“Marty” the robot is well known among GIANT Food Stores‘ customers. The towering robotic assistant, which has been in stores since 2019 and has gone famous for its big googly eyes and “facial” emotions, has been assisting in spotting hazards such as spills.
Marty’s employment, on the other hand, is mostly indoors, and he rarely ventures out on his own. Until now, that is.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR NEWSLETTEROne Lehigh Valley-area Pennsylvania grocery consumer posted a video of Marty on the loose in a store parking lot before personnel wrangled him back inside.
Marty “was just on a fresh air break,” according to a GIANT representative.
Can you imagine if you wanted to enter a GIANT, and you saw a group of Martys outside, picketing for more hours on the schedule? But I digress.
On Facebook, the popular video has nearly 500,000 views, with comments such as “Be free Marty, be free” and “I love Marty more than ever now.”
According to GIANT, thanks to a collaboration between Ahold Delhaize USA services company Retail Business Services, GIANT, and Jabil subsidiary Badger Technologies, the robotic assistant “Marty” was being implemented to all GIANT and MARTIN’S Food Stores.
“Bringing robotics and A.I. from a research lab to the sales floor has been a very exciting journey, and we were thrilled by the customer response in our pilot stores,” Nicholas Bertram, President of GIANT Food Stores in 2019 said. “Our associates have worked hard to bring this innovation to life with amazing partners.”
We have a Marty at our local GIANT and it’s kinda cool to see him roaming around. I’ve never actually seen him do anything other than roam around, but then again, I’m not watching him all that much. Just enough to get out of his way when he makes that slow gliding journey down and aisle.
The Marty program was tested in Harrisburg’s Union Deposit Road location and Carlisle’s Spring Garden Street location.
