A Job That Was Never Posted, a Decision Already Made

Around January 2020, the West Coast regional director position opened up at Circle K. Three qualified, senior employees who had flagged their interest in advancing were never told about it. The company filled it quietly, internally, without a posting, an announcement, or a single application solicited.

• Caldrone, Celusta, and Staats all worked as Dealer Business Managers (DBMs), advising fuel station operators on pricing, customer service, and operations. They reported directly to regional directors, putting them one rung below the role that opened up.
• All three received strong performance reviews and had won company awards. Their track records placed them squarely in line for regional director consideration under any normal process.
• Their ages at the time of the promotion decision: Caldrone was 54.4, Celusta was 55.8, and Staats was 56.9 years old. The man selected, Miko Angeles, was 45.2 years old.
• Circle K did not post the role internally or externally. It stated in litigation that it “decided there was no need to open the role for applications” because moving Angeles laterally “made business sense.” That admission became central to the appeals court’s ruling.
• The plaintiffs sued under two laws: the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects workers age 40 and over, and California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), which applies the same protections under state law.
• The case number is Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc., No. 24-1432, decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on October 3, 2025, with the opinion authored by Circuit Judge Eric D. Miller.

The Invisible Application: How Circle K Rigged the Selection

Circle K’s strategy was structurally straightforward: eliminate the application process entirely, then point to the absence of applications as proof the workers never competed. The Ninth Circuit called this out directly.

• Circle K historically notified employees of open positions either by email or through its internal intranet. Four separate declarations confirmed this practice. For the West Coast regional director role, no email was sent and nothing appeared on the intranet.
• The company knew all three plaintiffs were interested in promotion. Celusta, Caldrone, and Staats had each expressed that interest. This means Circle K made an active choice to not notify employees it knew wanted to advance.
• When sued, Circle K’s defense at the district court level was: the plaintiffs never applied, so they can’t claim they were denied the job. The district court agreed and threw the case out at the first legal hurdle.
• The Ninth Circuit reversed this logic entirely. It held that when a company doesn’t post a job or solicit applications, workers cannot be penalized for failing to submit applications for an opening they were never told existed. The court cited a precedent from a 1980 case involving Lockheed Aircraft, where employees “did not apply for training or for promotion but instead had to be sought out.”
• The court was explicit: the ADEA does not require a company to post jobs or run a specific process. But the moment a company uses the absence of an application as a shield against discrimination claims, that shield disintegrates when the company itself eliminated the application process.

“Circle K decided there was no need to open the role for applications, internally or externally, because Angeles laterally moving into the West Coast Regional Director position was a decision that made business sense.”
— Circle K’s own litigation statement, quoted in the Ninth Circuit opinion

What Was Actually Taken From These Three People

Brian Caldrone, Joseph Celusta, and Kathleen Staats each spent years building careers at a company with nearly 10,000 North American locations. They showed up. They advised fuel station operators on how to run their businesses. They earned awards. They got reviewed favorably, cycle after cycle. They told their employer, clearly and directly, that they wanted to move up. And then the door was quietly closed and painted over so they couldn’t even see it had been shut.

There is a particular kind of humiliation in this scenario that numbers don’t capture. These are not workers who coasted and got passed over. They were explicitly in contention. Celusta had the kind of conversation with a senior executive that should have been a career counseling moment. Instead, Wilkins told him he was “out of touch,” that he was “too old for this business,” and nudged him toward the exit ramp of retirement. Celusta was 56. He was still working. He had not asked for Wilkins’s opinion about whether he belonged in the industry.

Staats received the message through a different channel. Thomas Maloney, who had served as the Midwest regional director, apparently told her directly that Valencia and Wilkins “wanted only younger people with MBAs.” Read that again. She was being told, by someone inside the company hierarchy, that the criteria for advancement had nothing to do with her performance reviews or her years of accumulated expertise. The criteria was youth. And perhaps a graduate degree she presumably was not going to go back and get in her mid-fifties.

