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car crashes into a 7-11 store...every single day?


Gil Bang

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By Charlie De Mar | WBBM

CHICAGO (WBBM) — A Chicago area man just received a record-breaking settlement from 7-Eleven after losing both his legs in a pin-in crash at a store back in 2017.

The case revealed a disturbing trend – cars slamming into storefronts across the country with alarming regularity.

In a CBS 2 Exclusive Tuesday night, CBS 2’s Charlie De Mar took a look at the data.

A northwest suburban man whom we are calling Carl is adjusting to life without his legs. He is now a double amputee.

 

Surveillance video and an animation provided to us of the 2017 incident show Carl waiting outside a Bensenville 7-Eleven, which he was visiting to pick up a coffee – as a driver attempting to park stepped on the gas instead of the brake.

Carl was left pinned between the store building and the car.

The driver later pleaded guilty to aggravated reckless driving.

“This is an avoidable incident if they take the necessary precautions,” said attorney Larry Rogers Jr.

Carl, who is now in his mid-50s, asked us not to identify him for his own safety after he was just awarded $91 million from 7-Eleven in the largest pretrial recovery for a person injured in Illinois.

 

We spoke with his attorneys from Power Rogers LLC.

“This is a national problem, that people are dying people are losing the limbs,” said attorney James Power, “so the idea that a corporation would be allowed to keep this from the public just was not something we were going to stand for.”

What happened to Carl is far from an isolated incident.

Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day.

7-Eleven apparently fought in court to withhold that data from the public.

“They have not been producing that information for many, many years,” Rogers said, “and that’s what’s important about this case – getting this information out about how frequently this happens.”

Rob Reiter is co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council. He was retained as an expert by Carl’s attorneys in this case.

“If you install bollards, you pretty much solve that problem,” he said of the danger.

Reiter advocates for safety bollards or protective barriers being placed in front of storefronts – especially those with parking lots that face the front door.

Reiter argues such bollards would have saved Carl’s legs.

“This accident doesn’t happen if somebody had spent about $800,” he said.

Data collected by Reiter shows such accidents happen more than 100 times a day at storefronts in the U.S. – with 16,000 injured each year and 2,600 killed.

“The fight is retrofitting stores so that if your new stores are to a certain standard, retro-fit your other stores to a similar standard,” Reiter said.

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47 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:
Surveillance video and an animation provided to us of the 2017 incident show Carl waiting outside a Bensenville 7-Eleven, which he was visiting to pick up a coffee – as a driver attempting to park stepped on the gas instead of the brake.

Carl was left pinned between the store building and the car.

The driver later pleaded guilty to aggravated reckless driving.

Um, that's just as weird as a 7/11 crash a day. Is there more to the story? How does it go from accidently hitting gas instead of brake and then pleading guilty to aggravated reckless driving?

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33 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:
Rob Reiter is co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council. He was retained as an expert by Carl's attorneys in this case.
 
Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day.

Data collected by Reiter shows such accidents happen more than 100 times a day at storefronts in the U.S. – with 16,000 injured each year and 2,600 killed.

These two stats are simply to high for me to accept at face value.  

I looked up  https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics  and it throws up more red flags and the strong smell of BS.  They've been collecting store front crash data for 10 years and claim to have 25,000 crashes.   They shared their data with Lloyds of London who concluded it was credible but "At the most conservative, it appears that the SSC database captures 1 in 12 incidents (8.33%)."       So based on that,  they concoct the number of "100 times a day".   That's some Grade-A Bull Shit right there.   100 a day would be  36,000 in a single year.   And yet, over 10 years of actively searching and research they only have records of 25 thousand total?    And, of course they don't have an open database of those 25,000.  

Storefront crashes may be a problem, and I'm glad the guy who lost both legs got paid, but this is not the problem this story makes it out to be.

 

 

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This freaks me the fuck out. Friend of a friend who I used to golf with met his end on the exterior of a CVS when an elderly woman hit the gas instead of the brake as he was crossing in front of her car. I am on high alert in parking lots now esp if kids are with me. I walk in the middle of the aisle. Sorry not sorry. 

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22 hours ago, 0xdeadbeef said:

These two stats are simply to high for me to accept at face value.  

I looked up  https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics  and it throws up more red flags and the strong smell of BS.  They've been collecting store front crash data for 10 years and claim to have 25,000 crashes.   They shared their data with Lloyds of London who concluded it was credible but "At the most conservative, it appears that the SSC database captures 1 in 12 incidents (8.33%)."       So based on that,  they concoct the number of "100 times a day".   That's some Grade-A Bull Shit right there.   100 a day would be  36,000 in a single year.   And yet, over 10 years of actively searching and research they only have records of 25 thousand total?    And, of course they don't have an open database of those 25,000.  

Storefront crashes may be a problem, and I'm glad the guy who lost both legs got paid, but this is not the problem this story makes it out to be.

