He says a co-worker's apple helped him manage his diabetes - then cost him a 15-year career
Costco fired a manager of nearly 15 years over a single apple, a new lawsuit alleges - and he says bias, not theft, drove the decision.
The claim sits at the center of a complaint filed on August 6, 2026, in federal court in Alabama by a former assistant front-end manager at Costco's warehouse in Hoover. He is 69 and of Iranian national origin, and he says he spent nearly 15 years at the retailer - promoted again and again, named Employee of the Month several times, and moved into management only months before he was let go.
According to the complaint, a new general manager transferred into the warehouse in March 2025. During one of their first interactions, the filing says, she asked him - the warehouse's oldest manager - when he planned to retire, a question she did not put to younger managers. What followed, the complaint alleges, was heightened scrutiny of his work. Eighty-two days after she arrived, his career was over.
At the heart of the firing was an apple. The former manager says he has diabetes and that Costco had long let him eat when he needed to steady his blood sugar. On or about June 8, 2025, the complaint says, a co-worker handed him an apple after his lunch was cut short. He alleges he did not know it came from store inventory and had no intent to steal, and he says employees at the warehouse routinely tasted produce to check its quality without being disciplined.
The theft accusation, the complaint alleges, came from a front-end supervisor who, according to the filing, was known among staff to have used a racial slur about him and to have questioned why someone of his background held a management role. Warehouse managers knew of the remarks, the complaint says, yet Costco took no effective action. The same supervisor, according to the filing, later accused him of breaching the investigation's confidentiality - an accusation the complaint calls false.
For HR professionals, the case reads as a lesson in investigation integrity. The complaint's theory is not that the firing was merely harsh. It is that Costco allegedly let an accuser with racial hostility toward the employee shape the whole process, then leaned on his reports while setting aside the employee's own account. Investigators, the filing says, pressured the manager over several days to rewrite his statement, then treated the changed version as proof he was dishonest.
The complaint also rests heavily on comparators - the workhorse of any discrimination claim. It alleges Costco demoted, but did not fire, a younger, non-Iranian manager who intentionally took cash from a register, and kept another younger, non-Iranian manager after that person had sex with a lower-level employee on company time. Both engaged in deliberate misconduct at least as serious as accepting an apple, the filing says - and both kept their jobs.
Then there is the accommodation angle, one many HR teams will find familiar. The former manager says the apple episode grew straight out of a medical need Costco already knew about and had accommodated. During the investigation, the complaint says, he reminded managers of his diabetes and asked that the eating be treated in line with his existing accommodation. Instead, he alleges, Costco pulled the medical context out and recast the eating as theft. He frames that as both disability discrimination and retaliation, saying his suspension and termination followed within days of his renewing the request and objecting to unequal treatment.
The former manager filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in July 2025 and received a notice of rights in May 2026. His complaint brings claims under Title VII, Section 1981, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and seeks reinstatement or front pay, back pay, and compensatory and punitive damages. He has asked for a jury trial.
The allegations have not been tested, and no court has ruled on any of the claims.
