When you’re walking around a supermarket, the last thing you are probably concentrating on is the floor or your feet. I’d expect you are browsing the shelves. So it’s not hard to end up tripping and injuring yourself if there is a box, crate, or other item(s) of stock left on the ground in an aisle.
The Occupiers Liability Act puts an important duty on supermarkets to take all reasonable steps to ensure that people are not injured when in the store. Reasonable steps are normally systems of inspection and maintenance to clear away any hazards – such as stock on the ground that can be a tripping hazard.
So whether you can win a claim for personal injury compensation for tripping on a box or item of stock on the ground is largely down to how it ended up on the floor and / or how long it has been a hazard for.
Here are some examples where you may have a successful claim:
- A member of staff puts the item on the floor – making the supermarket vicariously liable for the employee’s negligence.
- An item is left or knocked down to the ground by another customer and staff fail to move it in accordance with a reasonable system of inspection.
- Items are dangerously stacked and fall over causing a tripping hazard.
All of the above examples can of course be difficult to prove – especially the last two. How can you know how often they inspect aisles and whether they have kept up to their systems of inspection or not? How can you prove items were dangerously stacked?
Normally the supermarket would defend themselves by showing that they have records of a good system of inspection. But the best evidence you could obtain could be CCTV footage – as they say, the camera never lies! We could try and obtain footage to see how the item ended up on the ground, and perhaps how long it has been there for.
Winning these claims can always be difficult – so to give yourself the best shot of winning a claim, you need to contact us as the experts in personal injury compensation claims.
Unlike a lot of the companies out there, we’re real lawyers – we’re an actual law firm who represent victims of accident claims and not just some middleman who pass people off to a solicitor. We also offer our clients 100% compensation agreements for most types of claims, including tripping claims against supermarkets.
To ensure that vital evidence like CCTV footage isn’t destroyed, which normally happens within just a few short weeks, call us now on 0800 634 75 75 for help and advice today.