Lidl reviews

The work is physically and mentally difficult. The hours are long and often you feel obliged to work off the clock to hit your productivity targets. It would be unusual for a manager NOT to work a 60+ week. It would probably be viewed as laziness by our peers not to do so. There is an elephant in the room about this in regard to senior management. They know we do this but they are purposely oblivious to the fact once targets are met and there's no trouble. Although vastly improved from when I first started there, the culture can be toxic and intimidating if you are not on the right side of the right people on the right day. This is continuing to improve however. The training can be very hit and miss. I have been through months of zero training and no movement. I have also had the best 6 months of training in my career to date recently. This is store dependent. You can have an excellent manager in one store and a poor one in another. Unfortunately this is the luck of the draw. However you do tend to move stores every few months so this can be positive or negative depending on how you look at it. The college aspect can be a bit of a joke at times. If you treat people like primary school students they will act like it. To improve their harsh image they have hired some 'soft' people who do not suit working for Lidl. Most of these people have ended up getting the sack which makes the whole course very tense and sometimes makes me view it as a poorly thought out joke. This is in stark contrast to what is expected of you when you go to your work block. The college is a good reputable institution however. This course and Lidl in general is not suited to a 'soft' type of person. They would sooner hire someone who will work to the bone for 13 hours a day and hit all their targets but is an absolute psychopath than someone who is great with the staff and fair with working hours but may not have quite the same results. It suits very straight-edged, driven and ambitious people who have the graft to back it up. Confidence is also a must. There is no time to find your feet no matter how good you could potentially be at the job. You will be buried alive. At times, the staff in head office can treat you with extreme contempt and vice versa. The pay for this programme is poor due to the fact that they are paying for you to attend college. You get paid 16k in the first years and 2k up every year after that. You also receive basic health insurance. Lidl in general pay well however. When I finished the programme I moved up to a very respectable salary as a deputy store manager and I will be moving up to the store manager position soon. To truly be successful and liked you can forget about a social life. You must live and breathe Lidl.

HQ "leadership" is a puppet role and does not involve any actual leading. But how can it? None of them know a single thing about retail in the US. Management positions are reserved for incompetent, insecure, Yes Men (gender neutral) to serve as overseers and personal bullies for the lower level employees. Despite using more company time (pointless meetings) and resources (sizable salary), they do the least amount of work, if any. It always a was a running joke/genuine question to ask "what does [name] even do?" Everybody spends all their time working on/talking about/revising/reviewing/documenting The Process instead of doing acutal work. You would think from the amount of time spent on it that the stores sell processes. Sadly, if they did, they would still be as low quality as their products.