Customer areas: spills, slips and trips

Slips, trips and falls are the second most common cause of injury to retail workers, and they are the most common cause of injury to customers in stores. A grocery store floor collects water from misted produce, melted ice from the seafood counter, drips from freezer cases, broken jars, spilled drinks, tracked-in rain and snow, and the residue of floor cleaning. Add pallets, cords, curled mats and product left in the aisle, and the sales floor offers plenty of ways to fall. HSE-106 covers slips, trips and falls in general, including floor surfaces, footwear, stairs and housekeeping programs. This lesson applies those ideas to the customer areas of a store, with a focus on how spills are found and cleaned up quickly.

Why spills matter so much in stores

A spill in a factory is mostly a risk to the workers there. A spill in a store is a risk to everyone who walks through the aisle, including older customers, children and people distracted by their phones or shopping lists. A fall that a young worker would shrug off can break an older customer's hip. Customer falls are also one of the largest sources of liability claims against retailers.

In the United States, state premises liability law generally requires stores to keep their floors reasonably safe for customers, and many slip-and-fall cases turn on whether the store knew, or should have known, about a spill in time to clean it up. A documented floor walk program and prompt spill response are therefore both a safety control and the store's main evidence that it took reasonable care. Workers' compensation covers employees who fall, while customer falls are handled as liability claims.

Where spills come from

Finding spills: floor walks

Many spills are reported by customers or found by workers passing by, but a store cannot rely on luck. The core of a spill program is a scheduled floor walk: an assigned person walks every aisle at set intervals, looking for spills, debris, trip hazards and damaged product, and records the time and what was found. Many stores use a phone app or scan points at the end of each aisle; others use a paper sweep log. The interval depends on how busy the store is and how spill-prone each area is: entrances and produce may need checking every 15 or 30 minutes at busy times and in bad weather, while quiet aisles may need checking once an hour.

Floor walks work only if they are done properly. A walk that consists of initialling the log at the end of the aisle without looking down the aisle is worse than useless, because it creates a false record. Supervisors should check walks are real, adjust intervals when spills are found often, and make sure the person on floor walks is not also expected to cover a checkout or the deli.

Every worker is a floor walker

Scheduled walks are a backstop, not the whole program. Northfield's rule is that any worker who sees a spill owns it until it is cleaned up or handed off to someone who will clean it. That means stopping, guarding the spill and getting it cleaned, not walking past and hoping someone else will deal with it. Workers on the floor should also listen for customers reporting spills and act at once.

Responding to a spill

• Guard: stay with the spill or block it with a cart or sign so nobody walks into it. If you need supplies, ask a coworker or customer to stand by, or call for help on the radio or phone.
• Sign: put out a CAUTION wet floor sign, or several for a large spill, so people approaching from any direction can see it.
• Clean: use the right method. Water and most food spills can be mopped or wiped; oils need an absorbent product first; broken glass needs gloves and a broom and dustpan (Lesson 6); chemical spills from damaged cleaning products need the safety data sheet and the right gloves and absorbent (HSE-102, HSE-251).
• Dry: dry the area with a clean mop or towels and check it is not still slippery. A floor that looks clean can still be slippery if a film of oil or cleaner remains.
• Record: remove the sign once the floor is dry (signs left out for hours are ignored) and note the time and location in the log.

Northfield keeps spill stations with signs, absorbent, towels, gloves, a dustpan and a broken-glass container at the front end, in produce, at the deli and in the backroom, so no spill is more than a short walk from supplies.

How often to walk: a simple model

The longer a spill sits before it is found, the more people walk past it. If spills happen at random times and are found only on floor walks, a spill sits on average for about half the time between walks. The program below estimates how many spills happen in Northfield's produce department each busy day and how many minutes of spill exposure there are with different walk intervals. The spill rate is invented for illustration.

# Spills in a busy department and exposure time under different floor-walk intervals.
import math

spills_per_hour = 0.6          # average spills in produce at busy times (invented)
busy_hours = 8
expected = spills_per_hour * busy_hours

def p_at_least_one(rate_per_hour, hours=1.0):
    return 1 - math.exp(-rate_per_hour * hours)

print(f"Expected spills per busy day: {expected:.1f}")
print(f"Chance of at least one spill in any hour: {p_at_least_one(spills_per_hour):.0%}")
print()
for interval in (60, 30, 15):
    avg_wait = interval / 2                 # minutes a spill sits before a walk finds it
    exposure = expected * avg_wait          # spill-minutes per day
    print(f"Walk every {interval:>2} min: average spill sits {avg_wait:>4.1f} min, "
          f"{exposure:5.0f} spill-minutes per day")

Expected spills per busy day: 4.8
Chance of at least one spill in any hour: 45%

Walk every 60 min: average spill sits 30.0 min,   144 spill-minutes per day
Walk every 30 min: average spill sits 15.0 min,    72 spill-minutes per day
Walk every 15 min: average spill sits  7.5 min,    36 spill-minutes per day

Moving from hourly to 15-minute walks in produce cuts the time an average spill sits from 30 minutes to under 8 minutes, and total spill exposure by three-quarters. In reality, many spills are found sooner because workers and customers report them, which is why the habit of every worker owning the spills they see matters so much. The model also shows why the walk interval should change with conditions: on a rainy Saturday, spills happen more often at the entrance and the interval there should shrink.

