Crone v. Jordan Marsh Co.
| Decision Date | 29 November 1929 |
| Citation | 169 N.E. 136,269 Mass. 289 |
| Parties | CRONE v. JORDAN MARSH CO. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Report from Superior Court, Suffolk County; Robert F. Raymond, Judge.
Action by Emma Crone against Jordan Marsh Company. Verdict was directed for defendant, and plaintiff excepted. On report. Exception overruled.
Hermanson & Silverman, Joseph L. Hermanson, William M. Silverman, and Charles H. Dow, all of Boston, for plaintiff.
This is an action of tort for personal injuries alleged to have been sustained by the plaintiff by reason of a fall in the defendant's store, caused by the defendant's negligence. The case was tried by a judge and a jury. The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff. The judge then with the consent of the jury directed a verdict for the defendant and the plaintiff excepted. The judge reported the case on the terms that if he ‘was wrong in the direction of the verdict for the defendant, judgment is to be entered for the plaintiff in the amount of verdict and costs, otherwise the verdict for the defendant is to stand.’
The plaintiff's evidence tended to show that on September 12, 1924, she went to the defendant's store to buy a rug or rugs for her home and that as she was walking from the elevator to the part of the rug department where she wished to trade, and passing through a large, open space between racks and piles of rugs, used not only as a passageway for customers, but also, nearer the racks and piles, as a place for showing rugs upon the floor, she stepped upon a small rug (about two feet wide and two and one half feet long) directly in her path and that it slipped from under her feet so that she fell and was injured.
The plaintiff testified that the floor was ‘very highly polished, slippery and glassy’; ‘that the rug slipped from under her feet as if she was stepping on a piece of glass with a rug over it, it was so slippery’; that ‘the floor did not have the appearance of being the ordinary polished floor’; that ‘it was the most highly polished floor that she had ever seen and was positively glassy in appearance’; and that salesmen who came to her assistance after she fell slipped as they came near her and had difficulty in keeping their feet. There was testimony from witnesses for the defendant that the floor was a ‘hardwood floor laid in narrow strips'; that it was last polished in the preceding May and June; that the workmen ‘did the best job of polishing they could’; and that ‘pulling rugs across the floor all the time tends to repolish it every time the rugs are pulled across it.’
According to the plaintiff's testimony she had taken ‘perhaps four or five steps' from the elevator when she noticed the slippery condition of the floor. She testified that ‘it was a well-known fact that a small rug upon a smooth floor is apt to slip.’ She walked about twenty feet from the elevator then turned to the left and took several steps before the accident happened. She ‘could have avoided walking on * * * [the rug in question] by going a foot out of her way.’
After the accident the plaintiff, as she testified, ‘noticed that there was nothing, ‘No anchor’ or means of any kind to hold it [the rug] to the floor.'
If it was found, as the evidence fully warranted, that the plaintiff was in the store by the invitation of the defendant as a customer the defendant owed to her the duty to use reasonable care to keep the premises in safe condition for her use as a customer, or at least to warn her...
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