myBigY 4+

Version 6 of the app has taken a significant turn for the worse for usability. It is obvious that those designing it did not try to use it in practice. It is now more like an ad than a tool to help you shop.

In particular the shopping lists implementation is horrible compared to the older iterations to the point of being unusable.

First, shopping lists are now buried in the More… menu, not directly found on the home page.

Once you find the lists, there are too many steps to add an item. The search capability is laughable. You have to know exactly what the item you want to add is named and even then you either get too many “hits” (trying to find “milk” presents a long list of possibilities including dog biscuits and “muscle milk” with little help to refine the list) or the app returns “not found”. There is also no feedback that an item has been added to a list- you have to go back into the list to verify that the item added correctly.

I’m tech savvy and this app is a mess to use. It took me 20 minutes to find and add 12 items to a list. It’s bad design when you have to adapt to how a quirky app wants you to use it. I shudder to think how long a less experienced user would bang their heads against the wall then give up in frustration.

Absolutely impossible to find the items you want to add to your cart. This app used to be super easy to use and way better than the Stop and Shop one, which crashed when I used it. Being able to add items directly from the flyer view was a huge benefit. That’s gone now. You have to look at the flyer, remember what you want to add to your cart that’s on sale, locate the category you think it is in , expand that that category because all the items don’t automatically show up, then find your product…. I’m better off writing a shopping list like the good ol days. Plus, when you load a Big Y savings offer, it does not add that item to your cart. You have to load the offer then go through the process stated above. Takes longer to make my list now, than it does to actually do the shopping. Apparently Big Y does not want to make it easy for people to shop the sale items.

Big Y is a great supermarket, but you wouldn’t know it when using this app.
1. The app somehow manages to fail at listing all the items available in the store. For a good while, I stopped going to Big Y because I would search for items (e.g., Special K cereal), and just a mere subset of flavors appear in app. When i stopped in store, the many flavors were on the shelves. I looked in the app while in store, and STILL those flavors did not appear in the inventory search!
2. Coupons don’t actually clip.
3. Impossible to view the weekly flyer

I try to give benefit of doubt and wait for basic issues to be updated by their programmers, but nothing is ever fixed. I get the feeling that whoever does the software engineering has never actually shopped at store. There are multiple supermarkets in my area, but big Y has the worst app by far. It’s 2024; a large company that requires its customers use the app to access savings, but makes an app so user-UNfriendly, one can only conclude the app is actually intended to limit users’ savings. However, this doesn’t explain issue #1, which inherently results in people shopping elsewhere when their inventory search excludes a majority of items they actually sell.