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Sorry, I'm still someone who doesn't get it. Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. As I ver

• thinkcomp 12y ago
  Have you seen the documentary?
• coolsunglasses 12y ago
  I read an overview of the facts of the case a few years back, so I'm recalling from a possibly faulty memory. This coffee was being over-brewed at higher-than-normal temperatures because the McDonalds franchise was being greedy and attempting to extract more coffee out of the grounds. This exact same franchise had gotten past customer complaints about the dangerously hot coffee burning people. I and my father have spilled decent amounts of normal temperature coffee on our laps in the car, it barely caused any burns at all, let alone third degree. The coffee was excessively hot and the franchise was negligent.
  • Karunamon 12y ago
    Likewise with the memory thing, but I think they were brewing it at the National Coffee Association recommended temperature. Anyways, I don't think the 'greedy' angle has any merit to it. One pack (mcdonalds coffee comes in these premeasured packets) is good for exactly one urn of coffee, and you (and the customer..) will instantly know if you reused it because the result is terrifically light and unpleasant to drink (but this implies McDonalds coffee is pleasant to drink in the first place...) As far as customer complaints go, McDonalds themselves had hundreds of complaints about hot coffee and burns for many years before this case ever saw the light of day. Those hundreds are a statistical rounding error when you consider how many cups of coffee the restaurant does in a single day that don't result in any problems, let alone years.
    • aaronem 12y ago
      Well, you know, you can get away with poor trigger discipline for years on end without hurting anyone, and then one particularly careless day you negligently discharge your firearm into someone's head. In what way does the former make up for the latter?
      • Karunamon 12y ago
        The fact that 700ish burns in a few years compared against 10ish million cups of coffee a day is a statistical anomaly that doesn't require the intervention of the legal system? I still disagree with the ruling in that case. They still brew the coffee at the same temperature but now with lawyer safe "Caution: Hot stuff is hot!" markings on the cups. As if anyone with functioning brain cells wasn't aware of this. Yes, 700 people manage to burn themselves in a few years and meanwhile 3.5 billion in a single year don't have any problem and the problem is obviously with the company selling the coffee instead of the 700 people who mis-handled a cup of scalding hot liquid. Give me a damn break.
        • aaronem 12y ago
          I've argued the substance of the issue elsewhere in this thread, and don't feel a need to restate points which you so evidently have no interest in considering. From a purely pragmatic stance, though, may I suggest you hang your argument for tort reform off some case other than one in which someone's genitals had to be rebuilt more or less from scratch?
          • Karunamon 12y ago
            That tends to happen when you dump hot things where hot things shouldn't go. The same kind of idiocy that leads to the absurd list of obvious warnings on products that we all like to make fun of. Irons warning you not to use them on clothes you're wearing. Baby strollers telling you to remove the baby before collapsing it. Coffee cups telling you the contents may, indeed, be hot. Is the severity of the self-inflicted injury the rubric by which we judge frivolous lawsuits now? What cements the case as being meaningless in my mind is the fact that they were not ordered to strengthen their cups or to brew at a lower temperature. That alone tells me that the "danger" here is only encountered by people doing otherwise stupid things. Such as sticking crushable cups of scalding hot liquid between your legs in a situation where your legs will not remain static. The fact that 12 people could be convinced that a faceless corporation was doing something negligent (which isn't exactly hard on a good day) due to a horrific, but ultimately self-inflicted injury that 99.99999% of people manage to avoid holds precisely nil value in my mind because of the sheer statistics in play.
  • mertd 12y ago
    Coffee is brewed at ~200F. Water boils at 212F. There is not much room there. Most likely, their containers were too hot, not the brewers.
• rtpg 12y ago
  third degree burns are extremely serious, it's not a "put an ice pack on it" issue, it's a "rush to the hospital" issue. Considering the likelyhood of people spilling coffee, it's not unreasonable to expect coffee servers to take that into account (just like cars are designed to take into account bad driving and accidents).
• DanBC 12y ago
  McDonalds had ignored requests from CDC about correct brew temperature of coffee. They were serving extra hot coffee despite being asked not to, and despite having had several previous accidents where people were injured. She initially asked for her medical costs to be covered. McDonalds declined, so she went to court. Full thickness burns are not a trivial injury. She was at risk of death. Treatment is painful and takes a long time. She would have been left with scarring and perhaps loss of function - because a fast food chain didn't care about customer safety. Do you have access to a thermometer? Try measuring the temperature of a cup of coffee that you make at home tree minutes after you've made it.
