Seattle Personal Injury Attorney

Our law firm was not involved in the personal injury lawsuit

described in this article.

A customer slipped and fell on a fallen wet floor sign. The trial court dismissed the case on Petsmart’s motion for summary judgment. The Washington Court of Appeals reversed.

The customer several minutes browsing the dog toy aisle. He caught sight of something yellow on the ground, but he did not initially see what it was because he was paying attention to the objects on the shelves in front of him. He stepped on that yellow object, which was a fallen wet floor sign, and fell, injuring himself.

The injured customer did not attempt to show Petsmart’s actual or constructive notice. Instead, he argued that he presented sufficient evidence to show that Petsmart’s mode of operation made it reasonably foreseeable that unsafe conditions, such as the fallen sign, would exist. Specifically, he argued that it is reasonably foreseeable that wet floor signs will be knocked over in a store where customers are allowed to use those signs and pets are allowed to run free.

The trial court dismissed relying on Carlyle. [1] In Carlyle, the court held that the hazardous condition created by a leaking shampoo bottle in the coffee aisle was not related to the store’s self-service mode of operation and that the injured invitee did not offer sufficient evidence to show that the hazard was reasonably foreseeable in the coffee aisle.

The Court of Appeals found the case to more similar to O’Donnell.[2] In O’Donnell, a shopper slipped and fell on a piece of lettuce in the check out aisle of a store where customers were responsible for moving their grocery items from their shopping cart to the conveyor belt. The record established that it was not unusual for items to fall in the aisle during the unloading process. The court held that the hazard—debris in the check-out aisle—was related to the mode of operation in the area where O’Donnell fell.

O’Donnell was not required to show that a customer unloading groceries in fact caused that particular piece of lettuce to be on the floor. Unlike the injured invitee in Carlyle, who was unable to show the foreseeability of shampoo in the coffee aisle, the plaintiff in O’Donnell satisfied the foreseeability element by showing that the store knew that grocery items occasionally fell from the cart during checkout.

According to the deposition testimony of the Petsmart manager, the wet floor signs get knocked over “all the time,” usually by dogs running into them or a shopping cart knocking them over. The manager testified that “it wouldn’t be unusual” for a sign to be knocked over.

The Court of Appeals held that a jury could find that fallen wet floor signs were a reasonably foreseeable hazard based on evidence that Petsmart allowed pets to run free inside the store, provided wet floor signs, and knew that pets often knocked those signs over.

[2] O’Donnell v. Zupan Enters., Inc., 107 Wn. App. 854, 859, 28 P.3d 799 (2001).