u/FantaEnjoyer3

Finally quit after just over 13 months as a CA, I person wouldn’t recommend anyone to work there unless you want to absolutely ruin your sanity and mental health.
Pay used to be good but now it’s barely above minimum wage yet you are expected to do 5x the work as a regular retail worker compared to another company. Expect to never finish on time, yes you will be paid but not be allowed to clock out until 10-20 past your finish time.

Your first few months will be chill.. training and learning the job mornings, evenings ect. It may seem fun at first but after 4-5 months and you are doing the exact same things every day it gets boring fast. If you are like me and good on tills and fast you will 98% of shifts be put on till 1 or 2, you never get a chance to be faster on deliveries because management never gives you the chance to do it.

Dependant on your store the team will be good or bad. In my experience it was mixed but the majority weren’t nice people. Most of my CA colleges were nice but moving to managers was way different.. out of 10+ managers I had over the course of working there.. only 3 were actually good managers, nice kind and fair to all staff with no clear favourites.

If you are on a shift where the shift leader has favourites and you aren’t one of them.. you get you will get the worst jobs all day and you bet they will let them go home 15-30 mins early and not care yet when you try leave on time you are leaving too early? Double standards is non existent.

Bullying culture at lidl is constant and it doesn’t get dealt with seriously. I personally felt bullied on multiple occasions and was essentially persuaded into not making a grievance because ‘nothing will happen’. Makes you not want to turn up on days because you are scared for the confrontation and no job should make you scared to go to work.

I’d say that this job is decent for a first job or for those wanting to build time management skills, being able to work in pressure and develop good customer service skills but I’d never stay longer than a year. I feel sorry for those who work as a CA their whole life and to my co workers who feel trapped as no retail job pays the same but they hate their job.

A word of advice for people especially on sundays or saturday closes, don’t stay late, don’t let managers guilt trip you into doing extra work and staying a hour late, they cannot force you to stay extra. If you do a 7am - 5pm and want to go home at 5pm go home. If managers guilt trip you which they regularly do and say ‘it’s unfair on the team’.. just go home it’s not your job to schedule more staff. You cannot get in trouble for not staying. As soon as you decline that power hungry manager you will indefinitely hurt their ego and they’ll stop expecting you to stay late.

Once you leave you understand how undervalued and little worth you was to the company, no goodbye from the boss just removed from the group chat and told not to come in for your notice after offering to get people to cover the shifts/give them away as hours are low this month.

Does anyone know how pay works after leaving because with the payroll cut off date which i assume runs from the 15th to the 15th assuming you have already worked your monthly contracted hours could you technically just not work your notice and quit with immediate effect - assuming you had no intention of coming back nor getting a reference

Or would any shifts scheduled after the 15th until your notice period ends effect your pay for the next cycle after you’ve already left.

Like say hypothetically every month they pay you a base of 120 hours and between the 15th of august and the 15th of september (or whatever the actual cut off date is) didn’t owe any hours and decided to leave. Notice period of 2 weeks from say the 16th to the 30th. On the next months pay after you quit would you still get the 120 hours minus any hours you owe or would they just pay you any shifts worked from the 15th to the 30th.

Only asking because I quit and can’t be bothered working my notice.. have no intention of coming back ever and don’t care about a reference and already have a way better job lined up but don’t want to be owing money to the company nor them taking my accrued holiday pay out of my pocket

I’m a CA and we’ve recently received a few new managers but i’ve never understood how external managers work.

What I mean is from personal experience it’s as if they have never worked in a store before (any company) lack any common sense and essentially have no idea how to do anything. To give benefit of doubt I know they are training but how is it that you can externally become a Lidl manager yet to become a manager internally you have to work your ass off to even get considered.

I was working chiller this morning and had a trainee manager and a trainee CA working with me, we had about 6 big pallets and one little one. I decided to do my pallets alone vs they did them together. First pallet i was done in about 45 mins moved onto my second, i’m half way done and they only just finished their first one. Skip to 7:30am and i’ve finished 2, finished all the ready to go and chillcon and i move on to quickly do the last small pallet. Gets to 8am and they only just finish their second pallet (in 3 hrs for 2 people). Okay yes a new person has to learn where everything is but jesus we’re they walking and doing everything at a snails pace.
If i was that slow i’d get a blocking from management and a dgo2.

