April 26, 2022

Hassaine v. Club Demonstration Services, Inc. (Apr. 22, 2022, D079396) __ Cal.App.5th __ [2022 WL 1195331]

Plaintiff slipped and fell while shopping at a Costco. She sued Costco and Club Demonstration Services (CDS), an independent contractor that gave out food samples at the store. The trial court granted summary judgment for CDS, concluding that its contract with Costco limited CDS’s maintenance obligations to a specified perimeter around each food sample table, and plaintiff had fallen outside that perimeter. Plaintiff appealed.

The Court of Appeal reversed. The court found that CDS had a special relationship with Costco shoppers giving rise to a duty of reasonable care extending to every area of the store in which customers are likely to shop. The court found that while the contract between CDS and Costco delineated their responsibility to each other, it did not limit the scope of CDS’s common law duty. In response to CDS’s complaint that “this outcome would impose an unreasonable duty covering the entire Costco warehouse,” the court explained that “CDS would have no liability so long as its conduct was reasonable under the circumstances, which include[s] the distance between CDS personnel and the hazard.”