Entrances, mats and weather

Entrances are where outdoor water, snow and slush meet a smooth indoor floor. Good entrance matting is one of the most effective slip controls a store can buy, because it removes water from shoes before people reach the sales floor. Mats need to be long enough for several steps on them, typically several meters, with bevelled edges that lie flat. Curled or bunched mats become trip hazards and must be replaced, as Northfield learned in Lesson 2. In wet weather, add extra mats, umbrella bags or stands and more frequent checks of the first few meters of floor.

Outside, parking lots and walkways need snow clearing and ice control before the store opens and during storms, often by contractors. The store should know who is responsible for clearing which areas, when they will come, and how to call them back. Workers collecting carts in winter need warm clothing and slip-resistant footwear or ice cleats, and should report icy patches. Cart corrals should be placed so carts do not roll across driving lanes.

Trip hazards

• Pallets and stocking carts left in aisles: keep them close to the shelf, mark them with a cone or sign if they must stay, and remove them before peak hours.
• Product and packaging on the floor: pick up fallen items and cardboard right away.
• Cords: avoid cords across walkways; use cord covers where unavoidable and route power for displays from the ceiling or floor boxes.
• Mats: replace curled, torn or bunched mats.
• Display bases and wings: keep them out of the walkway and visible, with contrasting edges.
• Floor damage: report cracked tiles, holes and lifted transitions between floor types.

Floor cleaning

Cleaning can create the very hazard it is meant to remove. Scrubbing or mopping while customers are in the store leaves wet floors behind, so clean in sections with signs, dry before reopening an area and do heavy cleaning outside busy times. Use the correct dilution of floor cleaner, since too much can leave a slippery film. Auto-scrubbers should be operated only by trained workers. Fuel-powered floor buffers and burnishers can produce carbon monoxide; they need good ventilation and maintenance, and workers who feel headache, dizziness or nausea while using them should stop and get fresh air.

Footwear

Slip-resistant footwear with a soft, patterned sole greatly reduces slips on wet and greasy floors. Many retailers require it for food areas and recommend it everywhere, and some provide a subsidy or a supplier program. Shoes should be replaced when the tread wears smooth. HSE-106 explains how slip resistance is tested and labeled.

Measuring floor slipperiness

Some stores and their insurers measure floor slipperiness with a device called a tribometer, which estimates the friction between the floor and a test sole. Results are usually reported as a coefficient of friction, where higher numbers mean less slippery. Different devices and standards give different numbers, so results should only be compared using the same method. The program below checks readings from Northfield's floor survey against an illustrative action level of 0.42 for level wet floors; the action level is used here only as an example.

# Check wet floor friction readings against an illustrative action level.
action = 0.42   # illustrative action level for level floors when wet
readings = {"entrance tile": [0.45, 0.39, 0.41], "produce vinyl": [0.38, 0.36, 0.40],
            "grocery aisle": [0.52, 0.55, 0.50], "deli quarry tile": [0.48, 0.46, 0.44]}
for area, vals in readings.items():
    avg = sum(vals) / len(vals)
    low = min(vals)
    status = "ok" if low >= action else "below action level - review cleaning, mats, surface"
    print(f"{area:<17} avg {avg:.2f}  lowest {low:.2f}  {status}")

entrance tile     avg 0.42  lowest 0.39  below action level - review cleaning, mats, surface
produce vinyl     avg 0.38  lowest 0.36  below action level - review cleaning, mats, surface
grocery aisle     avg 0.52  lowest 0.50  ok
deli quarry tile  avg 0.46  lowest 0.44  ok

The survey flags the entrance and the produce floor. That matches where Northfield's spills and its slip injury happened. Possible fixes include changing the floor cleaner or dilution, adding absorbent mats in produce, extending the entrance matting and, in the longer term, replacing the produce floor with a more slip-resistant surface.

For supervisors: running a spill program

Set floor walk intervals by area and time of day, and shorten them in bad weather. Assign a named person to each walk who is not tied to another post. Check that walks are real and logs accurate. Keep spill stations stocked. Track where spills and slips happen and fix the sources, such as misters, leaking cases or bad stacking. Make sure every worker knows that they own any spill they see until it is guarded.