Success Quote by Carl Karcher

The telling move here is the hyphenated pivot: "disabilities-or what they previously thought of as disabilities". Karcher isn’t celebrating charity; he’s describing a reframing that makes inclusion palatable to a workplace built on speed, standardization, and an unspoken ideal of the interchangeable worker. The line’s intent is managerial and cultural at once: reassure skeptics that hiring people with disabilities won’t disrupt morale, then quietly suggest the category itself is partly a misperception.

Coming from a fast-food magnate, the subtext is about operational proof. In a crew-based environment where competence is visible in seconds (can you keep pace, handle the rush, show up, get along), “disability” stops being an abstract label and becomes one variable among many. Enthusiasm from “other employees” functions as social evidence, the kind executives like because it scales: peer approval reduces the need for top-down enforcement and turns accommodation into team identity rather than corporate compliance.

The phrasing also reveals the era’s shifting norms. Karcher’s lifetime spans the move from institutionalization and paternalism toward the disability-rights framework that culminated in the ADA. He’s not using activist language about rights or access; he’s selling a workplace discovery: people you assumed were liabilities are often assets, and your assumptions were the real bottleneck. The quote works because it reports conversion without sermonizing. It flatters the listener’s practicality while smuggling in a moral correction: the “disability” may have been the organization’s imagination, not the worker’s capacity.