Show me the money...

What are typical district manager salaries? Do some companies pay a lot more for this position than others? What does a top earner make in this field?

What skills should you learn to increase your salary?

Aldi has a district manager training program that starts at $70k and ends at $85k. www.aldiuscareers.com/DistMgr.aspx Is this typical? What's involved with being a district manager? It looks like you can start there, or is it better to work your way up?

With this Company and for this position the salary starts at 50K.

Hedquist in Lexington, South Carolina said: With this Company and for this position the salary starts at 50K.

How did you get the 50K salary. What position?

salaries depend on the company you are working for and how much past experience you have. for a trainee you will obviously make less until you have some experience under your belt. a district manager oversees all the "happenings" of the stores in your "area". generally involves traveling etc. the general managers (GM) of specific stores will all respond to the district manager (DM) for approval etc for certain things that are out of the power.

All wrong. I worked for the company for a number of years. Store manager pay starts around 50K+ depending on the area. In chicago base pay is somewhere from 55-60K+ bonuses. DM position depends on when you were hired. If you were hired more than 4 years ago, you will be grandfathered in to a better scale where you started at 62 and top at 93K (NO BONUSES, PEOPLE) after that you get incremental raises. When I left I made over 100K. If you are not grandfathered in, the salaries are as listed on the website. They do not negotiate salaries, so what you see is what you get. There is no bonus for experience.

As a former Area Manager with ALDI, I would strongly discourage anyone with a university degree from going for the Area Manager role with ALDI. The typical people you will be working with in these roles are obnoxious, aggressive and over confident. This is the ALDI type they are after. They only want people with uni degrees because it shows you can achieve something. You won’t be using anything you’ve learnt at uni, so it seems such a waste of all that study. The role is basically running their supermarkets, a job which people without a uni degree could also manage easily.

They will work you to the bone for 2-3 years and then replace you with new grads. There are very limited opportunities to progress above Area Manager, as the number of Director roles is limited and everyone is competing for them, and the existing Directors won’t leave their current roles so they don’t come up often.

The progression from Area Manager is to Store Operations Director, Buying Director, Property Director or Warehouse Director. Given the existing directors have nowhere else to go, besides Managing Director, there are limited opportunities for progression. Each region can only have 1 or 2 Store Operations Directors etc., there is only 1 Managing Director. So the number of people in the Director roles is small.

Most people working for ALDI develop very specific skills in overseeing supermarkets, and there are limited opportunities to move into other retail companies with the ALDI experience. Other retailers would rather promote their existing staff into management, and so if you leave the company you will find it difficult to gain employment elsewhere with the ALDI background as your experience.

I would strongly discourage anyone from pursuing an opportunity with them, as they are a ruthless company and will use you until they can replace you. ALDI only operates for the profit of the German owners. ALDI don’t hesitate to replace people they don’t like, and their staff turnover is very high.

Uni graduates would be better advised to work in roles where they can utilize the degree they’ve studied, which in the long term will give them a lot more opportunities than ALDI can offer. Whilst other companies offer a lower starting salary for graduates, you will quickly catch up, and in the long term be in a much better position with a career that actually makes you attractive to many firms.

Whilst the ALDI starting salary is high, it doesn’t go up much further once you are in the company. It is a bait to attract lots of applicants to apply, and then you get stuck. I really regret working for ALDI and would have been better off starting off in a career oriented firm where I was using my uni degree.