Duty Owed to a Customer, Invitee or Guest
Many slip and fall cases occur at a place of business, such as a grocery store. Arizona law requires business owners to exercise reasonable care. This duty of reasonable care includes an affirmative duty to discover and correct or warn of hazards that the owner should reasonably foresee might endanger one of its business invitees or customers.
Arizona law requires business owners to take reasonable steps to warn, safeguard, or correct an unreasonably dangerous condition that business owner/property owner had “notice of.” In other words, the business owner must actually have had notice of the dangerous condition or should have had notice of the dangerous condition. There are three ways to establish that the owner “had notice of” the unreasonably dangerous condition:
• The owner or one of his or her employees/agents created the dangerous condition;
• The owner or one of his or her employees/agents knew of the condition in time to fix it or warn of it; or
• The dangerous condition existed long enough to where the owner or his or her agents should have discovered it and known about it.