- An 84-year-old man from Bartow, Florida is suing Waffle House after tripping over a curb in the parking lot and sustaining injuries, claiming the restaurant created hazardous conditions to attract customers’ attention.
There are a lot of reasons someone might end up hurt in a Waffle House parking lot. A stranger dispute gone sideways. A late-night misstep. General Florida energy. But for 84-year-old Edward Bowlds of Bartow, Florida, the culprit was reportedly a window poster for a Strawberry Shortcake Waffle — and now the whole thing is headed to federal court.
Bowlds and his wife Dorothy pulled into their local Waffle House on April 17, 2025, for what should have been a completely ordinary breakfast run. According to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Bowlds was crossing the parking lot when the promotional signage in the restaurant windows caught his eye. As he stepped up to the curb, he tripped, went down face-first onto the concrete, and walked away — or rather, didn’t walk away — with a broken nose and a torn rotator cuff.
The lawsuit names Waffle House and franchisee East Coast Waffles, Inc. as defendants, and the legal argument is more layered than it might first appear. The complaint alleges a combination of factors: the curb was abnormally high, it lacked any paint or markings to signal the elevation change, and the window ads were specifically designed to pull the attention of approaching customers. In other words, Bowlds’ attorney argues, the restaurant set up the conditions for exactly this kind of accident and then did nothing to prevent it…