Pros
The pay was decent when you were given shift manager hours and the benefits were also very good. We were given a decent amount of vacation time and the store closes relatively early. You get to sit down when you're at the register.
Cons
Working at Aldi is intense physical labor and the work is thankless. Cashier pay starts at $10 and shift managers make $5 extra dollars per hour when they are running the shift. That sounds nice, right? Well in reality, only one person can be clocked in as shift manager at a time. So when they store manager is there, he automatically gets the shift. He will schedule himself 40 to 50 hours, so the only hope you have of getting shift hours is when he/she isn't there; however, often Aldi will have 5, 6, and 7 different shift managers, so you are all fighting each other to get the shift for yourself or else you're stuck making cashier wages while you are there. The majority of employees there are women, and the store and assistant managers are usually men. It always seemed to me like this was done on purpose because they think women are more submissive and easier to control. We would be scheduled to come in as early as 5 a.m. and stock the truck. Usually there were only 3 people scheduled to do this. This labor is very hard on the body. You would be expected to stock not only grocery, but cooler, freezer, and produce. Every product at Aldi is stocked on the shelf in boxes. Manyof these boxes weight at least 10-20 pounds (sometimes up to 50 lbs) and often you have to chuck them up to get them to the right spot on the rack. After working there for 5 1/2 years, I had developed a bad case of carpal tunnel from all of the heavy lifting. Aldi keeps a skeletal staff, perhaps only having 8-10 employees at each store. Most of thetime there would be only 4 or 5 people working in the store at one time. That meant that if 1 person called out sick, everyone else would have to make up for their work and would often be stuck there hours and hours late trying to get everything caught up. Working as a shift manager, I was often on my feet for 10-12 hours at a time without being able to take a break. I would say the worst part about it is how much management does not care about you as an employee. You are simply the six-digit number that you clocked in with and nothing more. Our manager would constantly call us in on our days off when he didn't feel like working and would have us doing back-breaking work without rotating certain tasks to certain employees. Everything there was arbitrary and played by favoritism. Our work was never complimented, only criticized. The bosses didn't care if you were sick or had a death in the family, or if anything urgent had come up. They would bully you to come into work even if you had a real emergency and if you didn't come in, you would be punished by being made to do the hardest tasks there and work the worst hours. The store manager at my location had been there for so long, that he no longer had any accountability with upper management. He could do or act however he wanted and it was impossible to talk to upper management about it without him finding out. Even if they did find out, they would never believe any employee over him. It was next to impossible to get a full weekend off work, even if you tried to request it months in advance. Many times If we tried to switch shifts with another person, the store manager would intervene and say no. Again, completely based on favoritism and bias. The district manager would stop in frequently and nit-pick everything going on. A lot of these times, we didn't have enough people scheduled or someone had called in sick or we were having a record sales day, and it was nearly impossible to catch up, but he had no sympathy. He would make people skip their breaks just so we could "catch" the floor up to his perfect standards. I would have loved to see any of the district managers we had over the years get off their butts, roll up their sleeves, and attempt to run that store for 2 hours. There were at least 2 district managers at my location that were having sexual affairs with staff members. At lot of the equipment we used was over a decade old and had been falling apart for years, but management would not buy us new stuff. If out store manager spent over X amount of dollars in store expenses, he wouldn't get his bonus for the end of the year; therefore, he would push equipment as far as he could, no matter how much more difficult it made our job. It always irritated me so much because Aldi is a billion dollar company, but they can't shell out a few thousand to give their employees a decent environment to work with.