Do we like them?

Do we like Lidl?

Discount supermarket chain with thousands of stores across Europe and the US, run from Neckarsulm, Germany.

Our score: 6 out of 10. Cheap, decent-paying and active on living-wage sourcing, but it has a long record of advertising fines and union friction. We'd back it with a bit of caution.

Lidl is the discount grocer from Neckarsulm in Germany. It belongs to the privately held Schwarz Group, which also owns Kaufland. One report puts the group at around 575,000 workers and 13,900 stores. Dieter Schwarz is named as its head.

On pay, Lidl looks fairly good. Lebensmittelzeitung reported that Lidl and Kaufland pay above the collective-agreement rate in Germany, and ESM Magazine reported a higher minimum starting wage of €15 an hour.

Not everything is smooth. Unions at Lidl and Kaufland have teamed up with UNI Global Union to push for a global agreement with the Schwarz Group.

Advertising is the recurring problem. In 2025 a Paris appeals court ordered Lidl to pay about €43m to rival Intermarché over misleading ads. In 2026 Hungary's competition authority fined its local unit over misleading advertising.

There are older blemishes too. Lidl was fined €1.5m in Germany over a slow cheese recall, and faced fines for spying on staff in 2008. On the plus side, it has campaigned for living wages in banana-producing countries. So we give it a middling-good 6.