Pros
- Excellent pay right out of college - Fully paid company car - Free cell phone - Great health insurance - 4 weeks vacation - Freedom to write your own schedule I learned more during my Aldi District Manager trainee phase about working in the professional world than I would have learned anywhere else. It was basically executive boot camp. I still use much of that knowledge to this day.
Cons
They OWN you from the get go. They hire you right out of college and throw you into Aldi boot camp. This includes hazing by other District Managers and your "peer adviser." When I worked at Aldi, I complained to my director about the hazing and she acknowledged that that was just the way that it was and had always been. The actual task training is substandard. You are put into the store and given a cursory overview of how to perform tasks, and then left on your own to sink or swim. NEWSFLASH - no one expects you to do a good job as a store manager. They know you're going to fail. That doesn't stop them from berating you for it as it's going on. District Manager training involves following your peer adviser around at all hours of the day and learning by watching what they're doing. These DMs are also overworked and have to do their entire regular workload in addition to training you, so your training is not prioritized. There is no uniformity in training, either. The biggest drawback of Aldi was the culture. It's an environment where you're always in fear of losing your job. You never know when you're going to be fired or promoted. Every tiny thing that you did wrong during the month is brought up by your director at the monthly DM meeting. Just a very negative culture. They want you to drink the Kool Aid and drop the rest of your life for them, and if you don't, they will find some reason to fire you.
