If you are still under that impression I have to chalk it up to “willful ignorance of the facts,” because even McDonald’s doesn’t dispute the claim that she wasn’t driving at the time.
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She was not driving. She was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car.
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Ten to one this all makes no difference to his opinion.
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But coffeemakers do have warming plates to keep the coffee in the carafe at a temperature between 170°F and 180°F. I’ve seen Consumer reports coffeemaker reviews back to the '90s that won’t give a good rating to a household coffeemaker that doesn’t keep coffee at least 170°F, either via warming plate or via an effective thermal carafe.
You seem to have missed about a year’s worth of threads on cold brewing.
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I think a lot of that is the “Not noticing that what I or someone else wrote is ambiguous” effect.
E.g. Source writes “Increased from 10% to 12%.” Journalist writes “Increased 2%” Or, better journalist writes “increased 2 percentage points” and editor “shortens” it to 2%.
Ditto for unit errors, like kWh vs. kW. Add that to non-numerical comparisons for illustration and things get absurd pretty fast.
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You say that “the trial transcripts…”
I would appreciate a link to your source of the transcript. The closest I’ve gotten is a comment at Abnormal Use:
I have discussed this case online with various people for years.
Despite various people swearing that they had access to the source
documents for a class they took , no one has ever been able to produce
any of the relevant documents.
Just to clarify - she had asked for $11,000 - the $800 figure is what McDonald’s offered her. Still quite baffling, if they actually were doing as you mentioned.
While I agree that McDonald’s showed willful ignorance to a known safety issue in this case, can anyone speak to what level of burns she would have likely received had she done the same thing with a cup of 160 degree coffee? My googling is failing me on finding a decent source of info on this.
Her first course of action wasn’t to ask for anything. After two years of medical treatments she just wrote McDonald’s a letter requesting that they lower the temperature of their coffee to safer levels. They basically told her to go stuff it.
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I would appreciate a link to your source of the transcript
Yes. I was wondering about that after I wrote it. In retrospect, I think it was the court records, not transcripts that I saw. I have definitely seen court documents (depositions, motions, orders, one of which included a detailed justification for awarding punitive damages). Checking NM court records, it looks like all records were destroyed in 2007. I can’t find anything either, sadly.
The canonical refernce seems to be Moritz AR, Herriques FC Jr. Studies of thermal injuries: II The relative importance of time and surface temperature in the causation of cutaneous burns. (1947) Am J Pathol; 23:695-720.
At 160° a scald is almost instantaneous. At 140° (60°C) third degree burns take 5 seconds of contact with the water. In this case the water was held against the skin by thick absorbent clothing and sitting in a puddle on the seat, so any temperature above 51°c could have led to equivalent injury.
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Really? Shit. What am I going to drink now?
A point that I haven’t seen brought up yet is the difference between the brewing temp and the holding temp.
Obviously, coffee needs to be brewed at a certain temperature in order to extract properly from the beans but the case in question involved how hot McD’s held the coffee in the carafes prior to serving.
It was determined that McD’s deliberately and recklessly held coffee at much higher temps than typical practice and against recommendations - this fact is irrespective of the actual brewing process.
And it is currently available streaming on Netflix.
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To quote from the source:
Direct exposure of the surface of the skin to a rapidly flowing stream of hot liquid was chosen as the method best adapted for the acquisition of these data. With this type of exposure, the surface of the skin could be maintained at the temperature desired without the establishment of an appreciable gradient (less than 0.1 C) between it and the source of heat. There was no insulation of the surface by a static layer of gas, liquid or solid, no heat loss through vaporization of surface moisture, and no diminution of sub-surface heat conduction due to vascular occlusion by the application of pressure on the surface.
This is not what happens when you spill a cup of coffee (when you spill a cup of hot liquid it immediately starts to cool). The evidence at the trial was the following ( http://www.kentlaw.edu/faculty/rbrill/classes/BrillTortsF2009Day/CoursePages/Course_docs/Supp_material/Coffee.html ):
The jury was informed that McDonald’s operations and training manual required its coffee to be brewed at 195 to 205 degrees and held at 180 to 190 degrees for optimal taste, and that this was 40 to 50 degrees hotter than coffee made at home. A McDonald’s expert argued that any coffee hotter than 130 degrees could produce third-degree burns, so it did not matter that McDonald’s coffee was hotter. But a plaintiff’s expert testified that lowering the serving temperature to about 160 degrees could make a big difference, because it takes less than three seconds to produce a third-degree burn at 190 degrees, about 12 to 15 seconds at 180 degrees, and about 20 seconds at 160 degrees. According to Stella’s son-in-law, McDonald’s experts “admitted the [coffee] was too hot for consumption when sold. They did not contest the fact that it took 25 minutes to cool to a drinkable temperature.”
and
The recommended holding and serving temperatures for coffee seem to be based on the assumption that the coffee may cool 25 or more degrees as a result of being poured into a cold cup, mixed with cold cream, and stirred by a cold spoon. This would bring the temperature of the coffee down to 140-160 degrees F or less (depending on the serving temperature) by the time it is ready to be drunk. Judge Easterbrook cited sources indicating that aromatics are released from coffee at 150-160 degrees F. The McMahons’ expert, Professer Diller, testified that full-thickness third-degree burns would require 60 seconds of exposure at 140 degrees F (but only 3 seconds at 179 degrees); less serious but still quite painful second and first-degree burns would occur with shorter exposures.
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She should have sued the car manufacturer for not including a cupholder.
I once spilled BOILING WATER directly from the stove right onto my stomach. It was awful but even if it had spilled on my vagina, it never would have fused anything together. I got plenty of burns, but only 1st degree. Certainly not THIRD DEGREE and a FUSED TOGETHER VAGINA.
What happened if she had just been holding it in her hand, had been clumsy, and it had spilled directly right on to her lap, and still fused her vagina together?
Would that make you happy?
The car wasn’t moving. Did you even actually review the case, or are you just makin’ shit up to fit your little narrative? I’m going with the latter.
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And you’re still wrong. It shouldn’t have been that hot. Period.
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According to a contemporaneous Denver Post article, Stella Liebeck’s coffee was between 165° and 170° when it was spilled. It was other restaruants and branches where they measured hotter coffee right after it was poured.
Consumer reports has reported (year on year since the early 90’s) that most home coffeemakers hold the coffee at 175° or better. Coffeemakers meeting the ANSI standard will hold at greater than 170° 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.
So yes, the brewing will be at higher temperatures, and the closer in time to the actual brewing the hotter the coffee will be until it settles to its hold temperature. But I can find no evidence of any body that suggests typical practice is more than 2°c lower than the lawsuit’s estimate of the temperature of the coffee that caused the injury.
