Slip and fall at grocery store: your next step

When you have a claim

A slip and fall at grocery store aisles can leave you hurt, scared and facing bills. You can have a claim. It turns on how long the spill sat on the floor.

Produce, ice from the seafood case, leaking coolers and rain at the entrance cause most grocery falls.

Why grocery floors get slick

Grocery floors get wet all day. Ice thaws, grapes get crushed and jars break. Staff mop aisles with no sign, and rain comes in at the doors.

Stores know this, so courts expect them to check the floors on a regular schedule. Federal court data list property cases among the most common injury trials.

How long the spill sat

The store is responsible if staff caused the spill, saw it, or should have found it on a normal check.

Cart tracks, footprints and dirt in the spill show it sat a while. Cleaning logs with long gaps show the same thing. Federal trial data show injured people lose more property cases than they win, so proof matters.

Steps before you leave

Call us first for a free case review. Your lawyer can demand the cleaning logs and video before the store erases them. That evidence often decides a grocery case.

Photograph the spill and what caused it. Write down the names of workers who helped and what they said. Then see the full list of what to do after a slip and fall.

What a slip and fall at grocery store aisles pays

Your claim is valued from your bills, lost pay and pain, minus your share of fault. In Texas, you can collect unless you were more than 50 percent to blame.

Take Mike, 44, who slipped on water from a leaking cooler in Houston. A clerk told him the cooler had leaked all week. That gave his case the notice it needed.