It is. I made the mistake of doing that once, in a car that had no cupholders, with convenience-store coffee. It may have been two or three degrees cooler than the McDonald’s coffee. It’s a mistake you only make once.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at here - it seems like you’re saying that the McDonald’s coffee burned her worse than boiling water would have… That’s not what you’re saying, is it?
Yes, that is what marilove is saying. Considering gravity and likely positions, etc., the boiling water probably rolled right off marilove’s stomach and wasn’t of sufficient volume to transfer enough heat to pose a real danger. Whereas the dangerously hot coffee pooled–with no place to go–right in Stella Liebeck’s crotch.
The NYT video has some excessively graphic footage of the result.
Another, somewhat less gross example … I cook chicken sous vide sometimes. It involves water held at, well, let’s call it 132F degrees. 
If you put your hand in the water for a second or so, you won’t actually get burned (unless you manage to hold your hand in for more than say 3 seconds) but you will regret it. Intensely. Water is a great conductor of heat.
Th proper brewing temp is considerably higher. See http://www.ncausa.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=71
I was having an ongoing problem with extremely hot water in my shower, a while back, due to abysmal cold water pressure (third floor in a 107 year-old building). Rough guesstimate, the water temp was around 125 degrees Fahrenheit. I could only approximate it, because my only available tool was a meat thermometer.
(I’m not really interested in pedantic, physics/hydrology critiques of my method, unless they come with a handy meat-thermometer-plus-ambient-temperature conversion spreadsheet, or something. Thanks in advance!)
Because it was clearly scalding hot (I couldn’t take it for more than a few seconds at a time), and I needed to prove to my landlord that I wasn’t playin’, I did some research on burn temps for hot water. Several sources cited my (ballpark) measurement of 120+ deg. as being seriously dangerous for people of advanced years. Apparently, water temps that “only” seem unbearably hot to us younger folks cause a lot of severe burns when found in a nursing home setting.
What I’m getting at here is that – if memory serves – the McDonald’s lady was fairly elderly when her burn occurred. Should that be taken into consideration, when we pick nits about whether her vagina was justified in melting?
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In possibly-related news, I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed at the tepid “hot” water I get from the machine at work. I’ve starting putting the “hot” water in the microwave to get it to the temperature tea should be.
What does your comment mean?
It seems fairly straightforward: do not serve a food product capable of fusing a woman’s labia to her leg. If your company does that, your company is negligent.
Sort of like: don’t chain the fire exits in your shirt company’s warehouse.
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It’s McDonald’s. They sell their products through drive-up windows, to people in cars, with the expectation that people will consume those products in cars. Holding the coffee at an extraordinarily high temperature, to serve in situations in which spills are highly likely, is obviously negligent.
The people who should be held responsible for their actions are the executives who disregarded their own safety reports and insisted on keeping dangerously hot.
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All right I see your point and agree to a certain extent with the first paragraph. My point is that the definition of ‘extraordinarily high temperature’ is quite misleading in this context.
Even if they’d reduced the temperature by 10 deg F, (which they did later), the lady would still have gotten burnt (according to the sources I’ve cited above) due to factors such as the placement of the cup (between her knees with the likelihood that if the coffee spills, it could potentially burn a sensitive area of the body) as well as the cotton sweatpants which the defendants themselves agreed, exacerbated the problems.
I think though, that I am already beating a dead horse here. I’ve repeated my points and justifications ad nauseum and I think that its time for me to give it a rest. Have a great day!
This has been explained above. It is the point of punitive damages. $50 might be a meaningful punishment to a hot dog cart pusher, but it’s nothing to McDonald’s, ergo it would not effect a similar punishment.
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My grandma drank her coffee nearly that hot. I asked her if I could try it once, and she let me. If you live somewhere where there’s an Aldi store, it was the in-house Beaumont brand, brewed in a percolator, heated up to near the boiling point. After I got over the initial shock of having my mouth scalded, I thought people had to be insane to drink coffee. And the in-house brand is way better than it used to be, so if you’ve had it recently and thought it was horrible, it used to be worse.
Discourse and Chrome don’t seem to talk to each other nicely enough to let me Control-F for something, but regarding the salt thing: when I have beans that have been sitting around too long, and I know the pot is going to be on for a while, I’ll put a pinch of salt in the filter (I’m strictly on a drip brew maker budget) and maybe a peppercorn or two. Yes, I salt and pepper my coffee. And it’s FABULOUS.
Water boiled in a microwave is generally not at an even temperature
But microwaves don’t heat water evenly, so the boiling process is
difficult to control. Microwave ovens shoot tiny waves into the liquid
at random locations, causing the water molecules at those points to
vibrate rapidly. If the water isn’t heated for long enough, the result
is isolated pockets of very hot or boiling water amid a larger body of
water that’s cooler. Such water may misleadingly exhibit signs of
boiling despite not being a uniform 212 degrees.
You repeatedly say this as if this is a physical law, but you have no evidence at all for it.
Yes, liquid at 160ºF can cause burns if it is held against the skin at that temperature for a period of time.
What you forget is that there is a certain amount of energy associated with a cup of coffee, and particularly with a small spill. The spilled coffee will begin to rapidly cool as it gets in contact with the clothes, skin and air. The lower the initial temperature, the less energy will be transferred to the skin before the temperature is below a burning point.
Another way of putting this: If you fall into a vat of coffee, it doesn’t make much difference if it’s 180º or 190ºF, you’ll be burned pretty severely either way. But if a tablespoon of coffee drops on your arm, that 10º difference may well be significant. The cooler tablespoon will more quickly reach a safe temperature, and the actual damage done to the skin will be lessened.
So you can be sure that, even if it’s still possible to scald yourself at the new temperature, the number of burn victims almost certainly decreased.
In the view of the suit, McDonalds believed that their need for higher temperature outweighed the elevated risk to customers. The new temperature that the suit caused now decreases the risk to customers, without severely putting McDonalds at a disadvantage. That’s the point, not that the risk to customers has been completely eliminated.
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You’ve ignored the fact that the process of spilling and soaking into clothing would have further cooled the coffee. Suppose it was served at 190 degrees and when she spilled it it was at 180 degrees. The average temperature of the coffee incident on her skin might have been 160 degrees.
Now suppose it was served at 170 degrees and spilled at 160 degrees. The average temp incident on her skin might have been 140 degrees.
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…tests with one or two layers of denim and/or cotton typical of
apparel worn indoors and observed an effective drop of approximately
10% of the differential between the liquid and the initial surface
temperature, which can translate to roughly 5 8C (9 8F). There is no
noticeable delay in the thermal response at the underlying surface on
the time scale of the insult process, given the typical absorbency of
the above materials.
The temperature of the spilled coffee in this case was 165° - 170° (see comments above), so the effect of the coffee on the skin would be that of 155° - 160° liquid, the damage exacerbated by the effect of the absorbent clothing holding the hot liquid against the skin.
I was using made-up numbers to illustrate a point – a point which is actually supported by the cited passage.
I wasn’t writing my own doctoral thesis.
No criticism was intended – I just thought that since actual numbers were accessible, it would be useful to include them in the discussion . Its all about mass, temperature differential, and heat-carrying capacity. The clothing is fairly low on mass and heat-carrying capacity, but not inconsequential.
I’ll take a temporarily burned crotch for 9 million.
FFS. Watch the video.
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Congratulations! You win for “least informed comment of the thread.” It looked like @jimp was going to take the trophy for that “she was driving at the time” nonsense, but you just took the lead with that completely fabricated $9 million figure.
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