The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says a national grocery chain will pay $75,000 to settle a lawsuit accusing it of shutting out a cashier who asked for a place to sit. The worker, a breast cancer survivor whose treatment left her with permanent nerve damage in her legs, asked only for a stool during her shifts. Instead of granting the request or discussing alternatives, the store stopped scheduling her at all, according to the settlement the agency announced this month. The deal is a court-enforced consent decree, meaning Kroger admits no wrongdoing, but it puts a specific dollar figure and a list of new obligations on a company most households already shop at every week.
A stool request that went unanswered
According to the EEOC’s account, the cashier was hired at a Kroger store on Caroline Street in Atlanta’s Edgewood retail district. Shortly after she started, she asked to sit on a stool or chair during her shifts and supplied medical documentation describing the nerve damage in her lower extremities. The store’s response, as the agency described it, was to stop putting her on the schedule and to ignore her repeated phone calls.
She filed an internal complaint, and Kroger told her the allegations were unsubstantiated, then still did not schedule her for work or otherwise respond to the accommodation request, the EEOC said in the lawsuit it filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division, in January 2025. Months later, after she told the company she had filed a charge of discrimination with the EEOC in July 2023, Kroger said any further contact should go through her attorney and its legal department. It never scheduled her again.
What the consent decree requires
The case closed with a two-year consent decree rather than a trial, the mechanism the EEOC uses to resolve a lawsuit while the employer admits no liability. Under its terms, Kroger must pay the former cashier $75,000 and update its internal complaint procedures. The company also has to train store leaders and human-resources staff who field disability-accommodation requests, post a workplace notice telling employees about the settlement and their right to be free from discrimination, and send the EEOC periodic reports on how it handles future accommodation requests.
Marcus G. Keegan, the EEOC’s regional attorney in Atlanta, said the commission was pleased Kroger agreed to “conduct training and install other safeguards to prevent retaliation against employees who seek to enforce their rights through internal complaints or through the EEOC.” Darrell E. Graham, director of the agency’s Atlanta District, added that employers “cannot shirk their legal obligations under the ADA.”
A retaliation claim on top of the accommodation denial
The EEOC’s original complaint sought back pay, compensatory damages, and punitive damages for the employee, plus a court order preventing future discrimination — the usual menu of remedies in an ADA case, though this one resolved into a fixed $75,000 payment instead of a jury verdict. Retaliation claims like this one turn on timing and response: an employer does not have to grant every accommodation request exactly as asked, but federal law bars punishing or freezing out a worker for making one, or for going to the EEOC after being ignored. The agency’s version of events treated Kroger’s silence as exactly that kind of response — the employee asked for a chair, complained internally, then filed externally, and the store’s answer at each step was the same: no more shifts.
The ADA’s duty to accommodate, and to talk it through
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires most employers with 15 or more employees to provide a reasonable accommodation to a qualified worker with a disability unless doing so would cause an undue hardship — significant difficulty or expense weighed against the size and resources of the business. The EEOC’s own enforcement guidance describes what is supposed to happen once a worker makes that kind of request: the employer and employee are expected to work through an informal back-and-forth, often called the interactive process, to identify an accommodation that actually solves the problem, and the employer is supposed to respond and act “expeditiously,” since unnecessary delay can itself violate the law. A request does not have to invoke the words “ADA” or “reasonable accommodation” to count — an employee asking to sit down because a documented medical condition makes standing painful is enough to start the clock. What the guidance does not describe, and what the EEOC alleged happened here, is an employer that responds to that kind of request by removing the person from the schedule and no longer answering the phone.
How a worker in this position files a charge
Filing a charge with the EEOC is normally a required first step before an employee can sue over disability discrimination, and it runs on a fixed clock. Under the agency’s own rules for filing a charge, a worker generally has 180 calendar days from the discriminatory act to file, a window that extends to 300 days in places where a state or local law also prohibits the same kind of discrimination and an agency enforces it — the standard that applied to this case through the EEOC’s Atlanta office. A charge can be started online through the agency’s public portal, by phone, in person at one of its 53 field offices, or by mail. Once filed, the EEOC investigates and typically attempts a pre-litigation settlement, called conciliation, before deciding whether to sue on the worker’s behalf, which is what happened here after conciliation did not resolve the dispute…