Pros
I started as a sales associate in the jewelry department and became a cashier when I transferred stores because I moved to a different city. The transferring process was fairly simple even though there wasn't an opening in the jewelry department so I became a cashier. The location of the store really made an impact of the work environment. The store I started working at was located in a higher-crime location, which I was paid $0.40 more for the "danger risk" I was exposed to. The store manager of the new store I worked at made efforts to talk to employees throughout his day, something that wasn't true about the first store i worked at. I also liked the aspect that the associated managers rotated departments to oversee so if there was a manager you didn't like, you wouldn't be stuck with them forever. Being a full-time student, the second store I worked at was very flexible with students taking off for holidays and school breaks.
Cons
I'm not really sure what Walmart uses as guidelines for promotions because some of the managers I worked with were so incompetent! I had an associate manager that didn't know what she was doing so I ended up creating the schedule and doing managerial duties for her because the department manager kept going AWOL. Eventually, the store manager said having a sales associate create schedules wasn't allowed so she had the computer generate schedules and kept approving me to work outside of my availability without my consent (I had classes at those times). As a full-time student, I capped the number of hours I could work to 25 hours per week but was getting scheduled 34 hours every week. I had to talk to the store manager about all the scheduling conflicts.
