It's not about Apple or the plaza ownership themselves, it's the survivors or their insurance trying to get some money for the hospital bills. Obviously you can sue the driver but it's going to be hard to collect if everyone sues him.

The storefront is entirely glass and very large, unlike most other businesses. It's common to have bollards installed in front of them. Even large stores that have fairly normal entrances in walkable areas typically have them. I actually can't think of a store near me that doesn't have them.

I don't see how a case like this would necessarily apply to every business establishment everywhere. There's clearly an added safety risk due to the design of this store in particular.

Calculus of Negligence/ Learned Hand rule. If the burden/cost of taking precautions is less than the severity of the harm times the probability of the harm occurring and you don't take those precautions (PL>B), you've breached your duty and may be held liable for negligence.

Edit: confused as to the downvotes. It’s a real thing that US courts use. It’s taught in law school torts 1 classes as basically one of the 1st things law students learn.

I work for a large retailer and while we already had barricades at the entrances we are now even beefing those up with more robust solutions. I've found others that work in my industry are doing the same improvements for many other retailers as well.

I can see Apple being on the hook here if they didn't add any type of bollards or other protection measures due to aesthetics (which fanboy or hater Apple is known to prioritize appearance over function sometimes). There is a reasonable expectation to design in highly trafficked areas in a manner that protects pedestrian/patrons from automobile intrusion into the building or walking paths.

Without speaking to any specific details of this incident, from what I understand about the law, if the Apple store or the mall diverged from an accepted standard (e.g., using big windows instead of walls, failing to install bollards, etc.), then those decisions can be considered in the context of whether they increased the likelihood that someone would be injured in such an event.

It seems like they probably won't be held responsible, but we also don't know the details. It could come out that this was a specific concern at some point and someone chose not to address it, that they deliberately chose to design their storefront in this way despite the increased risk, etc.

In similarly cited cases (e.g., suing McDonald's for serving hot coffee, suing the phone company after a driver crashed into a phone booth, etc.) once you look closer, it turns out there were ignored warnings, previous accidents, and decisions made for the sake of costs rather than safety. I'm not saying that definitely applies here, but it's not something we can just assume isn't the case.

What’s wild is that since the accident, bollards have gone up. But they haven’t gone up anywhere else in the center. Every store is ten feet from any parking space and no other organization thought that protecting themselves and their employees was going to be of value.