Pros
ALDI has very loyal customers, and with the small store size, it was great to get to really know them and interact. The hours they are open are relatively short, so no crazy shifts.
Cons
Where do I start? ALL District Managers are hired in fresh out of college....repeat...ALL district managers. This means you will have someone who has no idea on how to run a store being your boss and telling you exactly how the book says it should be done. They train for a year for the job, but only spend a few months in a store, the rest is driving around doing district manager stuff. They have NO clue on how it is to really run a store on a day to day basis. They would roll in, in their company owned camry, and basically tell you that everything was wrong. It was common for them to leave and have a 40 or 50 item punch list to complete before you left. My district manager admitted that this was his FIRST job in his life. WOW! Prepare to be told daily by a 22 year old kid that you are not doing the job good enough. They will tell you that the job should be able to be done in 50 hours (five ten hour days a week), but, to do the things they tell you to be done, it takes much more than that. Expect 60 hours + a week. The labor budgets are extremely tight, and you can expect to usually only have you and a cashier on duty at any given time. You day looks like this: Arrive at/before 6 a.m., and spend the next 3 hours setting produce up. They don't have refrigerated displays for produce, so every night, it all gets pulled and put in the cooler, only to be pulled back out and reset every morning. Its a fairly small display, but it will take you most of the three hours to set it up. Then, you usually have about 15 minutes before open to run through the store to make sure that it is all ready. Is there dust on the ledge? A sign not exactly centered over the product? A product not PERFECTLY faced on the shelf? Dirty glass? The list goes on and on. The store opens, and you are usually there by yourself until 11 a.m. This means you are tied to the register, and must work only in that area. Company policy is to NEVER leave the front end out of sight, so you are very limited on the work that you can do until 11 a.m. You cashier arrives, and now you can start on the store right? Wrong! All ordering is done by hand, on paper. You have to write down how much there is, what the par is, and how much you are ordering. Count on a produce order, bread order, milk order all due before noon. Now, its noon, and starting to get busier. You will have a grocery/frozen food delivery 5 or 6 days a week. So, in the back room, you have 20 pallets of product that HAS to go up to make room for tomorrows shipment. So you prioritize what goes out, and start working it. BUZZ.. that sound means the cashier is backing up, and needs you to open your lane. So you spend the next 10 or 15 minutes clearing it up. Do you go back to your stocking? NOPE! You have to check produce because, as people buy the stuff, it doesn't look as pretty, so you have to touch it up. They require you to touch produce at least twice an hour. This is the cycle that your day goes on. They expect a pallet of groceries to be put up in 15 minutes, but that is in an empty store...when customers are in there, it takes twice as long. So, 20 pallets is 10 hours of work, and you haven't started on them until noon. See where this is going? Call more help in you say? Nope! The schedule is written so tight that any hour you waste by calling someone in early HAS to be cut somewhere else. This is where my district manager was famous for saying "I don't care if you have to work 100 hours a week, you will not go over budget on labor". Face it, the store manager is nothing more than a glorified stocker, with a ton of extra responsibilities. Yes, they pay the store managers very well (40k to 60k) but you have to sell your soul. For some, that was not a problem, but for most, it is too much.
