Court Opinion

ID: 9696299
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:44:04.891965+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:20.962414
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno:
There can be an honest difference of view as to whether the advantages of a Serve-Yourself store outweighs its disadvantages. The writer of this opinion prefers the old fashioned store where you go in and tell the clerk what you want and he goes and fetches it like a faithful dog returns to its master a thrown stick. But in the self-service stores, especially in the vast auditorium-sized ones, you must search for your desired purchase with the hunting, ferreting, probing, testing, scouting and, sometimes, the perils the arctic explorers confronted in seeking the Northwest Passage. The self-serving purchaser must push through aisles encumbered with wire baskets, traverse lanes of travel menaced by sacks of potatoes, maneuver over floors strewn with, and lubricated by, vegetables and fruits, all of which frequently make a tour through a supermarket resemble an obstacle course in a steeplechase.
In the case at bar, Ruth J. Martino and Daniel T. Martino were cruising through the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company Supermarket in Easton with a shopping cart into which they had piled a cargo of various food-laden cans, they had picked up a supply of fresh fish and were now in search of lemons to go with the fish. Daniel T. Martino was piloting the conveyor, and his wife trailed after him, as they both scanned the towering groceries-crammed cliffsides of the passageways for the other supplies they sought. Unsuccessful up to this point in locating the lemons to go with the fish, Ruth J. Martino was suddenly felled by an underfoot assault of grapes. Now, the Martinos *236were not looking for grapes, they had no need or desire to obtain grapes, but grapes is what they got, together with, on the part of Mrs. Martino, a broken leg.
The grapeshot which shattered Mrs. Martino’s leg came from the floor where vegetable and fruit had been crushed by the heels and the shopping carts of previous food-hunting customers.
How did the grapes get to the floor? The evidence was uncontradicted that masses of grapes were piled on a counter which was separated, by a cruising lane, from the scales where they were to be weighed. Patrons would pick up the grapes and carry them loosely to the scales. As there is often a slip between the cup and the lip, there was often a slip of grapes from their clusters as they were being carried across the passageway to the scales. For grapes to detach from their stems and splash to the floor was something the owners of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company Supermarket could anticipate. In addition, the floor showed that grapes fell like dancing raindrops and painted the floor with radiating spots which could not have escaped the notice of the store owners.
Not only that, an employee of the Supermarket testified that the cascading of grapes was accompanied in the splashing serenade by falling cherries and winging lettuce leaves. Oranges also rolled into the aisles and, on occasion, bottles of jams and jellies contributed to the concert by falling from the shelves or from customers’ hands and bursting on the floor. Into this terrestrial niagara came the faith-abiding Martinos to enrich the coffers of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.
They were entitled to protection from foreseeable harm by those who invited them into their store to sell them their products. These paying customers did not get that protection. In addition, they left the store, with Mrs. Martino disabled by a broken leg and Mr. *237Martino saddled with an enormous medical bill, plus tbe loss of the services of bis wife for a considerable period of time. They went to court to ask for recompense for tbe damage done to them by tbe Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and were told that the store owners were not responsible because the Martinos did not prove who had lubricated the floor with grape juice. Who else but the A. & P. Store was responsible for the grapes on the floor?
The court then added insult to injury by declaring that the particular grape which became the culpable lubricant under Mrs. Martino’s shoe “could have been brushed off the counter by the husband.” There is not a grape-seed of evidence to substantiate this gratuitous assumption. The husband’s hand or arm was nowhere near the grape counter because, as has been said, he was looking for lemons, not grapes. As if this assumption by the court did not sufficiently defy the evidence and common sense, it said further that the grape “could have been knocked off by the wife plaintiff as she fell.” Knocked off ichat? The Court here was mixed up in its order of events. Mrs. Martino fell because of the grapes already on the floor. How could Mrs. Martino knock off a grape (from what we do not know) after she fell and then have it precede the fall and thus become the cause of the fall?
Mrs. Martino testified that she “fell on a grape by the scale.” Mr. Martino testified that “there was grape juice on her shoe and there was grape juice on the floor where she slipped.”
Then the majority of this Court, with the case appealed here by the plaintiffs from the entry of the non-suit in the court below, compounded the error of the lower court by asserting: “the offending grape might have found its way to the floor as the result of actions by husband appellant or wife appellant.” An appellate court has no more right to guess than a lower court *238and, in fact, it should be less disposed to squeeze from the decayed fruit of supposition the acerbic stale juice of a non sequitur. Not content with essaying into the realm of fanciful conjecture, the majority opinion plunges over the brink of wilful negation by asserting that “there is no evidence from which the jury might reach a conclusion as to the cause of the presence of the grape in the aisle.” As one reads the record one can almost smell the grapes on the floor and see how they got there. J. F. Burnett, Jr., clerk in the store, testified: “there were some items that tended to fall on the floor more than others. Q. What were those items? A. Oh, lettuce leaves, grapes and cherries. Q. Would you say that those three items fell on the floor more often than any other? A. Yes, I would think so. Q. I assume that you on occasion saw these items fall on the floor, is that correct? A. That’s correct. Q. Or you saw them on the floor? A. That’s right. Q. Now, was there anything that you can recall as indicating that grapes had fallen on the floor numerous times at the edge of this Counter ‘A’? A. Well, grapes would fall there and people would either step on them or carts would be rolled over them, and there would be a black mark left on the floor.” (Emphasis supplied)
This is not a monumental case and should not require a long dissertation and yet to the Martinos it is a very serious matter to break a leg in a store and to see justice fractured in a court of law.
It is so fundamental as to require no citation “ ‘that it is incumbent upon the owner of premises upon which persons come by invitation, express or implied, to maintain such premises in a reasonably safe condition for the contemplated uses thereof and the purposes for which the invitation was extended.’ ”1
Thus, we have a case here where the owners of the A. & P. Supermarket knew that grapes were falling to *239the floor due to their failure to hire enough clerks and yet they failed to keep the floor clean. Where a store owner creates a dangerous condition by his own antecedent conduct, it is not necessary to prove that he knew of the specific square inch where the invitee caine to grief, or of the particular grape which triggered the winepress of disaster.2
There was positive proof in this case that from February, 1960 to September, 1961, grapes had been falling to the floor, leaving stains on the floor. Thus for at least 18 months the owners of the store were aware of the falling grapes, were aware that crushed grapes can be slippery, aware that paying patrons could be hurt by slipping, and yet they did nothing to avert the disaster which befell Mrs. Martino. The jury could find here that the defendant company was flagrantly negligent in not stationing a clerk at the grape counter, in not warning customers not to drop grapes, in not putting up signs to notify patrons of the grapes on the floor, and in not having the floor swept at such intervals as to make it reasonably safe for customer traffic.
With the demonstrated and uncontradicted facts in this case, it is absolutely inconceivable to me how, in law and justice, a nonsuit could be entered for, if there was ever a prima facie case of negligence on the part of a store owner, it is here. To deny the plaintiffs an opportunity to prove their case before a fact-finding tribunal not only crushes out their legal rights but tramples out the vintage of the grapes of wrath in the breasts of many lovers of law and justice.

 Nettis v. General Tire Company, 317 Pa. 204, 209.

 Hayden v. Philadelphia, 381 Pa. 134.