The gap between what these workers were told implicitly and what was actually happening is where the real damage lives. A person in their fifties who has earned awards at work, who has strong performance marks, who has expressed genuine interest in advancing, has every rational reason to believe the system is working for them. They are making plans. They are staying engaged. They are not mentally preparing to be quietly edged out. When that rug gets pulled, the damage isn’t just financial. It is a fundamental betrayal of the terms of the employment relationship as these workers understood them.

Meanwhile, the person who received the promotion they were denied reportedly visited two states in his region only once in more than a year. He met with 10 of 231 dealers. His productivity scores in his previous role placed him in the bottom third of his peer group. A manager who worked directly with him declared he should have been disqualified from promotion under Circle K’s own internal rules. The contrast is not subtle. It is the kind of contrast that makes you question every comfortable assumption about how large companies fill leadership roles and why.

What the Record Actually Shows: The Quotes That Built the Case

These are direct quotes and documented facts drawn from the Ninth Circuit’s opinion. Each one is a piece of evidence the court found sufficient to send this case to trial.

“Celusta declared that George Wilkins — the Circle K executive who plaintiffs assert chose Angeles — told him that he was ‘out of touch’ and ‘too old for this business’ after he told Wilkins that he was 56. Wilkins also encouraged Celusta to ‘start thinking about retiring.'”
— Ninth Circuit Opinion, Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc., No. 24-1432 (2025)

“Thomas Maloney, who previously served as the Midwest regional director, declared that Gerardo Valencia — Wilkins’s boss — ‘press[ed] [him] to remove older employees for no business reasons.'”
— Ninth Circuit Opinion, Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc., No. 24-1432 (2025)

“Staats declared that Maloney told her that Valencia and Wilkins ‘wanted only younger people with MBAs.'”
— Ninth Circuit Opinion, Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc., No. 24-1432 (2025)

“Angeles was responsible for 231 dealers as the Southeast regional director but managed to meet with only 10. And although regional directors are expected to visit each State in their region at least quarterly, Angeles traveled to Florida and North Carolina only once in more than a year. The situation, in Maloney’s telling, became so bad that he was ‘forced to assist [Angeles] with management of his region by managing some of his DBMs.'”
— Ninth Circuit Opinion, Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc., No. 24-1432 (2025)

“Maloney declared that as his direct report, Angeles was ‘timid and lacking confidence, . . . interpersonal skills, industry knowledge, . . . entrepreneurial vision, [and] general leadership skills.’ Angeles’s productivity scores put him in the 30th percentile of his DBM peer group. So extreme was Angeles’s underperformance that Maloney declared that he ought to have been disqualified from promotion under Circle K’s policies.”
— Ninth Circuit Opinion, Caldrone v. Circle K Stores Inc., No. 24-1432 (2025)

Seven Years From Promotion Denial to Federal Appeals Court Ruling

This Case Is Bigger Than Three People at a Gas Station Chain

Public Health and Workplace Psychological Safety

Age discrimination in promotion processes produces documented psychological and physical harm in workers who experience it. The specific tactics used by Circle K’s leadership carry real-world consequences beyond the courtroom.

• Being told you are “too old for this business” by a supervisor is a form of workplace psychological harm. Research consistently links this type of age-based denigration to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and lowered self-worth in workers aged 50 and over.
• Being steered toward retirement by a supervisor, especially when you have no intention of retiring, creates an environment of chronic job insecurity. Workers in this situation often experience the same stress markers as those facing direct layoff threats, yet receive none of the legal protections or severance that formal layoffs trigger.
• Maloney’s declaration that Valencia pressed him to remove older workers “for no business reasons” describes a deliberate culling operation. Workers targeted this way often don’t know they are being managed out until they are gone, which prevents them from building a legal record or seeking help in real time.
• The three plaintiffs were still performing at a high level when this happened. For workers in physically demanding or economically precarious roles, forced early exit from stable employment can accelerate health decline, particularly among those who lack strong retirement savings or access to quality health insurance outside employer-sponsored plans.

Economic Inequality

Age discrimination in mid-to-senior career promotion decisions is one of the least visible drivers of wealth inequality among older Americans. The financial structure of what Circle K allegedly did is worth examining in detail.

