Either I am mistaken that Walmart was offering store associate type jobs or the author doesn't realize Walmart has software engineering teams. Quite a few non-tech companies have very hip, modern, and high-power tech teams behind them.
https://github.com/walmartlabs
Walmart has been doing this level of work since at least 2013/2014 to my knowledge so it's not something new.
Getting a job on the Walmart engineering team doesn't seem like such an awful thing. Other notable call-out: Domino's. A few years back (... like a decade ago ._.) I had done a re-write of a node.js wrapper for the Domino's API and the team seemed very supportive and proud of what people did with it. The REST API was actually quite good and didn't try to throw up roadblocks.