ALDI

Aldi prices and selection are good, but they added self checkout for most of the lanes. First of all I don't want to ring up my own items for multiple reasons. Secondly, if you have a lot of items, there is not enough room to stage them all. Thirdly, the self checkout list of items rang up would always scroll to the top of the list, making it so you cannot see the items you most recently rang up.

Edit: long term, I'd say the Aldi experience has gotten a little better since implementation, but it's still not perfect due to lack of staff up front to help and the actual check out size being too small to hold all groceries. The following is my initial response. Adding back some stars, but it's still not an ideal experience. This store has recently been ruined by a poor self check out point of sales system design. I used to love this store for its fast cashiers, organic produce, and limited selection which makes going there a snap, but now it takes forever to do self checkout. There were no cashiers up front during our visit. It looks like they have changed the stores set up to be all self serve and one lane with possible cashier setup (assuming a cashier is up front and manning the register). So we were forced to use the self check out. The first thing I guess I should say is that I'm not a self check out hater. They have a time and place. I use at other stores frequently. But at this store, it's just an awful implementation... Read below. 1) no casher was up front watching registers so when there was a price issue we had to hunt one down. We were there at 7:30 p.m. on a weekend. Edit: it's hit or miss if I experience this issue now. Sometimes there is still no cashier around up front and you have to wait. 2) the area next to the register to hold items you have rung up is actually smaller than what a cart can hold once items are in bags especially. What actual sense does this make? We had to reload our cart mid check out three times. This makes it lots easier to make mistakes or miss items and makes for a really slow process. 3) This was the worst issue and it has been fixed, so I added back two stars.... if you are buying a lot of items, you cannot check that the price came up right without scrolling all the way to the bottom on the digital screen. So if you are getting like 50 things there, after ever time you scan something, you have to stop and scroll all the way down on the screen to make sure it came up right on the register. Whoever designed this software certainly was never forced to use it. It took about 5-10 times as long to check out compared to a cashier. 4) the register scanner doesn't work very well, so you need to use the handheld scanner. This is totally stupid because you also are using both hands to move groceries out of your cart and put them in bags. This really slows down the whole checkout process. This might be fine for a cashier, but as someone who has to immediately bag their groceries, it's a pain. While I feel self check outs have a time and place when designed correctly, ALDI has done an awful job at the implementation. They did not take into consideration that their stores are mostly customers filling their carts to the max because it's a grocery store, so they will have lots of items. They also didn't take into consideration that other stores with self check out have other lane options to use an actual cashier, not force people to use the self check out. The store had three employees we saw at there during the time of checkout. There is no reason an employee couldn't be on the cash register at that time due to an employee shortage. There were three people checking out while we were there at the same time. It's really sad that Aldi's did test runs on their self check out systems and they didn't find this poor user experience to be an issue before continuing to roll out other stores like this. Did they even bother getting customer feedback about how bad this setup is? I won't go to the Fairlawn store because of it and now they have ruined this one too.