During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
It’s pretty screwed up how the media made light of this lawsuit.
A lawsuit that ended in gross negligence, and the media shamed the lady involved for a decade.
The woman’s scalds were almost enough to kill her. She spent weeks in hospital and needed skin grafts. To make it worse, McDonald’s had received multiple complaints about the temperature of their coffee.
Her lawsuit was just to help cover the medical expenses. McDonald’s didn’t want a precedence of being sued so their PR cooked up a narrative of greedy frivolous lawsuits and America bought this story hook line and sinker.
This thing has been going around a long time. McDonald’s is bad and people will believe anything anyone makes up about the case. People on the internet tend to be contrarian, so they jump on the chance to say “well actually the women that sued McDonald’s was in the right, I know this because I’m much smarter than anyone that thinks otherwise!”
The flaw with this meme is making coffee involves boiling water. You can’t actually heat water above 100C without it turning to steam. The coffee served to the woman was significantly less than the boiling point of water, because McDonald’s isn’t able to change physics. The injuries the woman were horrific, but anyone would suffer even worse injuries if the spilled water on themselves while making a pot of Mac & Cheese. Like anything that involves boiling water to make there’s an expectation that you need to be careful when handling it.
The reality of the story is the lady that got burned admitted it was her fault. The reason she sued was to pay her medical bills. The real issue is lack of healthcare. Handling boiling water is a common thing, an accident can happen to anyone. Having a system that depends on either having a corporation associated with the accident you can sue or face bankruptcy whenever you have an accident is the real stupidity here.
I mean who would you sue if you tripped while carrying a pot of Mac & Cheese and got burned because of it? The Kraft Corporation maybe? Dumb system that brainwashed people into trying to blame accidents on a nearby corporation instead of fixing the real problem.
You want to appeal to shock and emotion because logic isn’t on your side.
No, I’m appealing to the reality of the situation because your willful ignorance has no bearing on it.
I think you’re ignorant to some facts:
- Boiling water is dangerous.
- Boiling water is something we regularly encounter.
- People understand the need to be careful to avoid horrific injuries.
- Accidents happen.
- Lack of healthcare puts people in a desperate situation where they have to sue someone to pay their medical bills when they have an accident.
- The link above this discussion is to a personal injury law firm which is incentived to promote the idea that suing people to pay medical bills is good and proper. A little sus isn’t it?
You’re only at the level where you’re having an emotional reaction to the horrific nature of the injury due to an accident. You feel like it’s heartless to not have sympathy for someone who was injured in such a way.
I’m at the level where I’m sympathetic for people that have similar accidents without a big corporation nearby that they can sue to pay their medical bills. Just google random images of third degree burns (if that’s your thing) and understand that unlike the images you linked to, a lot of the people in the other images went bankrupt because of those injuries. So who deserves the most sympathy?
Why are you so heartless that you don’t care about people that suffered these injuries and didn’t have McDonald’s pay their medical bills? Emotion emotion emotion!
Dude her labia fused to her leg. I think that coffee might have been just a bit too hot.
Yes yes, the emotion of it all. Let’s bring it back to logic. You would suffer more injury if you spilled a pot of Mac & Cheese over your groin. Injuries be nasty, boiling water be dangerous, these are just facts of science.
Unless your mom cooks all your food for you, then you are at risk of similar injuries nearly every day. Most of us have learned the importance of being careful around the dangerous things we encounter every day to avoid these nasty injuries.
The reality of the story is the lady that got burned admitted it was her fault.
The bottom line though is that McDonalds sold/served it at an unsafe temperature (for the type of container it was put in), to make more money, making it an unsafe product to sell, which companies are not allowed to do.
The bottom bottom line is lawyers want to keep up the narrative that it’s good and proper to sue over hot coffee. Check the source of the link.
The reality of the story is the lady that got burned admitted it was her fault.
The bottom line though is that McDonalds sold/served it at an unsafe temperature (for the type of container it was put in), to make more money, making it an unsafe product to sell, which companies are not allowed to do.
The bottom bottom line is lawyers want to keep up the narrative that it’s good and proper to sue over hot coffee. Check the source of the link.
You completely ignored my point about safety, you’re not being intellectually honest, and arguing for arguing sake.
< deleted. pls find info on fb/yt > …
Or they could just charge per cup
When you dive into that case, you definitely side with the lady. She had some pretty serious burns, like way beyond what most of us would get if we spilled coffee that we made at the house.
If my memory serves me well, she originally only asked them to cover the medical expenses. So their greed ended up costing them far more.
People love narratives that are simple and have an easy to understand moral to them even if they’re absolutely wrong. In this case, the narrative is that she asked for hot coffee and got hot coffee, and the moral is that people are greedy and stupid and you have to protect yourself from them. I’ve often found that one well-constructed point can blow these narratives up though. I was talking with my dad about this particular case, he’s a big “gotta do something about these frivolous lawsuits” guy because he used to own a business that was adjacent to real estate and real estate is probably the most litigated business in America. I’m a big “frivolous lawsuits is a term exploitative industries use to get people excited to give up their rights” guy, so we were at loggerheads about this one. Eventually I was like “Have you ever spilled coffee? When you did, who paid for your skin grafts?” Turns out that when crafting their narrative about how she was “suing them for giving her what she asked for”, the industry lobby left out the part where she had to spend 8 days in the hospital and have multiple reconstructive surgeries.
But, butt… if she spilled the coffee, then it’s on her for being clumsy… right? /s
they gave it to her without a lid when she ordered in the drive thru
Ouch… that’s an asshole move, they deserve the punitive damages.
The fact that someone actually was dumb enough to sue over coffee being hot was a punchline in the 90s and 2000s. It’s amazing what kind of misinformation can run amok in a world where you don’t have easy access to the internet and whatever corporate wants the spin to be, that’s what every Outlet is going to tell you.
Thankfully proper research has revealed that news groups were strong armed by McDonald’s into leaving important details out to save their stock prices… and this version of the story is the one that’s catching on.
I certainly hope that a better research clears up other misunderstandings ( the amount of people who actually believe Mother Teresa was a sadistic serial killer thanks to Christopher Hitchens riding the New Atheist wave of the early 2000’s with his easily debunked Hell’s Angel book is… way too high. The book claims among other things that she ran sham hospitals when in fact she ran hospices long before the concept was a thing in mainstream medicine and is credited for pioneering the concept of palliative care.)
Are you a ChatGPT bot comment?
You /s but someone in this very same conversation posted a comment above basically saying the same thing.
but yet people will still dismiss it as a stupid lawsuit by some greedy woman. gotta protect those big corps
but yet people will still dismiss it as a stupid lawsuit by some greedy woman. gotta protect those big corps
People, or “people”?
Redirecting the narrative away from your faults helps protect your profits.
Shocker of the century.
I respond by asking them for a cup of ice with it. Asking for ice in it leaves too many of them confused.
