Store Liability For Personal Injury Accidents

The interior of grocery stores can be an adventure for shoppers. That’s especially true for modern stores with onsite food and beverage options that are essentially combination restaurants, bars, and grocery stores. A shopper can encounter wooden pallets, stacks of boxes, floors wet from cleaning, grease and other substances from spilled food, liquid from spilled beverages, snow, slush, and water tracked in by customers and employees, the list goes on and on.

Meanwhile, shoppers are wandering around looking at shelves and displays and not necessarily watching where they’re walking. As a result, they may slip or trip on something in their way, like one of the common things I just mentioned, and fall to the ground. Such a fall onto a hard, tiled floor can cause serious injuries. So the question is, under what circumstances can the store be liable for the fall and resulting injuries?

Stores must ensure that their businesses are safe for anyone who may enter. But a store’s liability for a fall isn’t automatic. The injured shopper must prove that the store was negligent. That requires the shopper to establish that: (1) the store knew, or reasonably should’ve known of, a dangerous condition; (2) the store had an opportunity to eliminate or warn about the dangerous condition or otherwise make things safe; and (3) the store failed to reasonably take appropriate action.

Let’s use a common situation as an example. During the winter, the floors near store entrances can be a mess from snow, slush, and water tracked in by customers and employees. A store can’t possibly keep that area completely free of slippery surfaces during the day. So instead, it occasionally mops up the area and puts out “wet floor” warnings. In that instance, the store has probably discharged its safety obligations to its customers and wouldn’t likely be found liable for negligence if a customer fell.

Contrast that example of wet floors with a different one. The store has a leaky refrigeration or freezer unit that’s creating a puddle of water near the unit every day. The water’s clear and difficult to see on the floor. The store’s aware of the issue but doesn’t stop the leak from happening, prevent the water from pooling on the floor, remove the water, or warn about the water. In such a situation, the store very well could be liable if a customer slipped in the water and fell.

The customer’s potential fault may also be at issue in this type of case. Iowa law allows various ways for a store to blame a customer for a fall and reduce or eliminate liability for negligence. Using the examples above, a customer who comes barreling into a store when there’s snow and slush outside and slips and falls in an entrance area marked with “wet floor” signs will have a difficult time winning a negligence claim against the store. Conversely, a store will have trouble blaming a customer who slips and falls in a nearly invisible puddle of water from a condenser unit.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’ve been seriously injured in a fall at a store.