Is your personal responsibility now my responsibility?

It seems that no one wants to take any responsibility for their actions or inaction any longer. Every day I have another opportunity to take care of someone else's mistake, error, or problem. Like I don't have enough of my own issues to deal with, please let me deal with your first.

We often encounter situations with customers where a little foresight, caution, or common sense would avoid problems altogether. I want to give the retailer point of view on some of those situations: injury accidents, order errors, and defective product returns/exchanges.

Customer accidents involving injury are fairly common. People slip, trip, smash fingers, cut themselves, and get hurt a lot of different ways every day in retail stores. What amazes me is the customer almost always blames the store. A common one is the customer that trips over a floor mat/rug at an entrance/exit. Those rugs are there for a reason: to collect water, collect dirt, define the entrance or exit, etc. Now on average those rugs are about 1/4" thick and when an edge gets flipped over by someone dragging their foot over it the edge becomes about 2-3" high. As a human being, I was gifted with the ability to lift my foot over 3". I have no business dragging my foot over that and falling down. What about people with disabilities that cannot lift their feet that high? Well, if you know you drag your feet and that is a problem, then maybe you should pay a little extra attention to where you walk. This type of accident I have personally witnessed more than once. The most frightening was the man that fell (couldn't lift his feet that high), then proceeded to literally chase me around the store with his cane trying to "beat the shit" out of me. Nice, huh? I'm sure his grandchildren would be proud. Another specific accident that really bothers me happened about 5 years ago. A father was walking into the store I was at with his 4 year old son. The boy runs up to the front doors from the side, under the detection range of the sensor that opens the door. The boy puts his hand on the glass and as the father walks up the doors slide open. Now had the boy taken his hand off the door, this would not be a story, but you can guess what happened. The boy kept his hand on the door and sure enough, his entire right arm was pulled between two heavy metal and glass doors. Ever heard a four year old scream for his life. I hadn't until that point. Well, it seems from first glance the store had no liability at all in this instance, but the father did not see it that way at all. He demanded that I turn off the doors and have them replaced with something safer. He was beligerent at best and downright abusive most of the time I spoke with him. I tried reasoning with him that no one could possibly anticipate a person not taking their hands off the door when they opened. Well, it turned ugly and went well above my position and was turned back on the father as a possible case of child endagerment for failure to properly supervise his child.

I'm getting too wordy here, so I will finish the other two points later.