Morgan Cleaners & Laundry, Inc. Morgan Cleaners brought promissory estoppel and trade name infringement claims against Lisa DeCelles and Barbara McCorkle seeking enforcement of promises they made involving their purchase of a retail laundry and dry-cleaning store and damages for unauthorized use of the Morgan Cleaners trade name. A jury rendered a verdict in favor of Morgan Cleaners against DeCelles and McCorkle on the promissory estoppel claim, against DeCelles on the trade name infringement claim, and against DeCelles and McCorkle on Morgan Cleaner’s claim for attorney fees. On appeal, DeCelles and McCorkle claim the evidence did not support the promissory estoppel verdict, and DeCelles claims there was no evidence supporting the award of damages on the trade name infringement verdict, and that the trial court should have granted her motion to amend the judgment to prevent an illegal double recovery. For the following reasons, we affirm. 1. There was evidence supporting the promissory estoppel verdict against DeCelles and McCorkle.
The principle of promissory estoppel as set forth in OCGA § 13-3-44 a provides that a promise which the promisor should reasonably expect to induce action or forbearance on the part of the promisee or a third person and which does induce such action or forbearance is binding if injustice can be avoided only by enforcement of the promise. The remedy granted for breach may be limited as justice requires. Morgan Cleaners presented evidence of an oral agreement to purchase one of its stores by which DeCelles and McCorkle promised to pay $88,550 for the store over a period of time by paying Morgan Cleaners to process all the clothes brought to the store at a surcharge of 7 above the normal processing fee until the surcharges paid equaled the purchase price.1 In reliance on this promise, Morgan Cleaners produced evidence that it closed its store, transferred its existing inventory and customer base to DeCelles and McCorkle at their nearby new location, actively referred all its customers to the new store location, refrained from competing against the store in that area, and agreed to allow the store to use the trade name “Morgan Cleaners” for a period of 8 years during which the store would continue to use Morgan Cleaners for all clothes processing. Evidence showed that the store was generating about $250,000 per year in clothes processing at the time of the purchase so that payment of the purchase price by the surcharge was expected to take about 5 years. In the first 15 months under the agreement DeCelles and McCorkle sent about $318,000 in processing business to Morgan Cleaners, generating $22,260 in surcharges toward payment of the purchase price. At that point, DeCelles and McCorkle refused any further use of Morgan Cleaners for clothes processing leaving $66,290 of the purchase price unpaid, and refused to stop using the Morgan Cleaners trade name.
