- Florida’s Third District Court of Appeals determined a customer of Pet Supermarket, Troy Eldridge, lacked standing to bring a class action lawsuit against Pet Supermarket based on alleged violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA” or “the Act”). Pet Supermarket, Inc. v. Eldridge, No. 3D21-1174, 2023 WL 3327267 (Fla. 3d DCA May 10, 2023). The alleged TCPA violations occurred after Eldridge visited a Pet Supermarket and voluntarily sent a text message to enter a raffle to win free dog food for a year. Over the following three months, Pet Supermarket sent Eldridge seven text messages, five of which had nothing to do with the raffle and which the DCA determined were advertisements under TCPA.
- Eldridge first sued Pet Supermarket in federal court, but the case was dismissed for lack of standing since Eldridge could not prove he suffered an injury in fact under the more stringent federal requirements for Article III standing. Eldridge then sued Pet Supermarket in state court. The lower court found the text messages violated the TCPA and that that violation alone, even without a showing that the violation actually harmed Eldridge, was sufficient to satisfy Florida’s injury in fact requirement for standing. Pet Supermarket appealed that decision to the Third DCA.
- The Third DCA, like its federal counterpart, concluded that the text messages Pet Supermarket sent to Eldridge’s cell phone over three months simply did “not rise to the level of outrageousness required” to qualify as an invasion of privacy and satisfy Florida’s concrete injury requirement for standing. The DCA reversed the lower court and ordered the court to dismiss Eldridge’s complaint.
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