Where to begin. I worked a Store Manager in Training for Aldi for 8 months. It started off great for the first 5 months or so. I spent several months learning about the job and how Aldi works. I had been a Store Manager for other companies for 5 years, I really just needed to learn the Aldi way. There were ups and downs, the Store Manager at my first store was a 20 year employee and fantastic. I learned a lot from him, he was very helpful, and brought the best out of me. Then, the DM decided to send me to a store to train under a kid 8 years younger than me, had just become a store manager 2 months prior, and had no customer service or employee management skills. He treated me like dirt, micro managed me, and set me up to fail from the moment I stepped into his store. The thing with Aldi is that the DM's will always have their managers back no matter what. He ran my name in the dirt, and they backed him up. I covered vacations periodically at other stores where I saw success but every time I returned to this one store, I failed. The DM's didn't listen to me and always attributed my successes at other stores to other factors rather than my skills. I begged and pleaded to let me go to another store permanently to prove it to them but my cries went unheard. It doesn't help that within an 8 month period I worked for a total of 6 District Managers. The management structure with the company is always changing and expectations are never clear, and when they are, they want you to move like a robot on speed to accomplish unrealistic expectations that even the manager you work under doesn't accomplish but the blame ALWAYS goes back on you. Not to mention you get absolutely NO home life when in this program. For all positions, you NEVER get off at your scheduled time. The DM's are all kids straight out of college with no respect or experience or customer service skills. They don't know what really goes on in the day to day of a retail store. Ultimately, they let me go, because I couldn't live up their expectations in this one specific store and ignored everything I did everywhere else. They wouldn't listen and didn't give me a real chance to prove myself. I worked training under a failing manager and I'm the one who got fired for it.
