Store Motorized Cart Failure and Premises Liability in Texas

Attorney Answer

There is probably a claim here worth having a Texas lawyer look at, but it is not the simple version of a store-injury case — the store will argue about both what failed and who decided to move.

A shopper in a grocery store is an invitee. Corbin v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 648 S.W.2d 292 (Tex. 1983), states the duty the store owes: reasonable care to protect against unreasonable risks of harm on the property that it knows about or should know about. A motorized cart the store puts out for customers is equipment the store owns, charges and maintains, so its condition is squarely within the store's control.

Keetch v. Kroger Co., 845 S.W.2d 262 (Tex. 1992), sets out what has to be proved: actual or constructive knowledge of the condition; an unreasonable risk of harm; a failure to use reasonable care to reduce or eliminate the risk; and proximate cause. Keetch also holds that an owner who created the condition may be found to have known of it, but that fact alone does not establish knowledge as a matter of law.

Applied here, the knowledge element is the fight. A cart that shows a full charge and quits ten minutes later suggests a battery or charging problem the store could have found — but that has to be shown from the store's own records: the cart's identification, its service and charging history, and any earlier customer reports about that cart. The unreasonable-risk element is more intuitive than in a spilled-liquid case: a mobility device that stops working strands a person who cannot simply walk away from it, and a fall during the transfer is the foreseeable result.

Where the store will push: that no employee was ever told the cart had failed, so it never had knowledge of that day's problem; and that the transfer itself was a choice made without asking for help. That second argument goes to comparative responsibility, and Texas takes it seriously — under Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 33.001 a claimant found more than 50 percent responsible recovers nothing, and under § 33.012(a) anything below that line reduces the recovery by the claimant's own percentage.

One more point worth raising with a lawyer: a claim about what a store's employees did or failed to do in the moment is treated differently from a claim about the condition of the property, and federal accessibility law may also bear on what a store owes a customer using its mobility equipment. Neither of those is something this page can resolve for you.

What you can do

1. Get evaluated by a doctor if you have not already, and describe the fall and the transfer exactly as it happened. Records made close in time carry the most weight.

2. Report the fall to the store in writing now — customer service or the store's corporate contact — and ask for the incident report number and a copy. Email leaves a record that the request was made.

3. Write down the cart's number or sticker if you can still identify it, plus the date and the approximate time you were in the store. Keep the receipt from that visit; it proves you were there and when.

4. Keep every bill, discharge instruction and imaging report in one place, along with photographs of any visible injury.

5. Do not give the store's insurer a recorded statement before speaking with a lawyer.

6. Ask a Texas attorney about sending the store a written demand to preserve that cart, its maintenance and charging records, and the store's video from that day. Video is usually overwritten within weeks.

Most lawyers offer a brief initial call at no cost, and a few minutes on your specific facts with a Texas attorney is worth more than any general guidance, including this page.

⏱ Time limits apply. Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 16.003(a) requires a personal-injury suit to be brought not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues. Exactly when that runs out depends on your own facts, so have a Texas attorney check the dates rather than counting them yourself — and do not wait, because the store's records and video disappear long before the deadline does.