How Do Cashiers Get Hurt At Work?

Cashiers in retail jobs — including at grocery stores, clothing stores, big box stores, and other retail establishments where a person brings the goods they plan to purchase up to a cashier at a check-out area to pay — can suffer a range of on-the-job injuries that might not be as obvious as the traumatic injuries associated with dangerous work in construction, trucking, or warehousing, for example. Yet cashiers do sustain severe injuries on the job that can result in many missed workdays and the need for surgery, ongoing medical care, and rehabilitation. Most often, the types of injuries that cashiers report, and for which they seek workers’ compensation benefits, are musculoskeletal injuries or musculoskeletal disorders.

How do these types of injuries happen? And, more generally, how do cashiers get hurt on the job? Our Maryland workers’ compensation lawyers can tell you more, and we can speak with you about your workplace injury if you are ready to get started on your workers’ compensation claim.

Repetitive Movements Required of Cashiers 

One of the most common ways that cashiers suffer on-the-job injuries is through required repetitive movements. According to an article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, repetitive movements required to scan consumer products and operate a cashier often lead to symptoms associated with musculoskeletal disorders. As the authors of that study explain, cashier work “requires specific postures and continuous repetitive movements often conducted with forceful excretions.” For cashiers, that work involves spending “long hours in relatively static postures within congested areas” and “handling grocery items of various sizes and swiping carcodes through a laser scanner.”

Those repetitive movements, in just an hours’ time, can occur between 500 to 1,000 times on average for a cashier in a busy retail environment. Those repetitive movements then result in wrist and arm conditions, shoulder pain, neck pain, and back pain. Cashiers are also commonly diagnosed with neuromuscular fatigue as a result of these repetitive movements.

Contact with Register and Consumer Goods 

Cashier injuries can also result from forms of contact with the cash register and with consumer goods.

An error operating the cash register, or a defective register, can result in a finger getting caught and broken. Or, a cashier may sustain a serious laceration injury while scanning a specific consumer product or bagging a consumer product. Cashiers can also sustain injuries while attempting to remove certain heavy consumer products from the cashier belt.

Contact Our Maryland Workers’ Compensation Attorneys 

Cashiers in grocery and other retail stores might not be doing some of the hazardous work tasks associated with other professions, but cashiers nonetheless must perform a range of work-related tasks that routinely put them at risk of serious and debilitating injuries. If you got hurt in an accident on the job while working as a cashier, or if you have developed a diagnosed musculoskeletal condition as a result of your cashier work, you may be eligible for workers’ compensation benefits. It is important to get in touch with an experienced Maryland food market employee injury attorney at the Law Offices of Steinhardt, Siskind and Lieberman, LLC today. Contact us for assistance with your workers’ compensation claim.

Sources:

dol.gov/general/topic/statistics/safety

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7763189/#:~:text=Many%20studies%20have%20been%20conducted,or%20hand%20pain%20%5B6%5D