During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
Yes yes, the emotion of it all. Let’s bring it back to logic. You would suffer more injury if you spilled a pot of Mac & Cheese over your groin. Injuries be nasty, boiling water be dangerous, these are just facts of science.
Unless your mom cooks all your food for you, then you are at risk of similar injuries nearly every day. Most of us have learned the importance of being careful around the dangerous things we encounter every day to avoid these nasty injuries.
It wasn’t a pot of boiling water, it was a cup of coffee. Which is expected to be at a temperature that is drinkable when you get it and if spilling it on yourself is dangerous then that’s a problem.
Except the temp they were serving at was above regulations. They had been warned multiple times and got multiple complaints. Those regulations exist for a reason, this case demonstrates why. Because people don’t deserve to have their labia fused together because a coffee spilled in the drive thru.
They literally haven’t changed the temp they serve it at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants#Coffee_temperature
Cool! So if you go to a restaurant, order mac and cheese, get it in a cardboard container and when it spills you get hospitalized for a week, do you say “mac and cheese is meant to be served very hot! Of course I’ll cover the medical bill myself!”. What about when a few dozen people run into the same issue, because the restaurant has figured out that the occasional lawsuit from people being badly injured is cheaper than the cost of keeping the mac and cheese at an edible temperature? I mean, consider the comparison you’re going for here. “If she’d heated a substance to that temperature herself, then spilled it on herself, it would be entirely her own fault! Why is it when someone else heats a substance to an unsafe temperature, then someone gets injured by it, it’s not entirely on the injured party? They should know that the substance was heated far beyond what anyone would reasonably expect it to be provided at!”
How likely are you to spill a high volume of Mac n Cheese on yourself in the kitchen, to the point that it soaks through your clothes, versus spilling an open cup of coffee in a car?
We do encounter dangerous things everyday, and this scenario is more dangerous than what’s acceptable at industrial plants. You would be required to put in several safeguards which each reduced the chance of the event occuring by a factor of 10.
As a process engineer it’s absolutely insane to me how risky this was. I believe something causing permanent injury/disability to a member of the public would actually be our highest or second highest severity category. With how likely this is to happen, if a company had inadequate safeguards in place, they would be heavily fined and I don’t even know what else. This is a flagrant safety violation from a process engineering perspective.
As someone who made coffee that was 88C (I measured it) this morning and every other morning. It’s ridiculous to me that people are shocked that coffee is hot.
Stick a thermometer into a cup of coffee, see what temperature it is. Now work on some insane safeguards for it. Or just do what everyone else on the planet does and accept that it’s hot, so be careful with it.