If you have been harmed as a result of a company called Instacart, you should know that it is possible to file a lawsuit against the company and those who did business with them. In fact, most people who have had problems with this company have filed lawsuits against them. This is due to the fact that they have not only failed to meet their contractual duties, but they have also neglected to follow city laws which required that they properly maintain their on-demand warehousing facilities. Unfortunately, these warehouses were not up to par according to the conditions laid out by the law.
The problem was compounded when the company did not make any effort to resolve the situation once they discovered that their warehouses were in bad shape. These warehouses were essentially in shambles. Worse, these shambles were so bad that they were unsafe for both the shoppers and the employees who worked there. Consequently, a lawsuit was filed against Instacart which ultimately named four individuals who work at the company and are responsible for the injuries that their customers sustained as a result of not having a good facility. As a result of this negligence, the company paid out over three million dollars in back wages to the customers who were injured.
One of the plaintiffs in the case is identified as John Doe. John Doe is a customer who bought one ton of chicken and four cans of soup from on-demand grocery store called Instacart using a credit card. After he paid for his purchase, he was ecstatic that everything was in good working order. Sadly, two weeks later, upon arrival at his apartment, John Doe sustained serious burns to his body as a result of electrocution and smoke inhalation. Despite this injury, John did not press charges against instacart or their insurance company because he felt that they would be willing to compromise because they had signed a binding contract with the store.
Plaintiffs’ attorney, Ms. Ramona Cuellar-Gonzalez, claims that instacart was negligent in paying attention to the assembly process and in providing its customers with a safe environment to utilize their products. Instacart’s assembly process included a mandatory video inspection where they instruct their assemblymen on proper usage of the equipment. However, according to Cuellar-Gonzalez, this inspection did not adequately protect the public from the hazards of unsupervised, defective equipment. In fact, Instacart continued to add defective equipment to their inventory and did not make any efforts to correct this deficiency until it was too late for the lawsuit to remedy it. As a result of this negligence, Ms. Cuellar-Gonzalez has been awarded a settlement that should ensure that other consumers are not put at risk by purchasing unsupervised or defective goods from either companies engaged in on-demand warehousing.
This entire situation has played out in the background of numerous similar lawsuits being filed across the country solely by Ms. Cuellar-Gonzalez and her group of volunteers. Her case is one that many people may have found interest due to the nature of her job as a city attorney. City attorneys normally work on traffic and sanitation cases, such as the recent ongoing issue with Instacart, but she decided to take on the Instacart case due to the nature of the goods instigated. The bulk of her lawsuit focused on the company’s failure to properly train their delivery drivers. She argues that this deficiency constitutes negligence on the part of the business itself. The city attorney’s argument is that because the company did not properly train their delivery drivers, this represents a violation of the Florida Statute that protects against negligence among business organizations.
So far, the plaintiffs in this Instacart lawsuit are being compensated only for direct injuries sustained by their shoppers. This does not mean that the company did not care enough about the welfare of its shoppers to properly train their delivery drivers. It also means that the drivers, while being supervised by Instacart supervisors, were nonetheless allowed to operate outside of their designated areas and to disregard the law by performing unsafe work for their customers. It seems somewhat frivolous to hold the company responsible for the actions of its drivers, but it could be an important consideration in deciding whether to pursue a case against Instacart.
