Well, Maccy Dees are bastards, and it’s pissing down here, so I’m fine with both of those.
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You’re not big with the nuance and subtlety, are ya?
The temperature of a drink depends on how long it takes to prepare each customer’s order so their drink has more or less time to cool down before they begin to thoughtlessly chug it. There’s a mean temperature, and some range of variance around that mean. Even if you move the mean downward, there will still be some extreme instances where someone gets their coffee really fast and then tips it straight on their most tender mucus membranes. These will seem even more sensational, remarkable and newsworthy as they become rarer.
A business that sells coffee has to put the mean temperature somewhere. If it’s too cold, most customers will go somewhere else. Too high, and there will be a lot of customers burning themselves. So they put it somewhere in between. This will mean that some people will still get burned. It will be rare, but it will still happen occasionally.
How can we judge acceptable risk? On this thread, @Ambiguity conservatively estimates one court case per 25 million cups during that period, therefore if you had a cup of coffee at McDonalds every week, the probability that you’d will take them to court for burning you is about 1 in 500,000 during one year. This is about the same as the odds of being struck by lightning in the US in a year.
As to home-made coffee being automatically tepid and non-lethal, that makes no sense. It’s almost as if you’re piling artificial weight on one side of your argumentative see-saw so as to boost the other side up higher.
Coffee is made with water at between 85 and 92 Celsius, or 185-198 Fahrenheit. That is hot water, hot enough to cause injury. Therefore people who make coffee at home can very easily hurt themselves. Here are somw UK figures for burns accidents in the home: 1265 severe liquid burn injuries per year from handling cups! The UK population is less than 1/4 of the US. And if you’re making your own drink you’re facing further risks from the coffeepot or teapot (a further 217 severe injuries per year). It’s safer to get someone else to make your coffee for you.
If I am going to be handling something that could cost me $20,000 in medical bills because I klutzed it up, I damn well want to know about it.
Well, that’s the real problem. Individuals should not be paying out of their own cash for some some phony inflated “medical bill” supposedly for their treatment for emergency burns they got in an accident, whether at home or McDonalds. And in civilised countries, they don’t have to (but then I’m British so I would say that.)
But there is absolutely no overlap between the acceptable range of serving temperatures for coffee in terms of imparting flavor and aroma, and the range of temperatures where a hot liquid will not be a risk for severe burns of spilled on you.
Just look at the resources posted in the Oct13 boingboing post on this topic. The mythical 140° F ideal coffee temperature is not only way below anyone’s suggested brew and hold temperatures, but also above the burn damage threshold
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But there is a cost-benefit to CT scans even when they can give useful information. I’ve had kidney stones twice in two different countries. One system did a CT at a cost of hundreds of dollars. The other did an ultrasound at tens of dollars. $900 vs $20. The CT provides more information for finding zebras. Why is the standard of care in one country CT and the other ultrasound? Simply a different cost-benefit analysis.
Which is why even though I support a single payer system, I try to warn people that they should understand that there will be changes they might not like. The cost-benefit analysis will change and so will treatment paths.
There’s a big difference between brew temperature and holding temperatures used for serving. McD’s was found to be keeping the holding temps much higher than recommended not only for safety but for consumption compared to others.
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This is one point that the McDonalds defenders seem to ignore frustratingly often. This has nothing to do with brew temp. It’s the hold temp.
McDonalds instructed stores to peg their Bunn machines at the max hold temp. the device supported in the hopes that people who bought their coffee and only drank it 20-30 minutes later would be happy. They weren’t concerned with the health and safety of people who drank the coffee immediately on buying it who were getting blistered mouths (or other parts).
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The car was not moving, although that is part of the myth the OP is about.
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Huh? According to a contemporaneous Denver Post article, Stella Liebeck’s coffee was between 165° and 170° F when it was spilled. Any coffeemaker meeting the ANSI standard will hold at greater than 170° F. The manuals that come with the commercial coffee machines suggest hold temperatures of 175°- 185°. The Specialty Coffee Association of America suggest similar hold temperatures.
I don’t see anyone ignoring hold temperatures, but I do see people saying that coffee served very close to the time of brewing will be hotter than the typical hold temperature.
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I’m not really sure that lawyers are very often the problem itself. They are just people we hire to navigate us through things that are inherently confusing and messed up.
There are awful lawyers, but then again lawyers don’t do much on their own generally.
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look here:
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Here’s the problem with not having punitive damages: sometimes for a company (or a person), the cost of doing business can calculate in the compensatory damages, and the company can say (internally, of course), “yes we harmed people but we still cut our bottom line enough to pay the lawsuits and make money off our decision.” Ford Pinto comes to mind – in the lawsuits about that car, evidence showed that Ford knew of the defect that caused the gas tanks to blow up but chose to keep going forward with selling the cars based on a cost / benefit analysis that factored in compensatory damages. The same happened in the McDonalds case. McDonalds knew it was dangerous and didn’t do anything. If a person takes another person’s life with a conscious disregard for the safety of others (i.e. “malice”) it can be negligent manslaughter or a higher charge. We can’t send a corporation to jail. There is no other way to send a message.
