The weekly farmer’s market in El Segundo, a cozy beach town in the shadow of Los Angeles International Airport, has everything you’d expect to see at such an event ($6 organic waffles, $8 jars of beet sauerkraut, athleisure-clad parents pushing strollers) and some things you don’t. That includes — on one recent afternoon — a fleet of personal robot assistants.

The robot in question is called Gita (pronounced jee-ta), an Italian word that means outing, or short trip. It is made by Piaggio Fast Forward, a Boston-based offshoot of the Italian manufacturer of the famous Vespa scooter. But if the Vespa is a sexy, stylish partner in adventure, Gita is a humble and loyal footman, content to trail obediently behind rather than roar ahead.

The robot at rest resembles a wheeled drinks cooler, with a spacious interior designed to hold up to 40 pounds of whatever you choose to toss inside. Stand before your Gita, tap the app, and the robot awakens with an optimistic little beep. Five cameras on the front of the robot register the shape of your legs and their relative depth from other objects in the environment. The robot then follows those legs wherever they go. It’s a self-propelling, hands-free shopping trolley that moves like BB-8’s mellower cousin.

Gita’s stop in El Segundo was part of an ongoing nationwide tour to introduce the robot to potential customers in advance of its November 18 launch. A Gita costs $3,250, which means that at least initially, this will be a robot assistant for the rich of us, not the rest of us.

We may one day find ourselves as irritated by sidewalks clogged with Gita-like robots as we are with electric scooters. But Sherpa-bots have an important advantage: It’s way easier to get mad about something that you don’t use yourself. And the share of the population that feels comfortable on a scooter is dwarfed by those of us who are comfortable having someone else — or something else — carry our stuff.

Apart from the price, the barrier to entry for using Gita is very low. It works, literally, with the press of a button. It doesn’t require any meaningful behavioral changes on the user’s part. You don’t even have to look at it if you don’t want to — it trails behind you, out of sight and out of mind. It appeals to a massive demographic whose buy-in is essential for a product’s mainstream success: lazy people. And as one of those people, I felt a sense of kinship as I walked through the market with my Gita following effortlessly behind. At last, a robot made for me.

Even if this specific robot doesn’t end up taking over our streetscapes, it’s easy to imagine the kind of machines that eventually will. Grocery stores will replace wobbly metal shopping carts with self-propelling robots (actually, that one’s almost here). Public health systems will subsidize assistant robots so that disabled individuals can run errands comfortably and independently. Theme parks won’t let you bring your own Gita in, but they will charge you a fortune to hire Gita-like trolleys that haul all your kids’ stuff and leave your arms free to buy a ton of souvenirs.

The robot is somewhat similar in appearance to Scout, the autonomous delivery robot Amazon is trying out. Unlike Scout, Gita can’t be programmed to follow any set agenda. It awakens each time as a blank slate, as dutiful and quick to follow as a puppy.

Despite the cameras, Gita’s creators reassure that it is not a mobile surveillance device. Collected image data travels no farther than the visual processing board less than two inches behind it and isn’t stored anywhere. Odometry and power use information is transmitted for warranty and performance purposes when the robot is connected to the internet.

The robot also has no real autonomy. Unless you’re walking in front of it, Gita can’t and won’t go anywhere. And getting you walking is kind of its whole point.