Kroger comes in two flavors here in Muncie: Ruler Foods, a no-frills ALDI competitor, and Pay Less, a full-service alternative. Pay Less began in Anderson in 1947, but Kroger snapped it up in 19991. Muncie was never kind to Kroger, but it re-entered the market with Ruler in 20132. A bigger investment came in 2017, when the company bought two closing Marsh supermarkets and reopened them as Pay Less3. I recently ran into its wandering robot. It was weird!
I grew up in a Marsh family. Mentioning anything that started with K and rhymed with “ogre” was nearly akin to spitting out an f-bomb! I’m joking, but most of my family followed my grandpa to work at Marsh over the years. That made the company’s decline hit especially hard after its 2006 private-equity buyout. Stores began closing one by one, then all at once.
Around here, many wound up as storage units. That’s why Kroger’s return under the Pay Less name actually meant something to local shoppers. For people like me who would sooner take up subsistence farming than set foot in Walmart, it filled a real void.
I love potato salad, but I’m particular about it: Reser’s Red Skin is the gold standard of picnic sides for gluttons like me! Unfortunately, nearly everywhere around here has decided to abandon it, which leaves Pay Less as my only source. When I spotted the very last lonely tub of it in the deli case, I snatched it up like I’d just secured the final Cabbage Patch Kid. Then, I wandered past the checkout to buy some bottled water. It was there that I encountered the robot.
The newest employee at Pay Less is a roaming obelisk named Tally. It’s perched on a scuffed, disc-shaped autonomous base. The robot itself consists of a tall body sporting a screen with blinking cartoon eyeballs. A cheerful sign announces, “Hi, I’m Tally. I check shelf inventory!”
I was immediately suspicious since this robot looked nothing like the animatronics I held in my house for years. To its credit, though, Tally certainly seemed to be doing its job- just at a pace that suggested it was paid by the hour. It drifted slowly through the aisles as I hunted for a couple of liters of Evian. When I accidentally backed into it, I instinctively apologized!
That was the first time I’d ever seen Tally in action. About a year ago, Kroger announced that “Barney” and “Tally” robots were being piloted at seventy stores around Cincinnati and Indianapolis thanks to a partnership with Simbe Robotics. A Kroger spokesperson said they were intended to “gain real-time insights on product inventory,” so that associates could “more easily and quickly identify and address shelves where products are low or out of stock4.”
Although Muncie’s Tally robot didn’t feature such a disclaimer, one of Cincinnati’s Barneys had a name tag explaining that “Barney is here to improve your shopping experience by scanning shelves for missing items and to ensure correct pricing. Barney does not capture images of people or acquire any personal information5.”
That’s good news for me. I don’t need Tally -or his buddy Barney- keeping tabs when I load up on stuff. Those cartoon eyeballs felt awfully observant when I grabbed the last potato salad and debated whether I really needed a gunny sack of Cool Ranch Doritos or a bindle full of Steak-umms.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what Tally actually makes of us humans. It glides silently through the aisles for hours each day, scanning shelves while shoppers perform the strange rituals of modern grocery life. Somewhere in a Kroger database, Tally is probably reporting that aisle seven has low inventory while quietly concluding that humans are deeply confusing.
Lest you think I’m a rube, I’ve seen these supermarket robots before. That said, the whole thing felt futuristic in the most Midwestern way possible: instead of flying cars and animatronic butlers, we have a polite, slow-moving grocery robot making sure the ranch dressing stays stocked. It turns out that the future arrived not with a bang, but with a soft whir and a friendly pair of googly eyes.
Maybe that’s the real story here. Marsh was a supermarket innovator in many ways like checkout scanning, consumer studies, and home delivery. Still, it’s been nearly a decade since the company slipped into history. After decades of resisting, outlasting, and eventually needing Kroger, now Muncie shoppers like me are apologizing for robots while clutching the last tub of potato salad at Pay Less.
That’s a little sad, but there’s something oddly poetic about things. The old Marsh building still stands. The potato salad is still cold. The ranch and Steak-umms are still stocked. Only the cast of characters has changed: from Marsh cashiers who knew your name and bagged your groceries to a roving obelisk named Tally who knows your SKUs and UPCs.
I still miss Marsh but, all the same, I guess I can live with Pay Less if the future of grocery shopping involves a well-behaved robot making sure my preferred picnic side doesn’t disappear entirely. Still, I hope Tally doesn’t start judging the questionable contents of my cart. I can live without some machine rolling away to report: “Customer appears to be attempting dinner composed entirely of snack foods.”
Sources Cited
1 Kroger To Buy Pay Less In Cash Deal (1999, Deeember 6). Supermarket News. Web. Retriebed February 27, 2026.
2 Roysdon, K. (2013, September 27). Customers Check Out New Grocery. The Muncie Star Press. p. A1.
3 Ward, J. (2017, July 20). Former Marsh stores to become Pay Less. The Muncie Star Press. p. A1.
4 Sanderson, E. (2025, March 11). Meet Barney and Tally: Kroger pilots new inventory robots at area stores. WLWT5 [Cincinnati]. Web. Retrieved February 27, 2026.
5 (See footnote 4).
Cabbage Patch Kids! LOL. That brings back bad memories of market manipulation and consumer hysteria!
Hah! Glad you liked the reference!
I grew up with Pay-less in Anderson in the 1950s -1970s. For me the “real Pay-less is the one at 29th and Main. Our family shopped there when we lived on 53rd street. We moved away from Anderson in the late 1970s. I was back in Anderson a few years ago and walked into that store and it smelled just like I remembered it from decades before!
We have those robots in a local superstore. They roll around, and whistle when the get close to you. I find them an annoyance. I can see why managment likes them, but I’ll bet union reps hate them.
Speaking of Cabbage Pack kids, Our kids were little when they were the craze. My Aunt found 4 of them somewhere in Indiana, bought them and sent them to my kids in Massachusetts for Christmas!
Recently we saw one that looked almost new at a yard sale. We bought it for our youngest granddaughter for $1. I’m not sure she was impressed.
The 29th Street Pay Less is the one I most often frequented. I worked at the end of 29th Street where Guide Lamp used to be.
Ah, Kroger. They took over our local giant Fred Meyer a few years before I moved to Portland, and I’ve heard that it’s “not what it used to”. Plus, they own Seattle based QFC which has an outlet near my house–it’s basically Freddie’s with higher prices because it’s supposed to be “classier”.
And you wouldn’t have any trouble finding Reser’s potato salad at Portland-area Krogers (or Safeway or Albertsons for that matter) as Reser’s is based here. It’s enough of a player to get buildings named after them!