the skills and equipment for his barcode scanning duties.

School for Marty is in Nicholasville, Kentucky, at a robotics outfit called Badger Technologies. It was there that engineers conditioned his body, which stands at 6-foot-7-and-a-half-inches and weighs 130 pounds, most of it concentrated in his small rectangular base. (I’ve racked my brain for a way to describe Marty’s shape; on Reddit, someone once described him as “a cross between a hammerhead shark and a marital aid.”) They outfitted him with nine cameras for scanning and two laser-pulsing lidar cameras for navigation. To make sure he wouldn’t topple or injure any customers, they subjected him to a punishing training regimen. People walked around him in flip-flops and steel-toed boots. They rammed shopping carts into him from every direction.

During all that time, though, no one thought to give the robot a face. And here is the too-good-to-be-true-but-it’s-true part of the origin story: Before Marty’s official deployment in 2019, he was doing a pilot run at one of Stop & Shop’s sister stores, a Giant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when a store associate decided something was missing. She went to a craft store and bought a pair of stick-on eyes. Sometime thereafter, the robot started showing up in stores with a mouth—sometimes a coy smile, sometimes a grin wide enough to include a written message. And Stop & Shop finally gave him a name, which is technically an acronym for “Mobile Autonomous Robot Technology.”

There has been a lot of deep thinking among designers and engineers about how to smooth relations between robots and their human coworkers by making machines seem approachable instead of alarming. A robot that’s too human-like can provoke that terrifying “uncanny valley” effect, like the sexy, bald Ava in Ex Machina or the deadly AI demon doll in M3GAN. But a robot that’s too utilitarian—one of Marty’s recent ancestors was rectangular, like a roving cardboard box—feels like a missed opportunity. It’s possible that Marty’s eyes were a fast track to a personality, suggesting, if not a soul behind those stuck-on windows, then at least a sense of humor. It’s hard to get too angry at someone with googly eyes, which could be why the MBTA agreed this summer to plaster googly-eye stickers on a handful of trains.

Marty’s giant peepers did not instantly breed goodwill among Stop & Shop associates or a skeptical press. In July 2019, in a story headlined “Marty the grocery store robot is a glimpse into our hell-ish future,” a Mashable writer cited his limited functionality—while Marty can spot a spill, he can’t actually clean one, largely owing to the fact that he doesn’t have arms—and questioned the wisdom of his $35,000 price tag at a time of cutbacks across the supermarket chain. (Marty is now deployed in more than 500 grocery stores. It’s probably best to think of him as being everywhere at once, like Santa Claus.)

Stop & Shop executives insist that Marty has earned his keep and has not replaced a single associate. Still, Karen Mitchell, the chain’s chief marketing officer, acknowledges that his initial rollout was a bit abrupt for coworkers and customers. “I’m not sure that everybody really understood what he was there for,” she says. To engineer an image makeover, in January 2020 they threw Marty a first-birthday party at stores across the region, complete with cakes and balloons.

Mashable wrote a story about that, too, headlined, “Celebrating Marty the grocery store robot’s birthday is super depressing.” Yet something quite different started to happen on the ground. Kids made him birthday cards. One customer brought him a can of WD-40. And before long, Mitchell could sense a shift in the public mood. “The tide was starting to turn,” she says. “We were seeing more and more love.”

Another turning point came in March 2023, Mitchell says, when Stop & Shop took part in a campaign to benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The campaign’s ambassador, a six-year-old boy named Israel, loved robots. So Stop & Shop arranged for a delivery truck to arrive at Israel’s house, and Marty emerged and rolled up to the boy’s front door. When Israel wrapped his arms around Marty’s tall gray tower, “a spark went off” for the company, Mitchell says. Though far beyond his initial job description, Marty clearly had a knack for public engagements.

Mark Shake, a Badger Technologies executive who is one of Marty’s many human spokespeople, says Marty can tell whether an obstacle is a display rack or a human being. He’ll move around an inanimate rack. But if you’re a human, he’ll wait for a while. That’s what happens in Aisle 5, where a store associate dressed entirely in black, with dark-rimmed glasses, knee pads, and a name tag that says “Orbit,” is lifting spice jars from boxes and loading them onto the shelves. Marty rolls up to him and stops, inches away. Orbit keeps shelving, acting like he doesn’t notice. The standoff continues for several minutes before Marty finally gives up.“Yeah, I try to ignore him, but he likes to get in the way,” Orbit tells me when I cross paths with him in another aisle. He shows me the phone app where Marty sends him reports of missing inventory to fill. Orbit seems, at best, ambivalent about how helpful this is, though when I tell him I’m writing a profile of Marty, he volunteers a compliment: “Kids love the robot.”

Other associates and suppliers who are bustling about the store in the early-
morning hours aren’t always so kind. As we follow Marty from aisle to aisle—it feels a bit like keeping pace with an elderly aunt—I spot two men giving him the side-eye by the candy displays. “Watching the bucket of bolts?” says another, who spots us staring at Marty. Another calls out, “It’s stupid, isn’t it? I hate the thing.”

Marty seems unfazed. He’s too busy rescanning Aisle 5 as “19th Nervous Breakdown” plays over the loudspeakers. By this time, he has crisscrossed half of the store in an indecipherable pattern, though he seems to know exactly where to go.

“Are you tired, Marty?” I ask him at one point. I can see my reflection in his giant eyes, but again, he doesn’t answer.

