Funny enough I just wrote a post about my experience with Lidl in Berlin when I lived there.

The previous poster has no clue at all about how that whole thing can be an extremelly efficient process with proper cashiers and cooperating customers that would actually become way slower if you used self-checkout instead.

(I actually have some minor expertise in evaluating Business Processes from my job and like to evaluate the efficiency of all kinds of work processes I’m looking at, and efficiency as a cashier has a lot more depth than button pressing and article scanning - for example, merelly memorizing the position of the barcodes in articles can easilly make a cashier go several times faster. More broadly, with all the time I have free whilst waiting to pay at the supermarket, I often entertain myself spotting the unneeded time waste and it’s amazing just how big of a fraction of time is spent with stuff like waiting for customers to put their change in their wallets).

Then again this being Germany and Lidl the cashiers are actually normal store employees that will do whatever needs doing, on proper employment contracts and paid significatly more than cashiers in most countries get, as Lidl is known for investing in its employees - and expecting them to be much more flexible in the tasks they’ll do - rather than deal with them as easilly replaceable “human resources”.