At least in California, you need to show a conscious disregard for the rights and safety of others, fraud, or intentional conduct in order to get punitive damages. Your average car crash case doesn’t do it, but drunk driving would. And, it is important that punitive damages are based on the defendant. McDonalds is punished by a much much larger amount than you or I would be. Fun fact about the McDonalds lawsuit: the jury figured the amount of punitive damages based on the profit from ONE DAY of coffee sales, that’s it. The plaintiff didn’t even ask for that much in the closing argument.
Edit: one other thing I forgot to mention is that the government is absurdly terrible about going after corporate criminal conduct. While a plaintiff receiving punitive damages could very well be seen as a windfall, in many cases, without that windfall the corporation will not be punished. Sometimes the private, civil justice system does what government regulators are too overworked to do. We saw this recently with the GM recalls about the ignition switch. It all started with one Plaintiffs’ lawyer with a wrongful death case who stumbled across evidence that the case he was working on was not unique. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-17/gm-plagued-as-georgia-lawyer-presses-regulators-on-deaths.html There the issue was obviously big enough for the government to get involved. But, for nearly every safety feature you find in your car (airbags, seatbelts, impact absorbing bumpers, etc.) there was a lawsuit that started it.
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I don’t know if you have read my comments, but of course there is. You can simply fine them as much as or more than they pay in punitive damages under the current system.
I am absolutely not for letting them off the hook. I am for letting them face a vastly more dangerous enemy.
I would also like to point out that we don’t really have punitive damages here in Germany, but that’s probably just one of those things done outside America that would never work in the real world.
Edit: I sttarted this before your edit.
As @ad_absurdum notes the government doesn’t exactly have an outstanding track record of going after corporate criminal misconduct.
Even if they did—if a corporation does something highly unethical/illegal that has serious negative consequences for me and I go through the considerable time and expense to prove that wrongdoing in court, then why should the government be the body to reap the reward for those efforts?
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There is fundamental difference between criminal lawsuits where the Government is the plaintiff pursuing charges for criminal acts and civil lawsuits where individual plaintiffs seek compensatory damages for corporate negligence or malfeasance.
The whole point of punitive awards in civil cases is to punish someone monetarily because there are no other enforcement mechanisms available for deterring future bad behavior when no laws have been broken.
While there is the concept of State imposed civil penalties, it is prosecuted by the Government for violations of regulations or to compensate for harm done to the State, not to individuals (toxic waste dumping, for example).
As far as we know, there were no actual laws or regulations broken in the McDonald’s case that would warrant a fine by the government.
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Links for what?
Liebeck’s lawyers advanced proof that the coffee was between 165 and 170 degrees when it spilled: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=545243 quoting non-internet available LIABILITY WEEK, Vol. 12, No. 38, Sept. 29, 1997.
(165-170 degrees) well within industry standards both then and now: http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71 and ANSI/AHAM CM-1-1986
Even McDonalds intended temperature (185 degrees) was within the industry standard: see above
(Apparently, new users can only post two links per post. More incoming.)
The 700 cases of burns, some of which were as serious as Liebeck’s, most however, were less serious: http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm (a “pro-Liebeck” site)
The 700 cases of burns were over a 10 year period: See above and many others
The 700 cases of burns translates to 1 burn per ~24 million cups of coffee: http://www.stellaawards.com/stella.html (at first blush, it looks like a “pro-McDonalds” site, but it tries to give a balanced view of its namesake incident)
Virtually every other “hot coffee” case has been decided for the coffee producers: McMahon v Bunn-O-Matic, available at http://laws.lp.findlaw.com/7th/974131.html
Too late to prevent the massive derail that’s happened in these comments, but this is not about the details of coffee standards and hold temperatures or the percentage of previous injuries deemed serious. It’s about the media’s collusion with McD’s in framing the public narrative: “Spilled coffee on herself” sounds trivial, certainly more so than “melted her vulva with third-degree burns.” $2,600,000 sounds like a lot more money than $500,000. Yet the former are the takeaways retained even today by average people, and what informs their opinions about tort reform.
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I agree that the media has sensationalized the Liebeck story and tort reformers have propagandized it. I’m just trying to point out that it’s possible to recognize those points while understanding that it was wrongly decided.
Thank you for the links, but I’m not sure I follow how that shows that Liebeck was using propaganda.
Speaking of propaganda, I agree with @L_Mariachi here that the media didn’t simply sensationalize the story as you say, but that they also very much colluded with the corporatist framing of the story.
The truth of the matter is corporations are vastly more litigious than anyone else. The media keeps trying to frame a false narrative that the public is the problem, not their owners.
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