Shoppers navigating aisles of chips and cookies at a Fred Meyer store in Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood are dodging more than carts — they’re also sharing space with a smooth-gliding, autonomous robot named Tally.
Equipped with an array of cameras, computer vision and AI, the slender machine pauses briefly near display shelves before beeping like a grocery-focused R2-D2 and zooming down the line to scan digital shelf tags.
During a GeekWire visit one morning last week, Tally sparked a mix of curiosity and pointed questions about the impact of retail automation from shoppers and workers alike.
“It’s kind of wild,” said a shopper named Mark, who, like others we encountered, preferred to give just his first name. “It’s the Jetsons happening right here, right now. If this is what the future is then I guess that’s what it is.”
The future apparently arrived a couple years ago, at least as far as Fred Meyer parent Kroger is concerned. The retail giant began piloting robotic technology in 2024 to “gain real-time insights on product inventory.”
According to a thread on Reddit, Tally robots have been spotted in Fred Meyer stores in Seattle as well as around Washington state, including in Lynnwood, Puyallup, Port Orchard and University Place. Kroger operates more than 50 multi-department grocery and retail stores across the state.
“At Fred Meyer and QFC, we are always exploring new and innovative ways to create a more convenient and friendly customer experience,” Tiffany Sanders, head of public affairs for QFC & Fred Meyer Divisions of Kroger, said in an emailed statement to GeekWire.
Sanders said the technology means “associates can more easily and quickly identify and address shelves where products are low or out of stock” and that teams gain more time “to do what they do best,” which is serve customers.
Sanders did not provide any details about how many stores in the region are using the robots, how many hours per day they roam the aisles, whether any human workers have been displaced, or what Kroger does to ensure customer privacy.
Developed by San Francisco-based Simbe Robotics, Tally is an autonomous mobile robot engineered to help retailers track inventory, check pricing accuracy, and monitor product placement using computer vision and AI. Standing more than 6 feet tall with a slender frame atop a rounded Roomba-like base, the robot navigates store aisles at slow speeds using dozens of onboard sensors designed to safely weave around shoppers and displays.
Rather than sounding alarms or pinging workers in real-time, the robot feeds data into Simbe’s software platform, generating prioritized task lists for store employees to handle out-of-stock items.
Introduced to the market in 2015, Tally is part of a growing wave of automated inventory technology competing for space in grocery store aisles nationwide. Rival systems include autonomous machines from competitors such as Badger Technologies—whose googly-eyed robots are deployed in chains like Stop & Shop—as well as software platforms from companies like Brain Corp.
Simbe has scaled rapidly alongside competitors, recently surpassing a milestone of 3,000 autonomous units under contract globally, anchored by a 500-robot footprint within Kroger’s nationwide ecosystem.
Autonomous robots like Tally may patrol grocery aisles on their own, but some tech companies argue that the best way to track inventory isn’t by adding another machine to the floor, but by empowering the humans already there.
One Seattle startup taking that approach is Augmodo, which develops spatial AI technology designed to capture shelf data through human movement rather than roaming robots.
“Augmodo started by knowing what is actually on the shelf, just like robots, but our vision is to augment the physical workforce,” said Augmodo founder and CEO Ross Finman. “People already go up and down the aisles hundreds of times a day, so enabling the existing workforce with simple, inexpensive smartbadges can provide more frequent, cheaper data while also building an AI assistant to add two years of experience to every associate across back of store, delivery, facility maintenance, and more.”
Unlike autonomous floor bots that have drawn privacy scrutiny from shoppers, Finman emphasized that Augmodo’s hardware focuses strictly on products rather than people.
“Regarding privacy, we focus on products, not people — we actively filter out any people before anything leaves the store,” Finman said. “We do not just filter out anything that could be a person, we filter out anything that is irrelevant.”
Ranked No. 122 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups, Augmodo raised $21 million in a funding round this summer, a year after raising $37.5 million.
For all the futuristic promises of automated inventory, the machines still invite a mix of skepticism from those who share the floor with them.
During GeekWire’s Fred Meyer visit, a number of shoppers gave the robot a bit of side eye or muttered at it for being in the way while they shopped. At one point, Tally paused for several minutes in front of an aisle end cap stocked with Doritos. In other aisles it easily maneuvered around floor displays or paused for customers.
“Right now, it’s a curiosity,” said a Hershey sales rep named Mike who frequently stocks candy in grocery aisles and has watched Tally navigate the store. While he noted that the robot doesn’t personally bother him, he echoed rumors heard among workers about potential labor impacts.
Other shoppers looked past the novelty and expressed concern about broader privacy implications. Patrick, a Seattle resident who works in cybersecurity, said he usually tries to avoid the aisle when he spots Tally rolling past.
“First off, it’s taking jobs, but also it’s just more mass surveillance,” Patrick said. “Every time I pass it, I wonder: Is it collecting Bluetooth pings off your smart devices? … I’d be very surprised if it really was just doing cameras on the shelves versus trying to collect data on actual customers as well.”
The anxiety over data collection comes at a sensitive time for major grocers in the region. The Seattle City Council recently passed a groundbreaking ban on algorithm-based “surveillance pricing,” prohibiting retailers from using personal data and AI tracking to set individual, dynamic prices for shoppers.
Simbe’s Tally website features images of shoppers posing for selfies with the robots, under a headline that reads, “People are more likely to shop at retailers with in-store robots.”
While Tally is officially engineered for inventory management, shoppers like Patrick say roving robots only deepen distrust over how much corporate data is being gathered inside the aisles. Pointing to the cameras mounted on the robots and pairing them with modern AI tracking software, Patrick argued that it feels reminiscent the pushback against Flock automated traffic enforcement cameras.
“I think it’s just another way for them to cut the humans out of the labor force and steal more data from customers,” he said.