A Nowra woman has been awarded $300,000 after a plastic chair she was sitting on collapsed in Kmart Nowra.
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Before the accident, Kmart staff were fully aware customers were taking plastic, green chairs from the gardening section and using them in the photo lab area, a court has found.
Customers would do this because there were not enough steel chairs for people to sit on while they were processing their photos on touch screen computers.
The $8 plastic green chairs were only 50 metres away from the photo processing section but came with a warning that they were for domestic use only.
Nursing assistant Julie Ann Lewis, 63, was a regular shopper at Kmart in Nowra and known to staff in the photo lab section on a first-name basis.
She was a keen photographer at family events and used to process photos two to three times a week at the store.
On one occasion, Ms Lewis sat down on a green gardening chair in front of one of the computers used to process photos.
She inserted her USB into the computer and was about to download some photographs she had selected when the chair collapsed without warning, throwing her to the ground.
Ms Lewis told the NSW District Court last month, "All of a sudden I went down."
"This was because the chair had crashed to the floor, taking her with it," Judge Judith Gibson said.
"She found herself sitting on the floor, still in the chair. She looked behind and noticed that the back left leg of the green plastic chair had torn almost completely from the rest of the chair," she said.
Ms Lewis suffered permanent damage to her lower back, right buttock, thigh and knee among other injuries.
She was awarded more than $300,000 in damages.
Part of the money will go towards helping her with past and future wage loss.
In making her decision to award Ms Lewis the sum, Judge Gibson noted that Kmart had breached its duty of care.
"To keep the photo lab (and its income) flowing, Kmart and its staff allowed the development of a haphazard system of customers taking chairs for sale in other departments (itself a breach of store policy) for use in circumstances where those chairs were unsuitable to the point of being dangerous," she said.
"I am satisfied that the plaintiff has established breach of duty of care. The defendant's failure to provide adequate seating for its customers in the photo lab, training for its staff and regulation of equipment use all play a role in relation to the circumstances of the accident."
