Lidl reviews

3.4

58% would recommend to a friend

(8,069 total reviews)

Kenneth McGrath

73% approve of CEO

49% positive business outlook

Lidl has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 8,069 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Lidl employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Commerce de détail et de gros industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

8K reviews
1.0
Oct 4, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great co-workers, made some lifelong friends at this job. Decent wage.

Cons

Refused to pay my entitled holiday pay after leaving. Payroll hung up on me several times after I explained that I am owed this pay. The company is happy to skirt the edge of the law in order to save money, most notably in terms of health and safety procedures. (Managers encouraging you to put food that had fallen on the floor back onto the shelf instead of writing it off, as one small example.) They will promise you career progression into a management role, leading you on to believe you are being trained to prepare for a promotion, knowing the entire time that they have absolutely no plans for it at all. And similarly, they lied about increasing my contracted hours, saying that they had sent off the contract that I had signed, when they didn't. This was done to several people at my store, simply to encourage them to stay at the company instead of leaving. No respect for employees free time. Managers will guilt you into working shifts you can't/wont work, and if you don't take on these shifts, the same managers will punish you by giving you the worst jobs/shifts anytime you are in. And to add on to this, most of these extra shifts are last minute, you will be called sometimes an hour before the shift starts and are expected to come in. No respect for employees health or wellbeing. If you call in with a genuine sickness you will be guilted into coming in anyway, even if the sickness is contagious and you will be handling loose food items. This was very prevalent during the initial Covid-19 outbreak, if you called in sick with Covid symptoms you would be told to come in anyway. I had a serious issue with back pain that caused me to call in sick a few times, and this was not taken seriously by management in the slightest. Managers have extremely unrealistic time expectations. We are told that working a single pallet should take 45 minutes on your own, which is about right, but then we are expected to finish 5-6 of them in 2 hours in the morning before the store opens. Every single aspect of the job has these unrealistic requirements, that the managers themselves can't meet. Your shift wont be consistent in any way at all. During one week you will be made to do a mixture of 5am starts, an 11pm closes, and mid-day shifts. You are expected to alter your sleeping pattern 4-5 times a week, which destroys your personal life and leaves you permanently tired, even if you are working part-time.

1.0
Jul 25, 2017

Listen to the reviews and stay away

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The pay and benefits are ok but nothing amazing. International travel for management. Room for progression if you're willing to sell your soul.

Cons

Managers were hired with the understanding that they would be given their own store at the end of the training and yet an 8 hour testing day determined whether or not they would get their own store, despite the fact that they were given reviews throughout the training process. Managers given their own stores in a lot of cases were unproven managers who have no experience running anything and consistently failed reviews while overseas, but since they are good test takers, they did well on testing day. The whole process makes no sense. The company jumped into opening their stores entirely too quickly because they were hemorrhaging money from the millions spent on training and building new stores with no incoming revenue. Facilities management is a joke and unresponsive to issues. Freezer/cooler units are European and no one here in the US knows how to properly fix them thus making them crash CONSTANTLY and making a store lose money, for which the store management staff is blamed. Supply Chain has no realistic idea of what is happening in the stores and doesn't listen to the managers when it comes to allocations; they don't take sales into consideration AT ALL. Stores are allocated unnecessary product which they don't sell and have to write off at a store level for which they then have to answer to higher ups. There are so many incompetent district managers that don't even understand how to make decisions in their personal lives let alone their district (and that's with only having to support one store), and yet, they got a $15k raise for "a job well done". The company can't pay their employees (store management and under...don't worry DMs) correctly but expect people to keep showing up to work. They opened up stores in these welfare areas with unrealistically high expectations for sales, forcing management to hire 80+ associates for which they now don't have the hours. There are no HR policies written for firing/disciplining employees so firing people is nearly impossible even when they do things that are borderline illegal. So if you're a slacker and don't enjoy showing up to your job, this is the company for you because they aren't going to fire you, you may not even get disciplined!

1.0
Jul 5, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The pay is alright for the work.

Cons

Incompetence at management and district manager levels. Most of these are children incapable of doing a simple job such as ordering the right shirts or scheduling the correct hours of work. They literally took anyone with a degree and it shows with the sheer number of mishaps at the corporate level. All they care about is having sex and wasting their paychecks. Working with these little kids has been one of the worst times of my life. Halfway through my training, many managers and even some district mangers were fired from the company due to lewd facebook posts. How ridiculous can you get? Also, have fun driving to their "training center" located an hour and a half away from your house. Don't worry, they pay a pittance for mileage and will do everything in their power to prevent you from wasting their money. Your coworkers are usually alright. There are a few cases of people with their heads so far up their butts that they'll drink down anything management tells them to "get ahead" in the grocery business. What a joke Oh. Don't expect to have a life. They demand five day a week training, even if you live an hour and a half away. For six weeks. Do the math.

Viewing 109 - 111 of 8,069 Reviews

Glassdoor has 16,208 Lidl reviews submitted anonymously by Lidl employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Lidl is right for you.