It’s as if Christopher Walken’s Googly-Eyed Gardner decided to go into retail: Supermarket chain Giant Food Stores has deployed six-foot-three-inch googly-eyed robots named Marty—and it has plans to bring him to all 172 stores across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia this year.
Marty is the result of a partnership between parent company Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch food retailer, and autonomous robot company Badger Technologies.
At the NRF’s annual retail conference in New York on Monday, Steven Platt, director and research fellow at the Retail Analytics Council—an initiative between Northwestern University, Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications department and the Platt Retail Institute, which studies consumer shopping behavior and the impact of technology—said this marks the largest front-of-store deployment of robots in a retail environment.
Marty doesn’t need those googly eyes to see—he has a laser-based detection system to guide him—but Nick Bertram, president of Giant, said they wanted to personify the machine to “[make] it...
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