On the first day of August, the price of Publix stock went down.
Nobody sold it down.
No fund dumped a block. No headline moved anything. Nine people on a board in Lakeland, Florida set the number.
It fell from twenty dollars and forty five cents to nineteen dollars and sixty cents, and it fell because the board said it did.
So here is the cheap answer to the headline question. Publix gives its employees ownership because employees are the only people legally offered the shares, and the stock has to live somewhere.
That answer is true and nearly useless.
The real subject is the second question. What happens when your paycheck and your retirement account are the same company, and the shares have nowhere to trade?