Marty the Stop and shop robot: Spying on Shoppers?

By Anna Pociu, 2023

Published 12/9/19

It’s been a while since the Cheshire Stop and Shop rolled out our new neighborhood robot Marty. I first saw Marty 6+ months ago in the dairy aisle. At first it was funny, but the more I thought about it the more disturbing the whole idea was. To most of us, he is just another obstacle to maneuver carts around, but what if he is there to do more?

Each Marty unit costs about $35,000. After some quick calculations, that means that Marty costs about $16.80 an hour if the store was to pay him as a full-time employee for a year. That’s more than Connecticut’s minimum wage of $11.00 an hour. Stop and Shop employees have been going on strike and the company reportedly installed Marty to help with staff shortages by spending more money. This seems strange.

According to Stop and Shop, his only job is to alert employees of pricing disparities and spills that need to be cleaned up. To me that seems a little fishy. Whenever I pass him in the store, there are kids boxing him in so he can’t move. He is also bilingual and can report his spills in both English and Spanish. Even when he does report spills, does it really help that much? There is no logical reason why they need him—unless that is not all that Marty does.

Jennifer Brogan, the Director of External Communications for Stop and Shop, stated, “video footage [from Marty] of customers are stored for a very short period of time and then destroyed.” My question is, what are they doing with the footage? Many people believe that they are analyzing the customers for their age, gender, and other demographics. Whether or not this is true, Marty is still a creepy addition to our Stop and Shop experience.