Brown v. Glover

----ooOoo----

Catherine Brown,
Plaintiff and Appellant,

v.

Chris Glover
dba Chick-Fil-A of Fashion Place;
and Hahn Property Management Corporation,
a California corporation dba Hahn Company,
Defendants and Appellees.

MEMORANDUM DECISION
(Not For Official Publication)

Case No. 971694-CA

F I L E D
February 23, 2001 2001 UT App 52 -----

Third District, Salt Lake Department
The Honorable William B. Bohling

Attorneys:
George T. Waddoups and Nancy Mismash, Murray, for Appellant
John R. Lund, Salt Lake City, for Appellees

-----

Before Judges Greenwood, Bench, and Orme.

ORME, Judge:

Appellant argues that Chick-Fil-A's free-sample marketing method is inherently dangerous, making this case more like Canfield v. Albertsons, Inc., 841 P.2d 1224 (Utah Ct. App. 1992), than Schnuphase v. Storehouse Markets, 918 P.2d 476 (Utah 1996), and the food sampling cases relied on by Chick-Fil-A. We disagree. Offering a food sample to shoppers in the common area of a shopping mall is not, as appellant contends, fundamentally different from approaching shoppers in the aisle of a grocery store with a food sample. As Chick-Fil-A astutely observes, "[i]f it is not reasonable to impute knowledge of spilled food located within the store itself, it is even less reasonable to impute to the business owner knowledge of food which has been carried away and dropped some 100 feet away from the business."

Long v. Smith's Food King, 531 P.2d 360 (Utah 1973), implicitly rejects any relevance of how busy the mall was when the sampling activity occurred. We must also agree with Chick-Fil-A that the distribution of a chicken morsel on a toothpick is not somehow intrinsically more dangerous than distributing cottage cheese on a cracker or pie and whipped cream on a small plate.

Affirmed.
 
 
 
 

______________________________
Gregory K. Orme, Judge -----

WE CONCUR:
 
 
 
 

______________________________
Pamela T. Greenwood,
Presiding Judge
 
 
 

______________________________
Russell W. Bench, Judge