The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has settled a disability discrimination case against Kroger after a cashier with permanent nerve damage from cancer treatment says the retailer stopped scheduling her rather than address her request to sit during shifts.
What happened: A cashier at a Kroger store in Atlanta requested a chair or stool to use at the register, citing permanent nerve damage from cancer treatment, and provided medical documentation. Instead of granting or denying the request, the store stopped scheduling her and left her follow-up calls unanswered, the EEOC says. After she filed an EEOC charge in July 2023, Kroger routed further contact through legal counsel and never restored her schedule. A federal court in Georgia has approved a two-year consent decree: $75,000 to the employee, updated accommodation procedures, retraining for store leaders and HR staff, a workplace notice, and periodic EEOC reporting on accommodation requests.
Why it matters: The case turns less on the seating request itself than on what happened after it landed: nothing. “When an employee requests reasonable accommodations for their disability or files a complaint of discrimination, their employer cannot simply ignore them,” said Marcus G. Keegan, EEOC regional attorney. “Employers cannot shirk their legal obligations under the ADA,” added Darrell E. Graham, EEOC district director. The exposure sits in the absence of a documented process to track and close out a request, not in the underlying decision.
The original insight: Seating accommodations recur as EEOC targets because they are cheap to grant and easy to lose at the store level, where requests often route through a single manager rather than a formal HR system. The decree’s focus on documented accommodation procedures signals the agency now treats a broken intake process as its own liability, distinct from the latitude courts give employers on genuine fitness-for-duty judgment calls.
