I work as a Walmart cashier. The work itself isn't that bad. You just wave boxes on top of a glowing square, hear a beep, and then put it in a bag. The payment can be kind of tricky because almost no one uses only one form of payment. 80% of people use a EBT SNAP card along with cash or debit and a good portion of them use multiple EBT cards and/or a Humana or WIC card. It's not the best, most fun, or stimulating work, but I've had worse jobs.
However, you are in so much pain at the end of the day. You're standing on your feet for hours with the short days being 4.5 hours and the long days being 8 hours (though some coworkers told me they sometimes have 10 hour days). You get a fifteen minute break every two hours, which does help, but you're still always wishing you could sit for longer. I have so many feet soaks and lotions; it's ridiculous. I have 2 tubes of Epsom salt/aloe vera gel, 1 bottle of “foot lotion” specifically made for feet, 2 bottles of cracked skin extra strength lotion, a spray bottle of a skin healing solution, toe separators/bandages, 1 5lb bag of Epsom salt, and New Balance tennis shoes. I have to sit in the shower, and I peel off layers and layers of skin.
Besides from the foot pain, your back kills you. You have to bend down when scanning items, and most people want you to bend into their cart and scan heavy things like water bottle cases or bags of dog food. Around my last 1-2 hours, and the entire rest of the day, when I walk around, you can physically hear my back crunch and pop. It sounds like Pop Rocks or Rice Krispies. There's not much to do to help with it other than laying down.
Sometimes they schedule too many cashiers for the same day, so they send you to “do 20s”. A code 20 is when someone gets to the register and doesn't want their item anymore, so they hand it to the cashier. We hold onto them until we go to break or someone goes around doing 20s and picks them up for you and takes the items to the Service Desk. When you're walking around doing 20s, after you take them to the Service Desk, you collect all the things that had been gathered throughout the day including what you just grabbed and stuff people have returned at the desk and put it all into a cart. You use this app named Me@Walmart and use a feature called Ask Sam where A.I. Sam Walton scans your items and tell you where they belong in the store. Every time you do 20s, each cart takes 1 to 2 hours. I've done 20s three times in the past week, so it's just nonstop walking.
To be fair, I have two infected toe nails that need to be removed, so that might have something to do with the foot pain.
Like I said before, the work isn't hard, but wow your feet and back hurts like crazy. I've been working here for over a month, and I'm still not used to it. Not to mention that feet pain carried over at least a little bit the next day, so by day four you want to saw your feet off. I was talking to a different cashier who's been here for 10 months, and said “Yeah, when they gave me full-time hours, I thought I was going to die.” It's bad.