Kate Darling

It's like six feet tall.

It roams the aisles.

You're welcome.

But these poor people were so hard on getting a functional robot together.

And then people hate Marty because they didn't at all consider how people would react to Marty in their space.

Yeah, but you like Flippy.

Yeah, I do.

I believe there is.

So we were actually going to do a study on this right before the pandemic hit.

And then we canceled it because we didn't want to go to the grocery store and neither did anyone else.

But our theory, so this was with a student at MIT, Daniela DiPaola.

She noticed that everyone on Facebook in her circles was complaining about Marty.

They're like, what is this creepy robot?

It's watching me.

It's always in the way.

And she did this quick and dirty sentiment analysis on Twitter where she was looking at positive and negative mentions of the robot.

And she found that the biggest spike of negative mentions happened when Stop and Shop threw a birthday party for the Marty robots, like with free cake and balloons.

Like, who complains about free cake?

Well, people who hate Marty, apparently.

And so we were like, that's interesting.