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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

It's happened at least one. Von's, in southern California: http://www.bendover.com/askbenquestion.asp?faq=3&fldAuto... http://www.seattleweekly.com/1998-09-23/news/when-cards-come...

The loyalty cards can also backfire on supermarket chains. Safeway was sued for not notifying customers of product recalls even though it had the purchase data: http://www.progressivegrocer.com/top-stories/headlines/healt...

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Vons threatened to introduce the issue at trial. They were not allowed to introduce the evidence at trial, and they did not.

Ultimately, the shopper failed to prove his case. He claimed Vons was negligent for not cleaning up spilled yogurt, but during the trial somehow failed to prove (1) that there was some spilled substance which would have caused him to slip and (2) that his knee injury was caused by the slip and not by subsequent activities after he left the store.

Seems like a stupid threat anyway; the fact that you have a history of alcohol abuse does not mean that you were impaired when the incident took place, and it doesn't mean that the store was maintaining a safe environment for its invitees.

It doesn't matter. All you have to do is suggest the plaintiff is an alcoholic, and let the jury infer the rest. Ad-hominen attacks are par for the course in trials, because they are incredibly effective.

Let me repeat myself: Vons was not allowed to bring up the information about the plaintiff's alleged alcoholism. The jury would not have been allowed to hear this information in any court unless Vons could have shown (to the judge, before trial) that alcohol played a direct and immediate role in causing the plaintiff's injury.

But if the plaintiff was an upstanding member of the community, then the threat to publish alcohol sales - even if he wasn't an alcoholic and they weren't unreasonable - might be enough to convince him to drop the suit.

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