Dealing with Wal-Mart's office bureaucracy is very difficult when your assignment requires a lot of time in a customer facing situations. This in turn makes your time disappear - will not have time to focus on customers.. If your store is busy, you might be asked to run a cash register, and your speed and accuracy will be checked even though it is not your primary job - so figure this one out, you are expected to excel at register duties even though you never run a register... Long story short, this results in a very high attrition levels for optometrists - some stores do not have people to employ at all
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"Everyone should be able to work a register"....there is remote sense of reasoning which I will agree with your statement, and that is the statement is true, as the optometrist may need the ability to do so when their clerks or cashiers call in sick, and the manager of the store spites the professional by not providing coverage, it happens quite often as store managers are often jealous of the pay which the professional earns versus that of a title of "store manager" (most often college degree not required ) however keep in mind that it is not always the reason which this optometrist chose to advance in his education and become a medical professional. The same applies for pharmacists (which I am), and don't ask the same numb question "why does it take so long to put some pills in a bottle?". It is not cost effective to pay a professional to do a job which another employee can do for around 20% or less of the pay. If a professional is expected to "man the register" regularly, I will say that is just dumb or evan "retaliatory" utilization of resources. It's obviously not the best way to manage people. If it occurs regularly, the manager is not thinking in the best financial interest of his company. If it is a corporate decision to have professionals be cashiers, then they are not on the right track. Professional/patient interaction is important, however cannot be used as the excuse to have the professional do a task which is not the main reason they are employees of the companies. Yes, there are times I did it in the past. When scheduling was so thin, that during lunches and breaks of my ancillary help left me without a cashier. I worked as a cashier in a supermarket chain decades ago, so I had no problems. In a situation like this, a wise manager/company would have a system where the cash transaction can be securely allowed to go to the front registers of the retail business. Ask me again why it takes so long to count a few pills? It's because sometimes, we're too busy doing cashier work. (Thrifty Drug/RiteAid/Kaiser Permanente).
Everyone should be able to work a register