Store Not Liable For Motorized Grocery Cart Accident

Gun regulation? Man, we can't even regulate shopping cart scooters.

I can’t wait for the first robot shopping cart lawsuits. (Photo by Laura Lezza/Getty Images)

I’m a good liberal. I believe in regulation. I believe in tort laws. I believe that often it is the deep-pocketed business that is in the last, best position to protect us from the cruel fate of accident and injury.

But, in the instant case, I must agree with the Ohio Supreme Court. I, reluctantly, come to the conclusion that a grocery store cannot be held liable when one of its customers turns a motorized shopping cart into a battering ram, even though the store provided the customer with their implement of destruction.

Let me show my work. Giant Eagle, a midwestern grocery store chain, was sued by Barbara Rieger after she was slammed into by Ruth Kurka. Rieger was standing in line for baked goods. Kurka was driving one of those motorized grocery cart scooter thingies.

Rieger was seriously injured. She eventually died (though it does not appear that her death was a result of the injuries she sustained). An Ohio jury awarded her over $360,000, finding Giant Eagle liable for just handing out scooters to anybody who asked for them, without knowing if the customers actually knew how to operate one.

Again, I get the jury’s impulse here. I have a sense that Giant Eagle wouldn’t just hand a scooter to my six-year-old kid. I can imagine myself using my best Dad-voice to tell my kid “the scooter is not a toy,” (even though it’s kind of a toy). And yet, thanks to Mario Kart, my kid could probably manage the scooter better than some people I know. It seems weird to hand out a propulsion device to people without any showing that they can drive it. Do the people who drive motorized scooters around our nation’s grocery stores and Costcos still have, like, motor skills? Can they still see? It feels strange that the store doesn’t even have to ask.

But, the store doesn’t have to ask. The state Supreme Court overturned the jury verdict. It found that plaintiffs needed to show that there was something that the store could have done to reasonably prevent the accident. For the court, it was unclear what that reasonable preventative measure would look like. Are you supposed to put these people through driver’s ed for scooters? Is there some (totally not a toy) slalom course they need to set up? At what point do the requirements of getting a scooter become so onerous as to outweigh the accessibility benefits of having a scooter?

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In this limited kind of case, I think liability has to attach to the person driving the scooter into people, not the store that put the scooter in their hands. That’s unsatisfying, in the “tort-as-lottery” sense. If Jeff Bezos slams into me, I get paid for my injuries. If a judgement proof Amazon employee does, I get nothing. It’s unfair. (As always, my solution for the tort lottery is… universal, single-payer health care. Nobody should go bankrupt because the person who plowed you down in a grocery store happens to be poor.)

It’s a close thing. I’m balancing he handicapped and elderly accessibility equities against the likelihood that grocery store scooter liability would lead to no grocery store scooters. Giant Eagle is in the best position to pay $360,000 to an injured customer, but if they have to they won’t invest in making their scooter program safe, they’ll just get rid of all of them. And then they’ll have to be sued under the ADA and then their owners will say “I’m voting for Trump” and #NeverTrump Republicans will blame “liberals” who are just trying to make the baked goods line accessible and safe for all customers.

I should stop now. If somebody wants to write a law review article disagreeing with the Ohio court here, I would read it. These are the things I actually think about while standing in line at Stew Leonards.

Grocery store chain isn’t liable for motorized cart collision, state supreme court rules [ABA Journal]


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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.