Also, I never did HARP on the statement that 2.7 Million Dollars were awarded to the plaintiff. Do yourself a favour and read my comment clearly, before letting your biased opinion of what I may or may not be thinking, take over. I never said that the whole money was awarded to her. The Jury did award punitive damages of 2.7 million and I said that even that much amount was not nearly enough to redeem McDonalds of all the other wrong practices they commit around the world.
Presumably the units are in Fahrenheit, given the U.S. origin of the story. So if the usual temperature for drinking coffee is around 160F, McDâs was serving theirs around 190F (88C).
Because it seems no one has posted it yet, check out the Documentary âHot Coffeeâ and this Emory School of Law, âDebate on Tort Reform After Viewing of Documentary 'Hot Coffeeââ.
Edit: edit edit
While Iâm all for liberal-arts education, nobody should be able to get a college degree (or a j-school diploma) without at least an introductory statistics course. With 25 years of hindsight, that was the single most useful undergrad course I took.
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Same here. Salespeopleâs rubbish verbalisms get processed through my âmash those numbersâ filter and tossed onto the heap of discarded idiocies.
As for politicians ⊠David Cameron came out with a classic yesterday, along the lines of âMaybe the prices will be lower if we do this than they otherwise could be were we to do something elseâ.
Didnât even need to mention numbers for my antennae to wiggle like mating sea worms.
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Yeah. Actually, the lawsuit was still frivolous. First of all, I managed a restaurant many years ago, and restaurants DO usually serve coffee ~160F, and the McDonalds in question had had their coffee tested at ~190F or so several times. About half of our customers complained loudly about the âlukewarmâ coffee at my restaurant. (Though it was measured at ~160F) A large portion had the servers heat it in the microwave, and one woman actually told me it was not hot enough despite the fact that I had microwaved it to boiling. She left in a huff when I explained that I canât get coffee hotter than boiling because water becomes a gas above 212F!
Secondly, she placed a styrofoam cup of coffee between her legs in a moving car. Had the coffee been at ~160F as opposed to ~190F there would have been little if any difference in her injuries. If you place a styrofoam cup of hot liquid beteween your legs in a car, expect to get burned. And itâs 100% your own fault.
The âtrue storyâ makes no difference, Maggie. It was not the McDonalds restaurantâs fault she was burned, and she should have collected nothing at all.
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They usually get the hot water for tea from the coffee maker, so whatever the temperature for coffee is, their tea is usually the same temp.
BTW, if you need to add stuff to tea (or coffee) you donât really like it.
Car wasnât moving.
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Interesting bit from the Times text accompanying the video:
This weekâs Retro Report is the 16th in a documentary series. The
video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro
Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra
Darnton, a former â60 Minutesâ producer. It is a nonprofit video news
organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to
todayâs 24/7 news cycle. The videos are typically 10 to 14 minutes
long.
Iâve checked about 7 of the other 15 on the times website, and in each case this is the comparable text is something like this:
The report is the third in a weekly series that will re-examine the
leading stories of decades past. Videos are typically 10 to 12 minutes
long and are part of a collaboration between The Times and Retro
Report, a documentary news organization formed last year. The online
project was conceived of by Christopher Buck, a former television
editor whose father was a founder of the Subway restaurant chain.
I donât go to McDonaldâs very often but the last several times I had their coffee it was still pretty damn hot, easily too hot to sip without allowing it to cool for a while first. And charred, but maybe thatâs because I only go there on late nights when I need something to keep me awake during a long drive.
At any rate the Wikipedia article on the case (which cites a legal publication) states âSince Liebeck, McDonaldâs has not reduced the service temperature of its coffee.â
What surprises me about this thread is that on a site where coffee geekery often runs rampant, see e.g. http://boingboing.net/2010/09/30/perfecting-my-travel.html#more , no one has pointed out that coffee needs to be infused at 195-207 degrees (Fahrenheit) to be any good. My take on this has always been (and Iâm a lawyer whoâs worked both plaintiff and defense cases) that McDonaldâs was attempting to make a palatable product by using the correct temperature to make it.
Could the company have done more to make the coffee âsaferâ? Sure. Would the coffee have tasted markedly worse? Probably. Would the plaintiff in this case still suffered a nasty injury, based on the circumstances? Likely. And has this horse of a case been beaten to death by both sides? Absolutely.
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I wasnât questioning their data, merely making clarifying that they are a private advocacy group, not a government agency. The term âyourâ carries, to me at least, the implication of an air that it was representative of America as a whole. Itâs legitimacy (which I have no reason to doubt, since they are often quoted in this discussion on both sides) isnât something I was questioning.
