Grocery Store's Beloved Robot Mascot Makes A Run For It

In today's day and age, grocery store chains are always looking for ways to keep productivity high while not dispensing too many resources on a sizable workforce. This can mean temporarily charging a quarter to use the carts so stores don't require extra help putting carts away like at some Aldi locations (per Aldi's website), enlisting robotic help like at Kroger (via CNBC) or Walmart, or using "Just Walk Out technology" like at Whole Foods.

Kroger and Walmart aren't the only ones enlisting robotic help at their stores, although wandering robots in supermarkets aren't popular with everyone just yet. Giant Food Stores, typically just referred to as "Giant", is a grocery store that operates in select states on the east coast of the U.S., and they have a few extra helping hands in the form of robot helpers. 

These helpers are all named Marty (per Business Insider) and have two giant googly eyes at the top of their build to appear more friendly to shoppers. Marty is more than just a cute face, however; it also harbors a sense of adventure, as one news story shows.

Marty robots are indoor creatures that help around the store with spills and keep things tidy, and as Inside Edition reports in their reposting of the original video on YouTube, they usually do not go outside. At a Giant Foods Store in Pennsylvania, however, one Marty robot was caught outside in the store's parking lot, taking in the sights.

This Marty was able to make it quite a ways away from the store's interior, passing several cars on its journey out into the world. We may never know where the Marty bot was headed, however, as a store employee wrangled Marty and escorted it back inside. Maybe next time, Marty.

Many commenters under the Youtube video responded positively to Marty's escape attempt. One user sympathized with Marty working long, hard hours and wrote, "Marty is all of us who want to walk out of our jobs... he just had the courage to do it!!" Another empathetic commenter added, "Every retail employee in the world knows how Marty feels!"

For now, it seems Marty the robot will continue to live out its sentence as a grocery employee for the foreseeable future, or at least until the next escape attempt.