 

 

Big Bollard is probably fudging numbers

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On 2/9/2023 at 5:38 PM, Baboontyme said:

This freaks me the fuck out. Friend of a friend who I used to golf with met his end on the exterior of a CVS when an elderly woman hit the gas instead of the brake as he was crossing in front of her car. I am on high alert in parking lots now esp if kids are with me. I walk in the middle of the aisle. Sorry not sorry. 

Let's see some numbers from the Parking Lot Safety Council before we go freaking out. 

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On 2/9/2023 at 1:35 PM, 0xdeadbeef said:

These two stats are simply to high for me to accept at face value.  

I looked up  https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics  and it throws up more red flags and the strong smell of BS.  They've been collecting store front crash data for 10 years and claim to have 25,000 crashes.   They shared their data with Lloyds of London who concluded it was credible but "At the most conservative, it appears that the SSC database captures 1 in 12 incidents (8.33%)."       So based on that,  they concoct the number of "100 times a day".   That's some Grade-A Bull Shit right there.   100 a day would be  36,000 in a single year.   And yet, over 10 years of actively searching and research they only have records of 25 thousand total?    And, of course they don't have an open database of those 25,000.  

Storefront crashes may be a problem, and I'm glad the guy who lost both legs got paid, but this is not the problem this story makes it out to be.

 

 

My assumption is that the number includes very minor collisions. I wonder if those tend to not be reported very well and they use the actual numbers as a sample to come up with a rate somehow.

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On 2/9/2023 at 12:35 PM, 0xdeadbeef said:

These two stats are simply to high for me to accept at face value.  

I looked up  https://www.storefrontsafety.org/statistics  and it throws up more red flags and the strong smell of BS.  They've been collecting store front crash data for 10 years and claim to have 25,000 crashes.   They shared their data with Lloyds of London who concluded it was credible but "At the most conservative, it appears that the SSC database captures 1 in 12 incidents (8.33%)."       So based on that,  they concoct the number of "100 times a day".   That's some Grade-A Bull Shit right there.   100 a day would be  36,000 in a single year.   And yet, over 10 years of actively searching and research they only have records of 25 thousand total?    And, of course they don't have an open database of those 25,000.  

Storefront crashes may be a problem, and I'm glad the guy who lost both legs got paid, but this is not the problem this story makes it out to be.

 

 

That’s just what Big Storefront Replacement Services wants us to think

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My brother in law did this once. He was wearing Crocs (LOL) and he said his shoe got stuck around the pedal somewhere and he drove into the front of a Payless shoe store. Nobody was hurt but he was mortified. The worst part for him was a few weeks later, he went to the dry cleaner next door to the Payless to pick up his clothes and a couple of employees recognized him. "Hey, you're the guy that crashed into the Payless!"; he quickly denied this and left. He went home and told my sister, "Fuck, I have to find a new dry cleaner now. I can't go back there again!". 

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11 hours ago, Sandman said:

My brother in law did this once. He was wearing Crocs (LOL) and he said his shoe got stuck around the pedal somewhere and he drove into the front of a Payless shoe store. Nobody was hurt but he was mortified. The worst part for him was a few weeks later, he went to the dry cleaner next door to the Payless to pick up his clothes and a couple of employees recognized him. "Hey, you're the guy that crashed into the Payless!"; he quickly denied this and left. He went home and told my sister, "Fuck, I have to find a new dry cleaner now. I can't go back there again!". 

Wanna know how your BiL is white?  His biggest worry was finding a new dry cleaner, not doing three years in prison.  

although I'd been in the building literally hundreds of times, I just found out a few weeks ago that UT's Thompson Conference Center (weird looking building just north of the LBJ library that many of you surly tailgaters probably use to shit and do drugs in was built with Slurpee Money.  

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Sometime during 1979, my mom left the station wagon running and ran into the convenience store (maybe 7-11?) to grab something.  Being the 70's, my unrestrained 2yo little brother climbed into the front seat, pulled the gearshift into drive and drove though the front windows and into the store.  No legs or lives were lost, no multimillion dollar settlements, just a fair helping of shame for mom and heartache for some poor shop owner trying to make a living. /csb

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hadn't heard of this phenominon until this thread popped up last week...

and *poof*, N Austin checking in

AA17EXsd.img?w=768&h=432&m=6

Quote

A vehicle drove into a 7 ELEVEN store in North Austin Saturday afternoon. 

ATCEMS says, the incident happened just before 5 p.m. at a store in the 1800 block of Rutland Drive near Rutland Village East.

One person was being evaluated but refused transport. 

 

Edited by AUS-97HORN
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I knew a girl who hit two police cars in the high school parking lot the day she got her license, and a girl who did the drive instead of reverse thing when she was trying to sneak out with the car, and wound up in her parent’s kitchen when she was 14. Personally, I dinged up a bumper on an old Bronco at some ungodly hour of the morning on the concrete pillars they put in front of the gas tanks.  Wrote that one up to a lesson learned and got the fuck out of dodge.

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