How to write it
The job description is not your resume
"Greeted customers, scanned items, processed payments, bagged groceries." That is the posting, written back to the manager who wrote it. Every applicant sends some version of it, which means it separates nobody and gets skimmed.
Two numbers change this entirely, and every cashier has both. Transaction volume per shift, which tells a manager what pace you are used to — 300 transactions in a grocery rush is a different job from 60 in a boutique. And till accuracy, which is the one metric this role is genuinely measured on and which almost nobody thinks to include.
"Process 250–320 transactions per shift and maintain till variance under $2 against a $5 threshold" is the same job as the duties list above, described by someone who is good at it.
Availability is doing more work than you think
Retail hiring is a scheduling problem more than a skills problem. Managers are covering evenings, weekends, holidays and the seasonal peak, and a candidate who is available for those is more valuable than a slightly more experienced one who is not.
Put it in the summary, in plain words: "Available evenings, weekends and holidays." It costs a line and it answers the question that decides a meaningful share of these hires. If you are limited — school hours, another job — say what you can do rather than leaving it to be discovered at the interview, because a manager who finds out late is annoyed rather than informed.
Reliability is the other half of the same signal. Tenure, attendance and picking up short-notice shifts are all worth stating explicitly. In a role with high turnover, someone who stayed eighteen months is genuinely unusual.
Composure is the skill being hired for
Anyone can be trained to operate a till in an afternoon. What cannot be trained quickly is staying pleasant while a queue builds, a card declines, and someone is complaining about a price — and that is what a store manager is really trying to assess.
So write it as an event rather than an adjective. "Excellent customer service skills" is a claim; "de-escalate an average of three to four complaints a week at the register, referring only those requiring a refund above my authorisation" is a description of someone who handles it and knows where the boundary is.
Anything involving trust belongs here too: cash drops, opening or closing, key holding, approving overrides, handling the safe. Each of those is a manager having decided you were reliable, and that judgement transfers.
Everything beyond the register
Most cashiers do considerably more than cashiering, and leave all of it off. Stock and replenishment, receiving deliveries, returns desk, customer service desk, displays, inventory counts, training new starters, covering the floor. Each one broadens what a manager can schedule you for, which is the thing they are optimising.
Training others is the strongest of these. A cashier who has trained six new hires has been trusted with the store's onboarding, and stating the number turns it from a soft claim into something countable.
Also worth listing: the POS system by name. Stores run NCR, Toshiba, Square, Lightspeed, Clover, Shopify POS and others, and a candidate who already knows theirs saves training hours. It is the one technical keyword on the page and almost nobody includes it.
If this is your first job
You still have material. School, clubs, sports, volunteering, babysitting, helping in a family business — all of it evidences the same things a cashier role needs: turning up, handling people, being trusted. Write each one with a verb, a number and an outcome, exactly as you would a job.
Lead with a summary that states what you are looking for and when you are available, then education, then whatever experience you have under an honest heading — "Experience" if it was paid work, "Activities and Volunteering" if it was not. Skills last, and specific: cash handling if you have done it, a food handler card if you hold one, languages spoken.
One page, and do not pad it. A three-quarter page of real material reads far better than a full one propped up with "hard-working team player", and every manager hiring at this level knows exactly what a first resume looks like.