Business Owners and “Trust”

There’s a comment in More Lack of Liability Logic that I would like to promote to its own entry for me to comment back. The gist of the comment is that business owners just cannot trust us . . .

Here’s the comment; I’ve highlighted one phrase that really caught my attention.

Even if the restaurant owner wins the suit, there is still the cost and time involved. I agree that some business owners are simply closed-minded to any logic about inside or outside issues but no business owner can afford trusting the general public to act intelligently.

Yet, business owners trust the general public to wear flip-flops, and I can point to numerous lawsuits filed by flip-flop wearers. Business owners trust the general public to wear high heels, and I can point to numerous lawsuits filed by high heel wearers.

Sometimes the businesses win, and sometimes they lose, and yes, there is the cost involved.

For flip-flops, the most common cause seems to be slipping on wet spots. For high heels, it is of course catching the heel in a hole or some other floor irregularity (raised tile, folded rug, wrinkled carpeting, etc.). But even those are just a small subset of slip-and-fall lawsuits, which occur for all sorts of footwear and involved some of the craziest stuff (there’s one I’ve seen in which the business was sued because a woman tripped over stacked product because she was looking elsewhere).

I’ve looked at a lot of negligence lawsuits. What makes the unjustified ones so notable is their utter unpredictability. A business owner who goes after barefooters, and only barefooters, is ignoring the vast mass of reasons for which they might get sued.

I cannot think of any other article of clothing that a business uses as an excuse for supposedly avoiding a lawsuit. In fact, we can tell that’s the case simply from the “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” signs. Why link shirts and shoes? Surely not for liability reasons, since I can think of no liability that could occur from the lack of a shirt. No, the way those two are always paired makes it quite clear that they think it a matter of “decorum”. The liability excuse is just a rationalization they make up on the spot to justify what they so fervently believe in, even thought it is a prime lack of liability logic.

Finally, a barefooter is probably one of the least likely persons to sue a business. We have enough trouble going into businesses barefoot as it is. Instituting a lawsuit, even a fairly justified one, would get such publicity that it would most likely lead to even more restrictions on going barefoot. And what barefooter would want that?