7A Testing the Hypothesis

Publix Supermarkets is a non discriminatory hiring establishment, so when they get applications from people with physical disabilities, mental disabilities or any other documented issue, they prioritize them above regular applicants. But once a physically disabled person is hired, they are unaware of the rigorous requirements and physicality needed to be successful when it comes to working at Publix, especially in customer service, or backroom stocking.

Hypothesis: Publix can prioritize all applications equally through a more extensive application process in order to hire more applicable employees that can handle the tasks of being a Publix member.
Who: Publix Supermarkets
What: Publix holds people with disabilities over regular people in the application process.
Why: In order to establish a better company reputation.

Testing the who: This issue regards Publix, the applicants, and the management staff that trains new applicants. Everyone is affected differently.
Testing the what: Boundaries include statistics for how many disabled employees Publix hired because that number is unknown to me, but from working at three Publix's Ive noticed a huge increase in disabled people hired over people that are more capable of the job but lose the opportunity. I am not suggesting to discriminate who Publix hires, but a more effective hiring process needs to be in place.
Testing the why: Some people may not see the problem, but Publix requires fast paced employees that are completely aware of their surroundings and a lot of the time when disabled people apply, they do not know what they are getting into and end up quitting.

I interviewed five people, three of them I currently work with and two of them are disabled employees that recently quit. The general consensus that I received from the disabled employees was that the requirements written on paper are nowhere near accurate compared to the actual demanding requirements of working at Publix, one previous employee stated that the management staff plays a huge role in telling you the job is not so tough, but once the store gets busy (which is often), that is when being fast and extremely efficient is so important when it comes to getting carts, bagging, cashiering and overall keeping the store clean. A friend that I work with, and interviewed told me that corporate hires the employees and the management staff deals with training which is another example of how corporate simply does not care.


Overall, I learned that this issue is talked about very often amongst Publix employees, also this problem resides with corporate, and needs serious addressing because the disabled that are hired, seem to end up hating the job and quitting half the time. This also takes away from capable applicants that get their application overlooked simply because they wont make Publix look morally outstanding. But the problem can be easily fixed but efforts by management and corporate are hard to track. Publix management possibly blames the individual themselves not being able to carry out tasks required of them but this issue is far too common in Publix stores to be coincidental.