By Tim Binnall
Like something out of a Pixar film, a robot that roams the aisles of a grocery store in Pennsylvania staged a proverbial great escape and wound up briefly wandering around the parking lot. The amusing incident reportedly occurred at the Great Food Store in the community of Hellertown, where the automaton dubbed Marty monitors for spills, provides price checks for customers, and alerts employees to out of stock products. Since being introduced a few years ago, the googly-eyed device has become a familiar fixture at the supermarket, toiling on the job seemingly without interruption until this past Sunday when Marty made a break for it.
On that fateful day last weekend, the robot managed to find his way out of the grocery store and proceeded to roll around the parking lot until an employee caught up to the device. Sharing a video of the foiled escape on Facebook, customer Rebecca Prendergast lamented that "Marty almost made it to freedom before he was wrangled back to his grocery prison." Presumably, the robot's misadventure was merely happenstance, though one cannot help but wonder if somewhere within the sizable machine is a spirit that has long yearned to see what lies beyond the grocery store and finally decided to see for itself.