Had McDonalds taken that corrective action based on their own safety advocateâs recommendation, then YES, they would likely have won that lawsuit. The fact was, however, that McDonalds wasnât just aware there was a potential issue: âCompany documents showed that in the past decade McDonaldâs had received at least 700 reports of coffee burns ranging from mild to third degree, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.â This wasnât the first third-degree burn case for McDonalds coffee and it wasnât even the first time that McDonalds had paid six figures to solve the caseâŠhowever, THIS was the case that McDonalds chose to take to trial rather than settle out of court. And THIS was the case where a foreman who started the trial wondering why they needed to go to court to solve a coffee spill later declared that they wanted to punish McDonalds for their callous disregard for the safety of their customers. That was overreach on the juryâs part and thus it was reduced.
Whatâs baffling is why McDonalds didnât take the $800 request and call it a day, especially when they had already paid out sums from $27,500 - $500,000 and those werenât even to 79 year-old grandmothers.
I see multiple people citing the Coffee BREW temperature as if it was the same temperature you actually DRINK the coffee at. Those are two different things entirely, AFAIK. The issue here isnât the brew temperature, itâs that McDonalds forced itâs franchises to KEEP it at that temperature, post-brew.
Your soda and beer comparison arenât reasonable. Shaking the can vigorously is a common occurrence, but it isnât the company producing it that does that. Further, eye damage from is so unlikely as to be incredibly rare. It is NOT reasonable to buy a cup of coffee and assume it is totally unsafe to drink. The legal history revealed during the case showed that third-degree burns werenât incredibly unlikely, they had already happened repeatedly for years. McDonalds, as their expert witness said, didnât consider the hundreds of burn claims to be relevant to the billions of cups of coffee served, because statistically the results were a tiny fraction of their customers. Had they presented their case differently, they might have won initially, but their attitude before, during and after the trial was particularly egregious.
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Absolutely. Adding water to tea completely ruins it. Only losers do anything but chew the leaves straight off the tree.
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Thatâs true about many things. If you need to add frosting to your cake, you donât really like cake. If you need to add toppings to your pizza, you donât really like pizza. If you need to add salt to your potatoes, you donât really like potatoes.
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Good article, but I still think that it fails to fully convey the extend of the callous disregard for customer safety that McDonalds exhibited during the trial. McDonalds was heating coffee up an additional 30 degrees F above the temperature that coffee comes out of the coffee machine. Coffee straight out of a coffee machine wonât cause 3rd degree burns. McDonalds knew that coffee that hot is too hot to drink. McDonalds had received 720 previous reports of people receiving 3rd degree burns from coffee that hot. McDonalds had been directed to correct the problem in two previous lawsuits that they had lost, and yet they had taken no action. Representatives of McDonalds testified at the trial that they had no intention of correcting the problem.
Itâs also worth pointing out that itâs questionable whether reducing the temperature of coffee by 10 degrees F really addresses the safety issue. And you still have to wait for a McDonalds coffee to cool down before you can drink it, even if it is 10 degrees cooler.
The trial transcripts make for fascinating reading.
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Blockquote coffee needs to be infused at 195-207 degrees (Fahrenheit) to be any good.
⊠after which it comes out of the coffee filter at 160F. McDonalds was heating the coffee up an additional 30 degrees F on the hotplate. 20 degrees F hotter than the hottest temperature at which it is drinkable.
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True - but nowhere near their standard serving temperature in the late 80s/early 90s. That stuff was essentially nuclear - and, letâs be fair, it tasted like what I imagine nuclear waste must taste like. I drank it because 1) back then I didnât know there were better alternatives and 2) it had caffeine in it.
Exactly. The optimal temperature at which something is created is not the same as the temperature at which it should be served. Thatâs why restaurants donât build special warming plates so their bread can be served at 375Âș Fahrenheit.
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I am still under the impression she stuck a cup of hot coffee in her crotch (between her thighs while driving, then tried to pry the lid off, while driving, or the lid popped off, while driving.
If this does not qualify as stupid, I am at a loss to determine what does⊠When you are controlling a ton and a half vehicle loaded with a dozen gallons or more of highly explosive fuel and capable of generating more kinetic energy than a largish artillery shell, what the hell are you doing messing with a cup of coffee?
No one would accept this behavior had she had a pistol in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
First, she wasnât driving (her grandson was); second, heâd parked the car so she could add cream and sugar. The fact that you are still âunder the impressionâ says far more about you, and your willingness to click a link or two, than the facts of the case.
No one would accept this behavior if⊠(you fill in the metaphor here.)
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