And then just little things like asking me how to do everything or what do I do now or what else do I need to pull out for bulk and it makes you think do they actually train any of these managers beforehand.

I’m essentially training a manager who does less of a job than me but gets paid more how fair.

Any one else’s security for their store absolutely shite, all they do is walk around doing nothing all day and when there is a shop lifter they don’t do anything and leave it to us CA’s and managers to deal with.

For example today we had a regular known shop lifter come in, she tried stealing some stuff from the charity box, i saw and notified security to stop her and he just ignores me and almost lets her out before my co worker shouted and stopped her. Security got a bolocking from manager because he was absolutely useless. Cherry on top is that they get like 3x 15-30 min breaks a day for doing absolutely nothing. We’d actually have a half decent chance in stopping all shop lifters if security hired were actually decent.

That said we do have one regular security who is decent, helps out with the baskets and customers ect, communicates and talks to us but like 90% of the time the security hired don’t speak a word of english and are absolutely awful.

Anyone else always finish 1 to 1.5 hrs extra every saturday?

Literally every saturday we get scheduled 1-2 managers then 3-4 CA’s and 1 cleaner and then we have morning staff until 8pm. Then with the store not even closing till 10 I essentially have 30 min to do all my put backs and the rest of till close, help decard and pull out the delivery for sunday open. I’ve asked managers if we could schedule more people but nothing ever changes and i always end up finishing around 11:30-11:40 instead of 10:30pm.
(Our store is the biggest and busiest in the city)

Also side note/question:

Does anyone else have a manager who only lets them close their till when they are supposed to finish work, as in say i finish at 6pm you’d expect to close your till at 5-10 to 6pm finish serving and cash up yet I have multiple managers who ‘remind me’ it’s not 6pm yet so i can’t close yet that means I always finish late. I’ve asked them why and their response is always just ‘finishing 10-15 mins late isn’t that bad, I regularly stay 1 hour extra’ yet that justifies nothing since i’m a CA not a manager and yes i’d rather go home after 10 hrs working and not stay extra every day. Technically I can just close at 10 to and if they have something to say about it i’d just ignore which i’ve done before because quite frankly that’s not policy and unfair.

Say for example I texted in sick, got disciplined and told how the procedure works, on a few other occasions texted and called once or twice between but mostly texted since i have a fear of calling and absolutely hate it.

If i knew i was going to be ill at say 3am so texted a manager instead of staying awake till 7am just to call and notify but still gave notice, do HR see this as very bad.

I ask this because I know sickness procedure but always forget or just don’t follow it and just text as it’s easier and more flexible but can you be dismissed for this.

I asked a manager and they said don’t worry about it but since i have a HR meeting coming up i feel it’s more serious, or is this just DGO2 procedure.

So i’ve been working at Lidl for about 10 months now and i’m just so done. People say “oh every day is different” I can tell you now it’s not. My average day goes as follows: Get to work, get told to take my till out, spend 9.5 hrs on tills + break, go home usually at 8pm as i’m only ever scheduled 10-8 and Sundays. Most of the rude people don’t even bother me anymore I’ve lost all emotion.

Today I just had people constantly complaining or saying oh you look dead try smile more, or one woman complaining i looked miserable and apparently that’s rude like don’t say anything if you have nothing positive to say.

I ask management oh could i possibly decard today or help with back-stock and i constantly get the same reply, no we need you on tills today. I do have one manager he’s my favourite, always cheers me up and lets me get off my till for a while because he understands it’s draining.

One manager said to me, you need to prove to me you can decard properly and not do a half arsed job, (for context the one time I did that was because it was a sunday and we was supposed to finish 1 hr prior and we was all still there so I couldn’t really give a toss if it wasn’t perfect.) and then i said, how can i prove to you i can if im always on tills and never get a chance to do anything else.

I honestly almost quit today because im so done with it and got so angry deep down that I let myself put up with this job. But the job market is so bad i literally cannot afford to leave so what do I do..