My experience being employed at Walmart is solely mine. I am no longer employed by Walmart, but I know some who enjoy working there and would recommend it to others.

I personally worked at Walmart from May 2021 to January 2022. It started off as a truly enjoyable experience. The other employees I worked with were always very friendly, and I was able to keep busy. I switched to cashiering in July 2021.

After working at Walmart for eight months, I would not recommend it based on my negative experiences there.

Imagine you get to work a little early, but you can’t clock in until your shift starts. You wait near the bathroom, then head over to your register once it hits 4 p.m. You’re exhausted. You just finished a long day of school, so you purchase an energy drink to get yourself going.

Your coworker, who’s been working a shift for most of the day, is snacking and has their food and drink on the counter.

Now, here’s what happened to me in this exact scenario:

Out of nowhere, a security over aggressively told me that my energy drink wasn’t allowed.

During this shift at Walmart, I had security yell that I wasn’t allowed to have any other drinks except water, despite the fact that this wasn’t the norm or expectation at any point in the last eight months.

At Walmart, I had employers and coworkers express to me that clocking in even a few minutes before getting to registers was unacceptable, which created a work environment for me that appeared to care more about exactness than eagerness and willingness to work shifts. As an employee, most of the rules weren’t explained well and I had a confusing time trying to figure out what I could and could not do, which seemed to change on a day-to-day basis.

In this experience, I was sent home early without a scheduled or planned ride for having an energy drink on the job. I also had people make assumptions that I was snacking while working even though the food on the counters wasn’t purchased, opened, or being eaten by me.

This wasn’t the only experience I’d had at Walmart that was unnecessarily aggressive and created a tense workplace for me as an employee.

Imagine your shift ends at 8 p.m. You don’t have your license, so you rely on friends and family to get you to and from work.

Instead of getting let off when my shift ended and I had my ride waiting outside, random days I was there until 8:30 p.m. or later without any notice. The inconsistency was not only an inconvenience to me, but very frustrating to those who were taking time out of their evening to give me rides.

In another negative experience, I was used to staying later than my scheduled shift but had planned to attend a funeral that day. While at Walmart, I missed half of this event due to work keeping me after my shift. Even after informing my team lead that I needed to leave for an urgent matter, they kept me on the clock for another 40 minutes.

Coworkers resented me for leaving 40 minutes early to attend what I had planned that day.

Working at Walmart held positive experiences for me at first, but I really struggled with the aggressive and inconsistent management. At the location and in the team I specifically worked in, Walmart was not a positive job.

I can’t guarantee it will be the same in a few months or at different locations, but working under large corporate businesses with management that misunderstands situations and isn’t willing to have discussion with thier employees makes any workplace difficult to be in.