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I regard that as a frivolous lawsuit. As unfortunate as the outcome was, simply put it was her own damn fault. If McDonalds provided her with the coffee with no defects (to the cup for instance) then there was no negligence on their part. Obviously if you spill a hot drink on yourself your going to burn yourself. What is the difference between that and selling someone a hammer and then they crush their hand with it? Admittedly from my perspective here in Ireland I may view this differently from yanks. We drink a lot of tea and good tea must be boiling when you add the teabag, also drive-throughs are a lot less common so you will typically not have your beverage in a moving vehicle.

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She tried to settle for $20k for medical expenses and lost wages but McDonalds offered $800. McDonalds had more than 700 reports of injuries from the coffee. Their internal quality control manager reported that they recognized that they were posing a burn hazard to customers with the heat of their coffee, but that it was a minor concern that they were unwilling to adjust.

McDonalds admitted that not only were they burning customers who drank the coffee straight from the cup, many of whom needed medical treatment, but that this was something they were unwilling to change.

That is clearly not frivolous. She tried to settle. She was not looking for a big score. In the process of discovery the company was openly belligerent about their plan and willingness to continue to pose a public safety risk.

None of that seems to change the fact that it was her own fault, I'm a bit confused how anybody could think it does.

There's thousands of people cutting themselves with kitchen knifes every year too. So what? It doesn't make the kitchen knife manufacturer somehow liable if you cut yourself if they "knowingly" sell you a kitchen knife despite being fully aware of the thousands of injuries caused by them every single year.

All the stuff about how she was injured (emotive irrelevance), how other customers are also injured - is just an irrelevant distraction to the central fact that it was entirely her own fault and her own responsibility.

She was found partly at fault. Based on the trial she wasn't found entirely at fault.

The injury actually was relevant and not an emotive distraction. McDonalds was selling coffee, not knives. Most would have the expectation that spilling a cup of coffee on yourself wouldn't leave you with 3rd degree burns on 6% of your body with 1st and 2nd degree burns on another 16%. She not only needed eight days of hospitalization for skin grafts, but also years of medical treatment.

McDonalds acknowledged that customers had gotten 3rd degree burns from using their product in the executed manner (multiple customers with 3rd degree burns), but that they were unwilling to make a minor change to the product that would prevent this.

It was the fact that they knew they had already injured people to the point of needing hospitalization that could have been avoided by making a minor change to keep people from getting injured that was at the root of why they were at fault. It was the fact that in court they stated that they were unwilling to make that change even after knowing about this injury that caused punitive damages, which the judge reduced.

I don't consider it to be a "reasonable expectation" that if you spill a hot beverage you bought all over yourself, you won't be burnt. It is a completely unreasonable expectation.

I'm in the UK and I can buy tea all over the country. It is always sold at near boiling temperature - because that's how you make most tea, with boiling water. If you buy a beverage you can't just "expect" that it can't hurt you.

I expect this is why the outcome of the case is McDonalds adding a warning to their product that should be obvious to anybody - they didn't change the product because there isn't actually anyhing wrong with supplying a boiling beverage.

Please be sure to use the term "3rd degree" any time you use the word "burn" in this context. It's the most important detail, omitting it looks suspicious.

I don't buy tea in the US since the water's never hot enough to brew a good cup. The nature of the preparation is such that there's often little difference between serving and brewing temps.

When I buy coffee I have no expectation that it's as hot as tea because not only is it prepared differently, but there is always a difference between brewing and serving temperature. The serving temp is only peripherally related to the brewing temp. Most chains tend to serve coffee around 160-170 F / 71-77 C.

If coffee's served at 180 F/82 C, something is seriously wrong with the place's setup. McDonalds was serving at 190 F/87 C. They cranked their Bunn equipment to the absolute top end of the serving temp. the hardware would allow. At the higher end every degree has a huge impact on the seriousness of burns.

> Most chains tend to serve coffee around 160-170 F / 71-77 C.

Coffee at 160F can quite easily cause third degree burns. It can cause third degree burns in less than one second.

http://www.burnfoundation.org/programs/resource.cfm?c=1&a=3

No, there's hot and there's "almost boiling" and they'd been told several times to stop keeping the coffee that hot but somehow it saved time. Key words from the lawsuit "fused labia." It was not minor burning.

Well there was some mention of the cups not being fit for purpose and the temperature not being the standard which are valid points, but I do not think it is fitting to stress or mention the severity of the injuries (as many people here are doing) when debating the issue at hand. How severe the injuries are is immaterial to any negligence on the part of McDonalds. That is just logic. To illustrate: I could buy a "harmless" marshmallow from a sweet shop and then kill myself with it, by using it to block my airway.

