Deli Clerk Asked for Sundays Off to Observe Her Sabbath — Her Supervisor Said Everyone Would Want Them, and She Was Fired

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A deli clerk at a grocery store in southeast Georgia says she asked for one basic thing shortly after getting hired: don’t schedule her on Sundays so she could observe her Sabbath. The request didn’t kick off a long back-and-forth or a search for a workable compromise, the federal government alleges. Instead, it ended with her losing her job.

That’s the heart of a new lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, laid out in the agency’s announcement of the case. The EEOC says Reynolds IGA Foodliner, Inc.—which operates a Piggly Wiggly store in Hazlehurst, Georgia—broke federal law by refusing to accommodate the worker’s religious practice and then firing her when she pressed the issue.

She was hired for the deli, then the schedule became the fight

According to the lawsuit, the employee worked as a deli clerk at the Piggly Wiggly location in Hazlehurst. She is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and observes a weekly Sunday Sabbath.

Not long after she started the job, she asked to have Sundays off so she could follow that religious practice. It’s the kind of request that, in many workplaces, gets handled as a scheduling adjustment—especially in jobs that already run on rotating shifts and varying availability.

But the EEOC says this didn’t turn into a scheduling puzzle. It turned into a refusal, fast.

Her supervisor’s response: “Then everyone would want Sundays off”

The agency says the clerk’s supervisor denied the request with a broad justification: if the store gave her Sundays off, it would have to provide Sundays off to all employees.

That line—“everyone would want them”—is the sort of reasoning that tends to frustrate workers because it treats a religious accommodation like a perk. It also becomes legally risky for employers if it replaces the required, individualized look at whether an accommodation is workable.

EEOC Regional Attorney Marcus G. Keegan put it plainly in the announcement: “When an employee requests a religious accommodation, it must be individually considered on a case-by-case basis.” He said employers can’t deny requests “simply because they assume, without evidence, that granting the accommodation would cause an undue hardship.”

When she pushed back, the job ended

The lawsuit alleges that when the employee insisted on the accommodation—meaning she kept asking for Sundays off to observe her Sabbath—the store fired her in January 2025.

That’s the escalation point that turns an internal scheduling dispute into a federal case. A denied request can be disputed; a termination makes the stakes immediate. Suddenly it’s not just about one shift a week—it’s about a paycheck, a gap in work history, and whether a worker is being punished for trying to practice their faith.

The EEOC says this conduct violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans religious discrimination and requires employers to reasonably accommodate an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs or practices unless the employer can show an undue hardship on the business.

How this ended up in federal court

The EEOC filed the lawsuit—EEOC v. Reynolds IGA Foodliner, Inc., Case No. 2:26-cv-00060—in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, Brunswick Division.

Before it got to this stage, the agency said it attempted to resolve the dispute through its administrative process and tried to reach a pre-litigation settlement through conciliation. That didn’t produce an agreement, so the EEOC moved forward with a court filing.

In the agency’s telling, the key issue isn’t just that the worker asked for Sundays off. It’s that the employer allegedly didn’t treat it like an accommodation request that needed a real analysis. EEOC Atlanta District Director Darrell E. Graham said employers must make “a good-faith effort to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs,” adding that the agency remains committed to enforcing Title VII protections.

What people tend to focus on in cases like this

Even without a comment thread attached, the pressure points in a story like this are easy to predict because they come up in workplaces all the time: people want to know what was said, what was put in writing, and whether the employer actually explored alternatives.

On the worker side, the practical lesson many employees latch onto is documentation—making the request clearly, explaining it as a religious practice, and saving any written responses. If a supervisor gives a blanket “no” based on what “everyone” would want, that kind of statement can become central later, because it frames the refusal as a principle rather than an operational problem.

On the employer side, managers often fixate on the fairness problem—worrying other employees will complain about favoritism. But Title VII doesn’t treat religious accommodation as a popularity contest. The legal standard looks at whether the request is based on a sincerely held belief and whether accommodating it creates an undue hardship for the business, not whether other workers might prefer the same schedule.

And in retail and food service, where Sundays can be busy, there’s also the nuts-and-bolts question: could the store have shifted staffing, swapped shifts, adjusted hours, or placed the employee in a role less tied to Sunday coverage? The EEOC’s filing suggests the agency believes the request was rejected without that kind of individualized, evidence-based look.

The tension that’s still hanging over the store

The lawsuit doesn’t just seek to address one firing. It puts the employer’s decision-making under a spotlight: when a worker raises a religious need, do supervisors treat it as a real request that requires problem-solving, or do they shut it down with a quick “we can’t do that” and move on?

For the former deli clerk, the alleged sequence is stark—ask for Sundays off for Sabbath observance, get told no because “everyone” would want it, insist anyway, and then get fired. Now the argument will play out in federal court, where the focus won’t be on whether Sundays are desirable, but on whether the employer met its obligation to take the request seriously and handle it the way the law requires.