## Facts

- A grocery store provided shopping carts for customers to use inside the store without a separate charge.
- The store purchased the carts from a third-party manufacturer for store operations and customer convenience.
- A customer alleged that while pushing a cart during shopping, the cart tipped onto its side and caused injury when the customer tried to stop it from overturning.
- The complaint alleged the cart was not reasonably safe for its intended use and was prone to collapsing or rolling onto its side.
- The customer sued the store under multiple theories; the trial court dismissed the strict products-liability count (along with other non-negligence counts), leaving negligence pending.
- The customer took an interlocutory appeal limited to the dismissal of the strict products-liability claim.

## Issues

1. Whether a grocery store that supplies shopping carts gratuitously for customer convenience, and does not sell or lease carts, may be held strictly liable for injuries allegedly caused by a defective cart.

## Decision

- The appellate court affirmed dismissal of the strict products-liability count.
- The court held the store was not a seller engaged in the business of selling shopping carts and did not place the cart into the stream of commerce as part of the original producing and marketing chain.
- The negligence claim was not at issue on appeal and remained outside the court’s review.

## Legal Principles

- Strict products liability under Restatement (Second) of Torts § 402A applies to sellers engaged in the business of selling the product and to products placed into the stream of commerce through the commercial distribution chain.
- Under Illinois strict-liability doctrine, a plaintiff must prove injury resulting from an unreasonably dangerous product condition that existed when the product left the manufacturer’s control.
- A business that merely furnishes an instrumentality for customer use as an incident of its primary enterprise, without selling or leasing that instrumentality, is generally outside § 402A’s seller-based strict-liability scope.
- Analogies to cases imposing strict liability on suppliers of defective components depend on whether the component was provided as part of the marketed product sold to the customer; incidental conveniences are treated differently.
- Policy rationales supporting strict liability (cost spreading by market participants who profit from product sales) do not justify extending strict liability to providers of free, ancillary instrumentalities.

## Conclusion

The court refused to extend strict products liability to a grocery store for an allegedly defective shopping cart supplied free to customers because the store was not a § 402A seller of carts and was not part of the cart’s commercial distribution chain, leaving any recovery against the store to negligence or other non-strict-liability theories.


Keen v. Dominick’s Finer Foods, Inc., 49 Ill. App. 3d 480, 364 N.E.2d 502 (Ill. App. Ct. 1977)