But "being at an unsafe temperature" is not integral to coffee being coffee(or good). A marshmallow is not being served in an unnecessarily(and unconventionally) unsafe way. If you bought a superheated marshmallow you could get hurt too.

If you define 'unsafe' as capable of causing third degree burns, it actually is integral. McDonald's could have served significantly cooler coffee, but it still would have been capable of such burns.

The severity of the injuries is important because McDonalds had ignored many previous accidents and had ignored a CDC request to reduce the temperature.

Reducing the temperature reduces the severity of the injuries.

Using your marshmallow analogy: if you sold the marshmallows in individual plastic shells and children started eating the marshmallows by sucking them out of the shells, and children were sometimes choking because they were inhalling the confection, and you were told about this but ignored it, then yes you probably should bear some responsibility.

I case you think this is unlikely: http://www.food.gov.uk/news-updates/news/2011/mar/jellycupba...

> The severity of the injuries is important because McDonalds had ignored many previous accidents and had ignored a CDC request to reduce the temperature.

That and also it was a very important element in the PR campaign that was waged. Hiding and obscuring the extend of damages was crucial to its success. It would be hard to paint it as "oops someone burned themselves with some coffee, how silly" it they had to mentioned those were life threatening burns.

If I sell you a harmless marshmallow heated to 10000°C and when you bite into it your face is engulfed in flames, who is being negligent?

Also, from the article, the burns were so severe that she went into shock.

> “All I remember is trying to get out of the car,” Liebeck later related. “I knew I was in terrible pain.” She went into shock and her grandson rushed her to the emergency room, where she would undergo surgery and receive skin grafts.

People might expect coffee to be hot, but they do not expect the coffee to be hot enough to kill.

She suffered full thickness burns. This is a significant wound. The burns were on her legs and genitals. That turns it into a medical emergency - rush to nearest hospital, let them stabilize you and send you to a different hospital that specializes in burns.

Also, the car was not moving at the time of the accident.

Any coffee heated to the point where it is still drinkable at the end of a 20 minute commute, will be hot enough to kill if poured straight down your throat in one gulp. It is up to the customer to have some sort of clue.

I am pretty sure that when granny makes coffee herself at home, she makes it at least as hot as McDonalds serves it. Whistling kettles and all.

In a country of millions of people doing stuff, sometimes the stars align wrong for someone, and they get hurt. It doesn't have to, and in fact rarely is, someones "fault." It wasn't granny's "fault" that this one time she fumbled the lid and spilled coffee. Given enough tries, sooner or later anyone would, as it is a positive probability outcome. But neither is the probability of it happening large enough to say McDonald's was "at fault" of something. Stuff happens. Sometimes nice stuff, sometime less so. No need to feed a lawyer army either way.

It's the same silly obsession with finding who's "at fault" that underpins the enormously inefficient (except for, again, for lawyers) "at fault" car accident insurance schemes in place in most states. Despite most accidents and other mishaps being the result of all manners of complicated, best modeled as random, factors. None of which are a specific party's "fault."

But of course, there's the old adage about most people ending up in law school, do so because they couldn't hack math well enough to ever get into the complex systems classes....:)

She didn't ask for coffee that would stay hot after a twenty minute commute. She asked for coffee.

She was served coffee hotter than other places served coffee. Other places had listened to and responded to the CDC's warning about beverage serving temperatures and had reduced the temperature of the drinks that they served while still allowing people to order extra hot drinks.

Yes, when a kettle boils the water is at 100 Celsius. But you pour that into a cup and add milk. Try it at home if you have a thermometer. Try taking the temperature of coffee that you find acceptable to drink with the temperature that McDonalds was serving their coffee at.

Do you realise that the McDonalds coffee case was used as propaganda by insurance companies? They misreported the case (they said she was driving; that the vehicle was moving; that she sued for and got millions;) they also said "of course coffee is hot"'and did not mention that McD's was serving coffee hotter than other places and had ignored many previous injuries and the CDC warning on temperature.

And as she didn't specifically ask for coffee served at a specific temperature, McDonald's had no way of knowing what temperature she preferred.

What McDonald's did have, however, was a way to estimate what temperature it's customers in general prefer their coffee served at. Roadside Coffee is, after all, a pretty competitive market. If you're too far off temperature wise, people go elsewhere.

Hence, by the standards of "the community", or whatever you wish to call them, McDonald's served coffee at the right temperature. Or at least close enough not to offend enough of them to lose measurable business.

Out of curiosity, did McDonald's manage to poor milk into the cup, and still have it end up that hot? Maybe I have weird ideas about coffee, but for someone all too used to lukewarm coffee once milk is added, that actually sounds quite impressive for such a decidedly low rent establishment.

