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Comment by chakintosh | Hacker News Reader

> For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages.

What's the context here?

A woman spilled McDonald's coffee on herself, fusing her labia together and receiving third-degree burns. She needed skin grafts.

McDonald's knew that their coffee was dangerously hot and had been repeatedly warned about it, so the jury awarded punitive damages.

FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

> FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

This doesn't even make sense—water that hot destroys the flavor of the coffee. Why do they not just make and serve the coffee at a temperature people actually expect? Is it so hard to not be an asshole to your customers?

I believe the general consensus is that if they served the coffee cooler, by the time take-out customers got around to drinking it, it would be cold. Erring on the side of too hot maximizes customer satisfaction because the number of customers who would be upset at cold coffee is greater than the number of customers, buying coffee at McDonalds, who have sophisticated coffee tastes.

Anyway, Starbucks also serves their coffee about as hot as McDonalds. Turns out, coffee hot enough to cause horrific injury is rather common.

> Turns out, coffee hot enough to cause horrific injury is rather common.

So much for litigation as a way to incentivize behavior....

Sounds like someone needs to invent paper based vacuum insulated cups, and license them to McDonalds and Starbucks (etc). ;)

Adding to the sibling comments:

There was also a lot of public mockery and political grandstanding, at the time, based on a mischaracterization of the suit.

Wonder whether the victim should have sued the bad PR machine and set precedent, since this year a woman suffered an injury of similar order of magnitude (I assume) and all the papers go "woman gets wedgie in water slide muhahaha" due to PR spin.

Not OP, but I'm guessing this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...

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