Most of the legal standards that govern a shopping trip are unremarkable. A store owes its customers reasonable care: fix hazards it knows about, look for hazards it should know about, warn about what it cannot immediately fix. That covers the floors, the parking structure, and the fitting rooms.
Then you step onto an escalator, and the standard changes to the strictest one California imposes on anybody.
For roughly thirty seconds, a shopper at a mall like South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa is owed the same duty of care that a passenger is owed on an airline. Almost nobody riding one knows this, including many of the people who own the buildings they are in.
Why an Escalator Is Treated Like an Airline
The reasoning is straightforward once stated. California law defines a common carrier expansively. Under Civil Code section 2168, “every one who offers to the public to carry persons, property, or messages, excepting only telegraphic messages, is a common carrier of whatever he thus offers to carry.”…