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Grocery Industry -- Two More Crashes, Four More Injuries, Zero Progress Toward Storefront Safety

2/20/2016

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Another car crashes into another grocery store......and once again, another grocery store with no protective barriers sacrifices pedestrians and customer and employees who might be grabbing a shopping cart or entering or exiting through one of the doors.  In this accident in Brick Township in New Jersey, two pedestrians were injured when a vehicle driven by an 88 year-old  lost control while coming down the drive aisle car aimed directly at the store.  The photo above shows the result -- except for the two injured pedestrians, who were transported to hospitals, one by medevac flight.  Photo and great coverage from Shorebeat.com HERE

Now you may say that this was a fluke accident, except that the Storefront Safety Council has documented hundreds of such crashes and has raised awareness of the risks to the public that the grocery industry (and the property owners who build and own these buildings and centers) have for the most part simply tolerated.

In addition, this accident was not a fluke at all -- a quick review of this photo I took off of Google Earth clearly shows that any vehicle driving in the parking lot to park in any of the spaces in this particular drive aisle is aimed directly at the ShopRite store.  ShopRite should know better -- after all, they have been defendants in a number of cases like this one over the years.  You would think taking action to improve safety would be much cheaper than paying out injury claims over and over again....
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So three weeks after the last blog post about the grocery industry being ON NOTICE, here is another one -- because these accidents just keep happening and the inaction shows that the industry as a whole has elected to ignore this known hazardous condition to persist.  For a link to our previous Grocery Industry blog post (and the post before that one!) you will find it HERE.

There are better designs for parking lots, for traffic flows, for storefront alignments and construction, and for simple and effective barriers.  Twenty accidents PER DAY in the convenience store / small market portion of the grocery industry alone.  Hundreds more per year throughout the rest of the industry. 

Oh -- I had said there were TWO crashes.  Same day, same result.  Different circumstances.  But this accident was in a location where security camera video was available. The video will show you what the previous story did not -- it sucks to be inside a store when a driver crashes through the front door.  Story and video HERE

As we always note -- it doesn't have to be this way. 
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Grocery Industry -- ON NOTICE -- drivers still crash into your unprotected entrances every day!

2/1/2016

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The last time I wrote specifically about the grocery store industry, it was March of 2014.  Things have NOT improved since then.  That post HERE

Since that time, the incident continue to occur and progress in preventing them remains slow.  Other than Trader Joe's, I am not aware of any national chains who have initiated new national plans to prevent injuries to their employees, their customers, or pedestrians by retrofitting entrances or parking lots.  The latest one that caught my eye just occurred at an ALDI store near Cincinnati Ohio  Great coverage from WLWT Channel 5 TV HERE

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As we all know, storefront crashes (and you do not get more literal than in this case) are usually head on crashes into entrances or near entrances.  Most often, there are nose-in parking spaces in front of the store and the accident is a result of a driver error or driver pedal error when pulling into the parking space.  In this case, there was no nose-in parking.  Why then would a vehicle end up heading nose into the entrance to ALDI's??  Simple answer:  cars are AIMED at the front doors of this store. 

As my colleague Mark Wright has stated, cars aimed at storefronts are "like a loaded gun" that might go off at any time.  Having been a victim of a just such a crash, Mark knows better than just about anyone just how dangerous such crashes are and just how fast they happen.

So how was the car in the photo above from WLWT aimed at the entrance to the ALDI store?  Simple -- the parking lot is laid out so that vehicles are moving directly at the entrance under acceleration.  Poor design, easy to protect against.  This Google Street View image shows exactly what the problem is:
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Cars driving down the drive aisle are pointed directly at the storefront.  Clear sailing straight in -- there is even a curb cut out for the shopping carts to make the vehicle's run over the sidewalk even easier.  Cars under acceleration can fail to stop or fail to turn for any of a number of reasons, including driver medical emergencies, driver distraction, driver impairment, or simple driver error.

There are many ways to design away this problem in the parking lot.  Even less expensive would be to put simple safety barriers up (as Trader Joe's is doing) to make sure that approaching vehicles cannot get across the sidewalk and strike the building employees inside, customers entering or exiting, or pedestrians just passing by.  Walmart does this at their Neighborhood Markets before they open, as do many others.

So ALDI and the rest of the grocery industry -- YOU ARE ON NOTICE that there is a known hazardous condition at your storefronts.  By any standard of care, you as lessee and your property owners as lessors are failing to address this condition, which results in preventable injuries and fatalities.
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    I am an expert in perimeter security and retail and pedestrian safety.  I am also co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council

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