Before you head out of the Whole Foods Parking Lot with a tree on your Toyota Prius, you must sign this waiver.

So you won’t sue Whole Foods as a result of their trees damaging your car, customers purchasing Christmas Trees at Whole Foods must now sign a waiver before heading out of the parking lot. AZ Family investigative reporter Stanley Roberts tweeted out a photo of the waiver including a handful of photos showing the correct way to tie your tree down.

Check out the tweet here.

The font is small to read from your smart phone, but the key sentences are,

“By completing the purchase of any trees from Whole Foods Market, the buyer expressly agrees to release Whole Foods Market of and from any liability associated with the transportation or other use of the tree to the fullest extent allowable by state law.”

Basically, if you buy a Christmas tree from Whole Foods and forget to bring rope but hold it to the top of your roof, when your tree eventually falls off, possibly hitting another car, you cannot sue Whole Foods for the damage you caused just because they sold you an item their demographic is not familiar transporting (upperclass grocery shoppers.)

Also, if tree sap ruins your McLaren 720S paint job, thats on you.

Christmas Trees are a fairly new item at Whole Foods, the earliest mention of trees available for sale at their grocery store is in 2009.

I can imagine that not many people going to Whole Foods also don’t plan to buy a tree during the same trip. Maybe someone in the past 10 years strapped a Whole Foods tree to their car, didn’t strap it down correctly, and caused serious damage to their own car, someone else’s car, or worse, injury or death because of their poor tree transport technique.

It’s cliché to say that waivers are the result of someone suing a company, but there’s some truth behind that.

According to Western National Insurance, the safest way to transport a tree is on a roof rack with the stump pointed forward. If no roof rack is available, wrapping your tree in a blanket and securely strapping your tree to your car roof in the same fashion should be enough. You’ll want to travel at low speeds, avoiding the highway if possible.

Inside Edition has a good explainer.

Proper planning like measuring how big a tree you can buy and bringing your own rope goes without saying.

Have you seen any botched tree transports?

Let me know in the comments below.

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