> What McDonald's did have, however, was a way to estimate what temperature it's customers in general prefer their coffee served at. Roadside Coffee is, after all, a pretty competitive market. If you're too far off temperature wise, people go elsewhere.

Yes. They had 700 previous burns cases that they settled out of court (including some very serious full thickness burns). They were serving coffee that they admitted was not fit for consumption (because they knew it would burn the mouth at the temperature it was served at). They knew they were serving coffee at higher temperatures than other places selling coffee. They knew they were serving coffee at a higher temperature than people have it at home.

And they did all this despite their paying customers not wanting their coffee that way? Simply because they wanted to, above else, be as nasty as they could to people, never mind lost sales, complaints, court fees and what have you?

In other words, the corporate culture of their coffee operation is not greedy, as often assumed, but specifically sadistic. Happy to suffer lost sales and revenue, higher legal fees, and a shattered reputation, just for the pleasure of burning people?

It would be interesting to see the kind of interview processes that managed to maintain that kind of a corporate culture despite all the churn inherent in minimum wage job environments.

Tort reform boils down to "I know better than the Bill of Rights, because sometimes I don't like the way people exercise their rights." It's not much different than the thinking behind the cheerleading for other amendments being eroded.

McDonalds was egregiously horrible throughout the trial which is why they were hit with punitive damages. "Granny" wanted $20k for the medical expenses of an eight day hospital stay and lost wages. The jury watched McDonalds consciously weighing more than seven hundred reports of customers with medical injuries against others customers having a hot cup of coffee at the end of a long commute and saying they would live with people getting 3rd degree burns.

Also, even if your coffee is merely warm, rather than hot it's still "drinkable." If you are some coffee snob who wants a really perfect hot cup of coffee, you aren't drinking the swill McDonalds serves.

>Tort reform boils down to "I know better than the Bill of Rights, because sometimes I don't like the way people exercise their rights." It's not much different than the thinking behind the cheerleading for other amendments being eroded.

The right to defend yourself in a criminal trial does not imply the right to bring in all kinds of inflammatory, irrelevant evidence.

Likewise, the right to a civil trial does not imply total jury autonomy in dictating the punishment. If that were so, there would be no point to eg rules of evidence, judges reducing damages, etc.

Rather, tort reform, or more accurately some sort of limitations of what one can drag the civil courts system into, boils down to looking at who wrote the Bill of Rights, and making an estimate as to whether it is reasonable to believe they intended them to be used to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars for spilling coffee on oneself. Or, more pointedly, hundreds of thousands in legal fees by lawyers.

Did we really have cases like this, back when the Bills' authors were still alive? Otherwise, doesn't all this brouhaha look like it boils down to little more than someone getting paid very well to conveniently misunderstand what the Bills were intended to mean? Paid better, in fact, than if instead of harassing others, they simply went out and solved the problem they perceive exist, by selling perfect temperature coffee themselves.

Tort reform boils down to "Getting hurt shouldn't like winning the lottery."

FTFY

Creative rephrasing of what I said. It does recap my point well.

> Obviously if you spill a hot drink on yourself your going to burn yourself.

If I sell you shampoo with hydrochloric acid in it, and some gets in your eyes and you're permanently blinded, should I be held blameless because "obviously getting soap in your eyes hurts?"

It is my right to buy shampoo with hydrochloric acid in it without the nanny state getting in the way. Sane adults don't blame someone else when they put hydrochloric acid in their own eyes.

I would say that it's my right to have the guarantee that there is no hydrochloric acid in a hygiene product, especially one that can get near sensible parts of the body like your face and your eyes. Sane adults can blame someone when they buy a product whose properties do not match those of what the product is supposed to be.

It may be your right to buy hydrochloric acid and to pour it over your head, but actually, that's wildly different to what you said.

I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

On the off chance that you're not, though: you can buy hydrochloric acid and pour it in your eyes if you really want to, but you should also have an expectation that ordinary hair care products won't have surprise deadly acid in them. Similarly, you can pour boiling water in your lap on purpose if that turns you on, but no one should be handing you a cup of flesh-melting liquid and telling you that it's fit for immediate consumption.

> We drink a lot of tea and good tea must be boiling when you add the teabag.

But yet, iced tea and iced coffee both exist. The temperature required to make a substance has no correlation to the temperature it must be served at.

> Obviously if you spill a hot drink on yourself your going to burn yourself

3rd degree life threatening burns? There is nothing obvious about that. This is not like a hammer but a gun without a safety one, given to people in a drive through. Most could put those in their pockets and between the seats, but some will at some point pull the trigger. One can argue about the idiocy of those that pulled the trigger and shot themselves, but it is just as well valid to argue about why is the safety off by default. Now think of safety as the temperature value.

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