Lidl is very big about diversity and giving equal opportunities to people of all ethnic backgrounds, not just a bunch of whites and europeans.
This is how it's written on the Lidl website, this is what HR keep saying and this is how the company presents itself in public. That sounds good, especially in an area of the US where 50% of the population is black or from another minority background. Except for the fact that it's simply NOT TRUE. It's all made up.
This is obvious in departments like for instance Admin, especially PMO, Legal or Finance where exactly NOBODY is from a minority background. Everybody there is lily-white. If I look into the promotions section of our intranet, almost everybody there is of northern european heritage.
Now someone might say: Well, non-whites are simply less professional, or too dumb, or not able to understand all this ludicrously complicated Lidl stuff, which is surpassed in complexity only by topics like quantum field theory or higher mathematics! Also sounds like an explanation, except that it's not true, again.I know for a fact that there are countless smart, well-qualified black business people living in the DC area. And this is a food retail company, for gods sake! None of this stuff is rocket science, it's about training and investing in your people,no matter what their skin color is.
The only departments that seems to be almost living up to their own standards are IT and HR. That might be the reason for all the uber-positive fake reviews from HR here, which keep heaping praise on the company like it's the best place ever while giving zero explanation and detail about why it's supposedly so awesome. Guess what, there's a reason for that!
There are other areas of the company that would be worth criticizing, such as the apparent lack of connection between one's performance and promotions. Or the drivel about work-life balance when your manager expects you to work 60 hours a week. But these are areas which other reviewers here have written about. And unfortunately these things are also common at other companies. So you can't necessarily criticize only Lidl for that.
What you CAN criticize them for is the disconnect between the makeup of the total population and the Lidl workforce. Especially on a top management level this is so obvious that its almost a joke. Everybody from a director level upward is white!