Many self-service discount hardware stores and bulk-priced stores often try to save costs at the expense of customer safety. These stores will often stock products in their store and invite customers to freely access their warehouse style sales floors without properly considering customer risks. 



Many stores stack heavy products where they are difficult to retrieve by customers and employees. Sometimes these products fall and cause customers serious injury or death. Retail and warehouse stores owe their customers a legal duty to maintain a reasonably safe shopping condition and to protect them from unreasonable risks of harm. Stores that display stacked merchandise must display their merchandise with the reasonable anticipation that customers will walk through customer aisles and inspect, touch and attempt to move the stacked merchandise. 

Therefore, the accepted industry standard is to stack merchandise and products no higher than eye level - generally accepted as no higher than six feet. The higher a store stacks a product above this six foot level, the higher the risk of merchandise falling onto someone and causing injury. Stores usually have a written merchandise stacking policy that they fail to follow resulting in customers or employees getting hurt. 

Proper shelving is a way stores can avoid high stacking and keep customers safe. This can be expensive and some stores try to save costs by high-stacking instead. Other causes of falling merchandise includes broken or unstable shelving systems, improperly stacked merchandise on high shelves, bad employee conduct and training, lack of safety inspection and poor implementation of stacking policies and procedures. 

Stores and their insurance companies will usually try to blame the customer in these falling merchandise claims by stating that the customer caused the product to fall on them. They ignore the fact that merchandise should  never  be stacked in a way where it could fall and hurt a customer. 

If you need help with an injury caused by falling merchandise, don't take the blame for someone else's negligence. Call the St. Louis based law firm of Allen Injury Law, LLC for help. 314-300-8380