Dive Brief:

• The decision to fire an employee who drank a $1.69 orange juice prior to paying for it proved to be a costly one for Dollar General, as a federal jury ruled in favor of the EEOC in a federal disability discrimination lawsuit to the tune of $27,565 in back pay and $250,000 in compensatory damages against the retail giant. 

• EEOC charged Dollar General with firing a cashier at its Maryville, Tenn. store because of her need to treat her diabetes. According to EEOC's suit, the cashier, an insulin-dependent diabetic, told her supervisor she was a diabetic and requested on several occasions that her supervisor allow her to keep juice near the register to prevent a hypoglycemic attack.

• Although Dollar General did have an accommodation policy that could have allowed the cashier to keep juice near the register, the employees, including management at the Maryville store, did not know about the policy. So when the cashier drank the orange juice prior to purchase, in violation of Dollar General's "grazing" policy, the district manager and loss prevention manager fired the cashier after she admitted to drinking orange juice before buying it. Dollar General, the nation's largest small-box discount retailer, operates over 11,000 stores nationwide.

Dive Insight:

This case is a prime example of an employer being penny wise and pound foolish. While having a "no grazing" policy is fine, an exception could have been made here from an HR perspective. A reprimand might have made more sense. As an EEOC spokesperson said, however, the commission continues to see "cases where employers fail to train their employees on basic requirements under the ADA. The Commission will continue to carry out its goal of ensuring equal opportunity in the workplace for persons with disabilities."

Bottom line, this represents a clear-cut issue of poor training, from the store manager all the way up to the district level. Employers must be prepared to combat the costly risks posed by diabetes in the workplace, a problem that accounts for an estimated $70 million in indirect costs nationwide stemming from lost worker productivity, disability, mortality and early retirement.

The Americans with Disabilities Act's reasonable accommodation requirements are pretty clear. From the EEOC's perspective, a large employer like Dollar General not properly training employees and management staff is essentially the same as Dollar General having no policy at all. Worse yet, rather than accepting responsibility for its inaction, Dollar General argued in court that the cashier did not require an accommo­dation for her condition.