Interesting that this was Walmart, too. I would sure like to know what goes on in their training. I am not really mad, since taking the $10 would have been the same as stealing in my mind, but I AM frustrated that instead of being thanked for being honest, I was made to feel embarrassed for holding up the line. The easier thing to do would have been to take the $$ and say nothing, but I was not brought up that way and I would have felt guilty. Maybe the cashier was scared she would get in trouble? But for a manager to act like this situation was SUCH as burden was laughable.
As a former employee, I can tell you that training is minimal. It's like "Oh, you don't know how to check? Well, just wing it." I was a floor associate forced into learning how to cashier because they were "short handed", so instead of them hiring more cashiers and letting me do my job stocking my department and making it look neat and assisting customers with finding what they needed, I frequently got called up front.
Even when I later took a promotion to department manager, I still spent more time on a register than in my own department (of which I was the ONLY daytime associate). Not long after I was stepped down for "not completing my duties as a department manager" and I was given the choice of moving to the back room or, shock, going up front to be a permanent cashier.
I chose the back room out of spite (I know full well what they were doing), but once they changed the hours for that position, I had to move again to accommodate the hours I needed and ended up in the bakery as a cake decorator - in which I had to learn to bake bread and stock the floor because, once again, "short handed", in addition to filling cake orders.
This was all in the span of almost 4 years, and I finally got tired of being pulled in 5 million directions at once and getting scolded for the extra things added to my plate that 8 hours wouldn't cover in a day for a single person, not to mention being yelled at by customers for things I had absolutely no control over. All of the stress started affecting me mentally and physically and my health began to suffer, so my husband and I agreed that I needed to leave. I left less than a month before my 4th anniversary (I left this past June) and I haven't looked back.
Retail is too often such a thankless job from both sides, management and customers, so I personally thank you for being patient and honest as well as apologize for such rude behavior from management. I've been in the place of a cashier in a Walmart and sometimes things happen throughout the day that get you rattled and your mind isn't always where it should be, but it's the kind people who make things a whole lot more bearable.