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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

For reference, your Keurig pours coffee into your cup at 192*F. McDonald's coffee wasn't even this hot when that lawsuit happen.

Additionally - the detail often left out of all the armchair analysis is the customer placed the fresh cup of coffee between her legs while in her car, and removed the lid. Her legs crushed the now-unstable cup... and she was unsurprisingly burned.

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Yes, the kitchen has many hazards that are not expected in a drive-through restaurant, and your point about how she held the coffee is presumably why the jury found the plaintiff 20% liable rather than 0%.

Yes, and now the "Caution - Hot" markings on the cup keep us all much, much safer.

Any temperature above 100*F is going to burn. There is no safe temperature above 100*F that is not going to cause 2nd and 3rd degree burns.

I think I agree with you on principle, but temps higher than 100 are totally fine in a lot of cases. Hot tubs are at 102-106. 120°F takes you like 10 minutes to suffer serious burns. But 140° will cause burns in seconds. I've seen cooks handle stuff waaay hotter than 140 for a half secondish (grab a noodle from a pot of boiling water, poke a 160+° burger on a grill, etc). Obviously makes a big difference if you splash yourself a bit vs get a whole cup on you too.

The warning was made more prominent and, probably more importantly, they switched to rigid styrofoam cups that are less likely to buckle as happened in that incident. Furthermore, the Wikipedia article shared in the thread elsewhere details how such burns take substantially more contact with skin to happen if the coffee is not served so hot.

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