• Regional director positions at a company with nearly 10,000 North American locations represent a significant income step up from a Dealer Business Manager role. Denying that promotion to three workers in their mid-fifties compounds over time: the wage gap between what they would have earned as regional directors and what they earned as DBMs accumulates across the remaining years of their careers.
• Workers who are denied advancement in their fifties have a compressed window to recover economically. Unlike a 30-year-old who loses a promotion opportunity and has decades to try again, a 55-year-old facing illegal discrimination has roughly a decade of peak earning years remaining. Every year of lost wages at the higher salary tier directly reduces lifetime earnings and Social Security contributions.
• The legal costs of pursuing this kind of case are prohibitive for most workers. Caldrone, Celusta, and Staats have been fighting this case since 2021. Most workers in their position lack the resources or the will to sustain a multi-year federal lawsuit, which means the workers with the strongest claims often walk away.
• Circle K operates nearly 10,000 North American locations. If this promotion decision reflects a broader corporate culture of pushing out older workers, the aggregate economic impact across thousands of employees, many of whom never file suit, is substantial and invisible in the official data.
• The precedent set by the Ninth Circuit specifically helps workers in decentralized, large-enterprise environments where decisions are made by individual executives without paper trails. This ruling makes it harder for companies to use a “no application, no claim” defense when they secretly control who gets notified of openings.

Putting a Number on What Three Careers Were Worth to Circle K

Who to Hold Accountable and What You Can Actually Do

The case is remanded. A jury will now decide. Here is what that means for workers, advocates, and anyone watching this company.

Corporate Leadership to Monitor

• The evidence in this case names George Wilkins (Vice President, identified as the likely decision-maker in the Angeles selection) and Gerardo Valencia (Wilkins’s supervisor, identified as pressuring managers to remove older workers). Their current roles at Circle K are not confirmed in the source material.
• Circle K Stores Inc., a Texas corporation, is the defendant. Its parent company, Alimentation Couche-Tard, is a Canadian corporation operating thousands of convenience and fuel retail locations globally. Executive accountability at the corporate governance level runs up to that parent company.
• Cross America Partners LP, a Delaware Limited Partnership, is named as a co-defendant in the original filing.

Regulatory Watchlist

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. If you are an older worker at Circle K or a similarly structured company and believe you have been passed over for promotion without a posted opening, the EEOC is the first federal body to contact. File online at eeoc.gov.
• The California Civil Rights Department (CRD), formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, enforces FEHA. California workers have parallel state-level protections that run alongside federal ADEA claims, and in some cases provide stronger remedies.
• The Department of Labor (DOL) maintains oversight of wage and employment practices at large employers. Patterns of age-based workforce reduction documented internally (as described by Maloney regarding Valencia’s pressure) may trigger broader DOL interest if they are systemic.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is worth monitoring if Circle K’s parent company, Alimentation Couche-Tard, makes public disclosures about workforce practices or litigation exposure that contradict internal evidence like the Wilkins and Valencia declarations.

Grassroots and Mutual Aid Action

• If you are a current or former Circle K employee who experienced age-based comments, unposted promotions, or pressure to retire, connect with an employment attorney. The Ninth Circuit’s ruling now establishes that you do not need to have formally applied for a job that was never advertised to pursue a discrimination claim.
• Workers in the fuel and convenience retail sector often lack union representation. Reach out to local labor organizing groups, particularly those affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) or United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which have active campaigns in retail environments. Collective bargaining agreements can require transparent promotion processes, directly preventing the conditions that enabled this case.
• Share this ruling widely in workplace communities, particularly in Slack groups, Reddit threads (r/antiwork, r/WorkersRights, r/LegalAdvice), and any Circle K employee forums. The legal precedent is powerful and specific: if your employer fills roles without posting them, that practice cannot later be used to block your discrimination claim.
• Support organizations like the AARP Foundation Litigation and the National Employment Law Project, which track age discrimination cases at the appellate level and provide resources for workers who cannot afford private counsel.
• Document everything. If you work at a company with a pattern of unposted internal promotions, keep a written record of every time you expressed interest in advancement, every conversation about your career trajectory, and any comment referencing your age. That documentation is the difference between a provable case and an unprovable one.