Marty, I later learn, never talks on the job. When he discovers a spill, he sends an electronic signal that triggers a loudspeaker announcement in someone else’s (female) voice. He is known to have spoken only once—through a voice filter on Instagram—in a video posted on the Stop & Shop account. While his mouth doesn’t move (in this video, he doesn’t have a mouth) he tells a steady stream of dad jokes. “The people here call me ‘Scan Man’ because I do be scannin’ shelves all day long,” he says. “I love checking the doughnut aisle to be sure there are no holes in the display.” As soon as the post went up, Mitchell tells me, Marty’s Stop & Shop handlers decided he wouldn’t be a company spokesperson. The edict came down: Marty would henceforth be silent.

Muteness hasn’t stopped Marty from ramping up his public appearances, though. In the past year, he has visited an elementary school in Lynn and another in Queens, New York, to promote Stop & Shop’s school food-pantry program. He held court at the National Retail Federation convention in Manhattan, where executives put on googly-eyed glasses and took selfies with him. He visited a telethon run by NBC 10 Rhode Island; you can spot him in the back of the live shots, sitting with his Stop & Shop coworkers as they answer phones.

What might be the biggest proof of Marty’s popularity, though, are the spontaneous tributes he receives, mostly from children. Mitchell and Shake tell me about homemade Marty Halloween costumes. About a little girl who came to a store clutching a cardboard Marty replica. About the time store associates had to clean one of Marty’s cameras because some kids were feeding him yogurt.

As the robot’s profile rises, I wonder if he’s giving someone else a run for the most popular Marty in town. So I reach out to former Mayor Marty Walsh, who is politician enough to be diplomatic. “I wish the robot well,” Walsh says. In fact—maybe because I can’t help but also ask him if he’s going to be on the Democratic presidential ticket—he sounds a little relieved that the press might have another Marty to badger. “All of the speculation about what I’m gonna do next?” Walsh asks. “You can ask what the robot’s gonna do next.”

Mitchell hints, coyly, that there could indeed be other jobs in Marty’s future. He’s got skills; he’s capable of collecting a lot of data. He’s got rizz, though she wants to be judicious about his public appearances. He’s not going to be hawking the weekly specials or pitching the quarterly earnings report. “We don’t want to overexpose Marty,” she says.

Still, it sounds like a lot to navigate, these mute-spokesrobot responsibilities on top of his regular job. So I call Dorie Clark, a business consultant and author of Reinventing You, to see if she can offer Marty any advice. Clark says it’s not unusual for a worker to demonstrate unexpected skills that make him valuable to his organization—and to face resentful coworkers in the process. “It is important to make sure that you maintain a sense of humility, that you’re demonstrating in tangible ways to your coworkers that you’re not getting, quote-unquote, too big for your britches,” she says. “Not that I think Marty wears britches. We’re just speaking metaphorically.”

Actually, I wouldn’t put it past the Stop & Shop handlers to put britches on Marty if the occasion felt right—Oktoberfest, maybe? For Marty’s sake, I don’t really want to give them any ideas. I can see how little he controls his own fate and how, owing to his physical considerations, even some of his star turns include a degree of indignity. Last fall, Marty went to Fenway Park for the “Strike Out Hunger” promotion, outfitted with a Red Sox cap and jersey and a mounting bar to hold a baseball glove. But while the grounds crew asked for photos with him, they were adamant that he could not roll onto the field. Celebrity or not, he had to stay on the warning track.

I find Marty on the far side of the store, inching up the aisle between dairy and frozen confections. I follow him, 10 paces back, as he rolls toward produce, pausing at the top of every aisle. Like his early-morning coworkers, most customers ignore him; by now, he’s too familiar to be noteworthy. One woman, perusing a display of frozen dinners, moves her cart out of the way to let him pass without even looking up.

But as Marty approaches the seafood department, I see what Orbit was talking about. A little girl in a red shirt, white pants, and pink Crocs bounds up the condiment aisle in Marty’s direction. She starts giggling and dancing around him like a fish leaping out of water. Her older brother runs up and joins her.

“Marty! Marty’s a robot!” he says.

“Hello, Marty!” the girl repeats, still giggling. “Hello there, Marty!”

They circle him for a good few minutes while Marty stands perfectly still.

The children’s mother later tells me that their names are Joanna and William, and they are four and seven, respectively, and they live near the store and seek out the robot on every visit. I ask them what they like about Marty.

William gives an answer that seems to channel every snarky adult on the internet: “I don’t really know. I just like calling him different names.”

Joanna just wants to know why “you guys” got a robot to work in the supermarket in the first place. It feels too complicated to explain that Marty wasn’t my idea, and I had no hand in this decision, and I’ve sometimes wondered the same thing. So I just say, “That’s a good question. What do you think?”

She ponders for a moment. “Maybe because sometimes the workers get tired?”

I start to ponder this, too, the notion of a perfect robot task compared to a perfect human one, the way work and shopping might look in the future if we offload more functions to robots with or without googly eyes. But before I can ask Joanna a follow-up question, she’s disappeared.

Still, her open-mindedness makes me realize something: How you feel about Marty has a lot to do with your own attitude. Yes, he is maddeningly slow, and he’s sometimes directly in your way, and it’s possible that a human associate would be just as efficient at looking for spills. But he has an innate, robotic ability to make something as irritating and mundane as a grocery run feel a little bit playful, or at least a little bit weird. This is easy to acknowledge when you’re four years old, but it’s also possible when you are several decades older. Just look at me, in my trench coat, spending my Saturday afternoon stalking a robot.

At this point, I’ve lost track of Marty completely, so I head for the deli section because we’re also out of smoked turkey. As I’m waiting for my order, I hear that telltale beeping sound. I turn around to find Marty rolling right by me in the direction of the produce. His googly eyes gaze in my direction. I have to believe—I want to believe—that he knows.

“Hi, Marty,” I say quietly so the woman behind the deli counter doesn’t hear me.

Marty pauses as if he’s contemplating me, his lidar cameras whirring, his eyes unblinking. Then he rolls on as if he has more important things to do.