David Collins, a 58-year-old who has worked for Walmart for over 20 years and remains employed at the company's Escondido, California store, sued under California's Fair Employment and Housing Act and the Labor Code, asserting age discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and failure to prevent discrimination. He alleged that after transferring to the Escondido location in 2016 he endured what he described as years of mistreatment by supervisors and coworkers, was denied promotions and performance reviews, and — after filing complaints with the Civil Rights Department and through Walmart's internal channels — was reassigned from hardline capping to softline capping in the store's backroom when he returned from an unpaid leave of absence in early 2023.
Judge Ruth Bermudez Montenegro of the Southern District of California granted Walmart's motion for summary judgment on January 28, 2026, and denied Collins's cross-motion, holding that Collins failed to produce evidence sufficient to create a triable issue on any claim.
On the age-discrimination claim, the court held that Collins could not establish an adverse employment action on any of his three theories. His failure-to-promote theory failed because he had not applied for a management position since February 2020, and the court held that the exception recognized in Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc. — which excuses the application requirement when an employer declines to solicit applications and does not announce that a position is available — did not apply because Collins stopped applying only because he felt it would be doing the same thing expecting different results. His performance-review and raises theory failed because he received annual raises throughout the relevant period and produced no evidence that younger employees in the same position were treated more favorably. And while the court declined to decide whether the softline-capping reassignment was itself an adverse action, it held the claim failed at another element: Collins introduced no admissible evidence — no age-related statements by management, no sufficient circumstantial evidence — that the reassignment was connected to his age.
The retaliation claims fared no better. Collins's complaint to the Civil Rights Department on March 12, 2021 was followed by his reassignment more than a year later, a gap the court held was too long to support an inference of causation from timing alone. His October 2022 leave of absence was unprotected, which the court held placed it outside the range of protected activity under FEHA. And a July 9, 2024 call to Walmart Ethics was followed only by the kind of minor workplace friction the court had already found non-actionable. The court separately held that the harassment claim failed because none of the alleged incidents were based on Collins's age. The Labor Code section 1102.5 retaliation claim and the failure-to-prevent claim also failed, the court holding that Collins had not established the underlying discrimination, harassment, or retaliation required to support those claims.
Collins proceeded without counsel throughout the litigation. The court applied a liberal evidentiary standard, treating his handwritten notes — transcribed and submitted without proper authentication — as part of the record and construing a prematurely filed opposition brief as a timely response. Even under that liberal construction, the court concluded the record contained no evidence capable of sustaining any of his claims.