Clean up the olive oil spill in aisle 3 before someone brings a lawsuit!

This case is a routine slip-and-fall claim against Wal-Mart Stores, where someone slipped on milk (or something in the milk aisle) and sued the store because it was on constructive notice that a dangerous condition could have led to a customer's injury. The district court threw out the case, but the Court of Appeals brings it back, and it will proceed to trial unless the parties settle.

The case is Marquez v. Was-Mart Stores, Inc., a summary order issued on March 17. Not all hazardous conditions at the supermarket will subject the store to liability. The plaintiff has to show the condition was in place long enough for the store to be aware of it, or that store employees should have known about it, such that the failure to timely fix the problem was the foreseeable result of someone's injury.

Anyone who ever worked in a supermarket will tell you that slippery and other dangerous conditions are commonplace. The store has a duty to clean up the spill quickly, lest someone slip and fall and file a lawsuit. I am sure the supermarket managers are trained by a risk-management expert who advises that there are lawsuits to be had when no one feels like cleaning up the mayonnaise or olive oil spill and employees instead walk right past it -- or even over it -- pretending not to see it because it's too much of a hassle to get the mop from the back room to wipe up the spill and, besides, my break starts in 15 minutes and I don't have time for it and someone else will take care of it and they don't pay me enough to do this anyway.

In this case, what the Court of Appeals (Livingston, Sack and Lohier) calls "the liquid on the milk aisle floor" -- could have been milk or yogurt or pudding or anything slippery -- was visible long enough for the jury to find against the store. Cases hold that "as little as five minutes can be sufficient for a defendant to discover and remedy a hazard, depending on the circumstances." Here, video evidence -- those cameras are all over the place at the supermarket, just look up at the ceiling -- shows customers looking at the spill and gesturing to other customers to stay away from it, and "a young girl may be seen sliding in the vicinity of the liquid." This allows the jury to find the liquid was on the floor long enough for workers to clean it up pronto. It will all be up to the jury.