Today, over 99 percent of supermarket floor areas are slippery when wet or otherwise lubricated. The lubricants may be water from tracked-in rain and snow; vegetable display sprays or a dripping ice bag; WD-40 from a customer’s test of a spray can; cooking oil; milk; or a very large variety of other liquids and solids.

Most of the floors are vinyl with a coating of floor finish, or “wax”. This is applied as a liquid and solidifies — a similar process to the formation of ice — and when wet, it’s even more slippery than ice.

Floor finish manufacturers acknowledge that their product is slippery when wet, and refuse to defend a supermarket that doesn’t have adequate matting at the front door to absorb rainwater from customers’ shoes. This may need 10 feet or more of absorbent matting in a busy store.

Floor finish is there to protect the vinyl from wear, and to make the floor glossy. Customers love shiny floors! But now it’s possible to make the floor both shiny and slip-resistant to all sorts of contaminants! Coat the floor in vulnerable areas with SparkleTuff™ Anti-Slip from Safety Direct America. It has no VOC’s, and it has Sustainable Slip Resistance by the McDonalds Restaurants criterion. It complies with ADA and OSHA requirements, and with all known pedestrian slip resistance standards in the USA and many other countries. SparkleTuff™ lasts for years, eliminating the need for continually stripping and waxing the floor. It also can eliminate painful and expensive injuries to customers, staff, and delivery personnel. You need to sell a lot of bananas to pay for one slip and fall! SparkleTuff™ can also help prevent fraudulent claims, because it shows visibly that you have not been negligent.

Too many slips and falls occur in supermarkets. If you are a victim of one, try to file a formal report and make photos with your cell phone before you leave the premises. Often the extent of the injury is not apparent until the next day, and your claim will have lost a lot of credibility if you wait until then or even later. Don’t assume that the market’s closed-circuit TV will help you — those records often mysteriously disappear long before your lawyer can get them.