On Saturday, Jan. 25, Marty the Robot turned one.
The googly-eyed, wide-smiled robot, of which there are 325 in Massachusetts, was deployed in Stop & Shop stores a year ago. To celebrate, Stop & Shop held birthday parties in stores around New England. My local store advertised a coloring activity, birthday cake and "fun giveaways."
Marty has one purpose: to detect and report spills and "potential hazards." When it finds a discrepancy on the store floor, it stops, says "Caution, hazard detected" in English and Spanish, then waits until a human employee comes by to clean it up. The Boston Globe reported last year that each Marty robot costs $35,000. (A Stop & Shop spokeswoman declined to comment on financials.)
Consumer advocates (and my neighbors) have raised concerns about the robot's potential for surveillance. And in a December blog post, Tim Rowland, CEO of Badger Technologies, which created the robot, boasted that Marty is equipped with navigation systems, high-resolution cameras, a multitude of sensors and powerful software. Yet Marty, Stop & Shop maintains, is harmless: It doesn't monitor customers, it doesn't report theft or other security threats and it's only here to help.
"Marty takes only still photographs of store floors in order to identify potential hazards," a spokeswoman wrote in an email to BostInno. She said Marty is not capable of taking videos.
The supermarket chain has started to try to get out ahead of customers' privacy concerns. At Marty's party, a store associate handed me a fact sheet including FAQs with questions like "Do you take videos of customers?" and "Do you follow customers around the store?" The answer to both of those is—in all caps—NO.
The fact sheet also insists that Marty is not in the business of replacing human store associates—a concern that might be particularly pertinent in the wake of last year's strike, in which 30,000 Stop & Shop workers stopped working for 11 days until the supermarket chain met their demands for better pay and health care coverage. In fact, the New York chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union that represents Stop & Shop workers in the state tweeted several times that it was unimpressed with the Marty party.
At my local Stop & Shop, though, there was little strife—and little fanfare. Marty patrolled the aisles as normal, rolling through the florals section and trailing me into the health foods aisle. It didn't seem to be aware that there was a celebration going on. Aside from a party hat secured to its top and a ribbon proclaiming "I'm the Birthday Bot," nothing about the robot was different from any other Saturday.
The party itself consisted of a table near the checkout with chocolate and vanilla cake, party hats, toys and some confetti. The associate who handed me the fact sheet implored me to take a survey that would be linked at the bottom of my receipt when I checked out, the only giveaway I noted that day.
But I'm not the target audience for a robot's birthday party.
At Stop & Shop stores elsewhere, these kids had a great time.
