By: Eric Richwine, Law Clerk
Edited by: Betsy G. Ramos, Esq.
Plaintiff Michael Racine slipped and fell while walking inside defendant Rite Aid’s Irvington, New Jersey, store. He suffered a fractured left tibia, resulting in him filing a complaint against the defendant, in which he alleged negligent maintenance of and failure to conduct reasonable inspections of the premises. The trial judge had granted summary judgment to the defendant on the basis that the plaintiff failed to demonstrate that the defendant had actual or constructive notice of any “dangerous condition” on the premises. The issue on appeal in Racine v. Rite Aid Pharmacy, 2023 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 959 (App. Div. June 14, 2023) was whether constructive notice can be inferred by the presence of dirt in a condition.
Plaintiff testified that he had not noticed anything on the floor as he entered the store looking to purchase hair gel, which was on a shelf close to the entrance. He reported that he soon after fell, and after which, he noticed a “dark greasy spot” on the floor which he believed to be a mixture of dirt with either hair gel or grease.
On appeal, the plaintiff contended that the trial judge “drew all inferences against plaintiff rather than the reverse” and that he sufficiently established that defendant had “constructive notice of the condition that caused [plaintiff] to slip.” The Appellate Division first considered whether the plaintiff was relieved of the burden to prove constructive notice via the mode of operation exception, i.e., by demonstrating that the dirty substance here was likely to occur as the result of the nature of Rite Aid’s business. The Court quickly determined that this was not the case.
The Appellate Division then turned to whether or not a jury could find that defendant had constructive notice of a dangerous condition. Plaintiff contended that, because “the substance appeared dirty,” the factfinder could logically infer that “the substance had been on the floor for a significant time.” Plaintiff supported this argument by citing the Court’s decision in Parmenter v. Jarvis Drug Stores, Inc., 48 N.J. Super. 507 (App. Div. 1957), in which a plaintiff slipped and fell just inside an entrance of a store on an “all wet” and “all dirt” floor, which the Court declared was sufficient to put the defendant store on constructive notice.
However, the Appellate Division distinguished the facts in Parmenter to those before the Court here; namely, the dirty, wet floor in the defendant store of Parmenter was the result of an all-morning rainstorm that was continuously tracking in dirt and rain into the store upon the opening and closing of its doors.
Here, there was no such storm. The Court emphasized that, unlike in Parmenter, the plaintiff here could not identify the cause or duration of the “dangerous condition” of the dirty substance on the floor of the store. Further, the Court rejected the contention that the presence of “dirt” permitted a speculative inference that the substance had been on the floor for an adequate period of time as to place the defendant on constructive notice.
As such, the Appellate Division found that the plaintiff failed to meet his burden of demonstrating that defendant was put on constructive notice of the dirty substance on its store’s floor, nor was he able to successfully argue that a jury could infer such. Therefore, the Court affirmed the trial judge’s granting of defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
