Big Name National Grocery Chain to Start Paying New Employees $23 an Hour

A major player in the grocery industry is ready to fork over big bucks to people who want to join on as new employees.

It's enough to make you wonder how they can actually afford to do this.

Grocery Chain Increases Starting Pay

"Bagging groceries" has long held this aura of being a low-paying profession that one would only enter if they couldn't possibly find anything else.

That couldn't be further from the truth.

Rarely is there a single grocery store worker whose only duty is to put groceries into bags. Often times, a grocery store worker is stocking shelves, wrangling carts, unloading trucks or maybe even hauling card board boxes in addition to bagging up people's orders.

As someone who once worked in the only grocery store of a somewhat small town, I can tell you that all of those tasks were regular parts of nearly every shift in addition to staying past closing some nights to clean the floors.

That's one of the reasons why I didn't see much of an issue with Aldi recently announcing it will increase it's starting employee wages to as much as $23.

Aldi Hiring Thousands In Coming Weeks

Aldi recently announced the wage hike in a press release that also contained the chain's plans to hire a bunch more people at both its stores and its warehouse operations.

READ MORE: Popular Grocery Store Just Dropped Its Own Branded Shoes

The plans call for hiring more than 13,000 new employees who will be able to get starting wages between $18 and $23 an hour. The effort is part of Aldi's plans to prepare for the upcoming holiday rush.

Aldi says it has more than 49,000 employees spread across more than 2,400 stores in the U.S.

For comparison, career and company review website Glassdoor.com lists the salary of a grocery store employee to be between $38,000 and $51,000 a year. The range does not take into account varying positions and the pay scale for each at the stores.

Here is how Aldi stacks up among the most popular grocery stores in the U.S.