TLDR: Pass on the deli & hot food counter. Take a stand and boycott the self-checkout. Edit:…read moremanagement saw my review and reached out to me via email, offering to re-stock missing items, if it was possible via their distribution channels. MENU: Impressive array of items of all kinds. Sometimes I wish it was better organized. Why is the canola oil in one place, but the olive oil in another aisle? I suppose the modern conventions of shady marketing practices dictate that products have to scattered willy-nilly, because studies show that customers buy X% more when they're forced to wander around the store. Very frustrating. Some commonplace items are absent. (Especially seafood: frozen calamari, mussels, scallops, etc.) Occasionally, items get discontinued without rhyme or reason. We get forty different versions of apple juice, but the Old Orchard guava juice has to go. Same with L&A dark cherry juice, Talenti vanilla, mango, and on. COMPETITION: The only other grocery store worth mentioning is ALDI, which is great for specific things, even if it isn't always in stock - their frozen shellfish selection, for example, is much better than Hy-Vee. That said, 99% of the time you can get whatever you need at Hy-Vee at a price that's comparable to Wally World, without the degradation in quality. FOOD QUALITY: Let's talk about the butcher area... Way too lenient with the sell-by dates. On one occasion I got a cod fillet, only to find that it was stinking rotten when I got it home. I assumed it was a fluke, and tried again a couple weeks later, with the same result. Speaking of the fish counter, can y'all please stop screwing up the salmon? They keep removing the skin and hacking the fillets into these random-cut portions of mismatched sizes. I wonder about the quantity of food waste going on at this store. (Which makes the replacement of staff members with machines all the more sinful.) Let's also talk about the deli section. The quick service menu items are sometimes not in stock. The quality of the food is too hit and miss to bother with. Worst thing is the wide spectrum in pricing. If you get a three piece fried chicken meal with a couple of sides, it'll come to around ten bucks, which I think is reasonable. But if you buy a bucket of drumsticks, you're going to pay upwards of $2.50 a piece. A tub of crusty mashed potatoes will cost you $20. Doesn't scale properly, if you ask me. It's also annoying to pay the same price for a piddly wing that's nothing but skin and bones as you would for a decent wing with some meat on it. Likewise, the various in-house made salads and whatnot in the cold food section tend to be bland and watery. My advice: don't bother. MENU FAVORITES: Excellent selections for ice cream, wine, fruit juices, organic stuff, and pickled goods. If you enjoy cooking at home, you'll find most everything you could ask for. FRONT OF HOUSE SERVICE: My biggest complaint about Hy-Vee is the self checkout nonsense. Forcing customers to bag their own groceries under the disinterested gaze of someone paid merely to stand around until they have a system error to deal with is an appalling shame. No matter how long the line may be at the human checkout, I will always go there. Why? Because I would prefer that all the lovely staff members, like Sarah, and Dorothy, and Heather, and the beardy butcher guy, got to keep their jobs, rather than getting replaced by machines. Besides, there are no benefits to the self-checkout. There isn't enough room to cope with more than a few items, there's often a line queued for these stations anyway, and the few times I have used it resulted in a delay because of a system error. If you're reading this, and you agree with me: boycott the self-checkout. If enough of us commit, we can force them to go back to proper human cashier service. On the upside, the management does care about customers if you address a concern to one of them directly. For example, on one occasion I bought a pair of thawed catfish fillets from the butcher section, and one of them had a roughly 4-inch long, parasitic worm running diagonally through the meat tissue. I managed to get one of the higher level managers on the phone to report the problem, and he offered to replace it for me. If you have any major issue, talk to someone in management and they'll try to make it right. KITCHEN SERVICE: I get the impression that new hires are not trained well. I know, low-wage jobs have a lot of turnover, but you'd think they would get some basic form of orientation. On a day when I tried to order some of the fast food, the young gal at the register had no clue about any of it, and had to run to the back several times to get a confirmation from the guy working the fryers, only to be treated like he didn't have the time of day to give her. Sad. Poor management in that area. ATMOSPHERE: The store is generally clean, neat, and orderly, including the bathrooms.

This has to be one of the best Hy-Vee's I have ever been in. The "Smile in every aisle" slogan is…read moreperfected at this store. All smiles and friendly hi's from everyone, just a very positive feel throughout the store. But that doesn't even begin to tell how great this store is with service. I stopped to pick up some fruit for breakfast and some deli food that required no or very little preparation. I was on my way to my Grandparents and wanted to keep everything simple and Grandma out of the kitchen for the weekend. They had strawberries on sale so I decided to grab extra for some strawberry shortcakes. I could not find any shortcakes and was looking around the bakery section. One of the ladies working back there asked if she could help. After stating my request, she said they didn't have any, but came out from behind the counter to help me find some instead of just sending me to another section alone. She went over and asked one of the produce workers if they had any and they said they were unable to get any in. We found some premade strawberry shortcakes in the deli area and the bakery lady suggested getting a pound cake to make. I explained to her my circumstance and that I didn't want anything that required preparing. She then went to the back and found the shortcakes that the salad bar used to make the premade strawberry shortcakes so I purchase those. Any other store, the bakery person would have said no and sent me on to fend for myself. They would have said they didn't have any for sale and left me with nothing to buy. Instead, this employee went the extra mile and made sure I left fully satisfied. My Grandparents were happy with the various items we had from the deli all weekend and were items that they hadn't tried before. Everything was delicious and good quality. This will be a stop for me every time I am headed to the Grands as they won my business with their kindness and great service!