  • ams6110 12y ago
    Most McDonalds use standard commercial Bunn coffee makers. Their coffee is about the same temperature as any other restaurant that uses those.
    • joezydeco 12y ago
      Having worked in an actual McDonald's store back in those days, the holding temperatures on the coffee pots were set higher than normal drinking temperature. The reasoning for this was because people would buy their coffee in the drive-thru or lobby and take it home to drink. The whole concept of actually drinking it in the car was not considered when the holding temps were specified by corporate, not to mention spill-type accidents.
      • phyzome 12y ago
        That may be why the temperature was set the way it was initially, but a big part of the court case was that they had had many instances of people burning themselves on the coffee and had decided it was cheaper to settle repeatedly.
        • joezydeco 12y ago
          Sorry, I was only rebutting the parent comment about how the coffee urns were not set to a temperature different than any other restaurant.
• stormbrew 12y ago
  That coffee you carefully sipped on probably wasn't as hot as the coffee she spilled on her lap. It's pretty unlikely it was hot enough that if you'd spilled it you would have required re-constructive surgery on your genitals.
  • michaelochurch 12y ago
    That coffee you carefully sipped on probably wasn't as hot as the coffee she spilled on her lap. It's pretty unlikely it was hot enough that if you'd spilled it you would have required re-constructive surgery on your genitals. He said 195 - 205 °F, which would do that kind of damage, pretty much instantly. That said, I find it unlikely that most people actually enjoy coffee that is that hot. When coffee burns your tongue and you have that annoying (thankfully, temporary) lack of taste for a couple days, that's typically around 180 °F.
• rayiner 12y ago
  I think one fact that goes ignored is that McD's whole MO is selling coffee to people in cars, a higher risk situation. I think the reasonable temperature to serve coffee in that situation isn't the same as for when you're in a cafe.
  • crusso 12y ago
    I dare say that if you spilled even 130F coffee in your lap while driving down the freeway, you could easily cause a fatal accident. As a society, do we expect McDonalds to make that decision for us and just not sell coffee in the drive-thru?
    • andrewguenther 12y ago
      But you're posing a theoretical situation completely different than the one actually involved in the case. McDonalds was grossly negligent in serving their coffee at a temperature well above necessary, hotter than anyone in the industry. Starbucks won't even brew your coffee that hot (if you ask for anything over 180 degrees they may say yes, but won't actually do it). Much of these cases is based on reasonable expectation. Would you ever expect your coffee to be so hot that it could melt your skin? No.
      • Crito 12y ago
        If that coffee had been 180F, the outcome would have been the same. Perhaps slightly less tissue damage, but we would still be talking about third degree burns. It think it is illuminating that so many people believe that Mcdonalds no longer serves their coffee that hot, but in reality, the only changes they have made in response to that lawsuit are changing their packaging, including adding warning labels. If you go to Mcdonalds and buy some coffee today, it could be just as hot as the coffee that that woman bought. So to address this question: > "Would you ever expect your coffee to be so hot that it could melt your skin? No." You really should, because it still is!
• Tuna-Fish 12y ago
  > Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. As I very carefully sipped my fresh Starbucks coffee today at the mall, Starbucks coffee is not served anywhere near that hot. By their corporate guidance, the normal acceptable range of temperature for coffee served to customers is 145-165F. If you poured that in your lap, it would be very unlikely for you to receive third degree burns. The burn risk of water goes up very rapidly as temperature is increased above that. This is the entire point of the court case -- nearly everyone else in the country served coffee ~30-40F cooler than Mac, due to having found the risks too great, yet even after hundreds of complaints, MacDonalds decided to keep their temperature higher.
  • crusso 12y ago
    Okay, so let's say it's 165F and I spill a cup on someone. There's still going to be an injury. Scalding burns can occur at temperatures down to 125F or so. Whose fault is it? Does Starbucks have to lower the temperature of the coffee they're serving to maybe 115F in order to avoid responsibility? If I spill it in someone's eye, that may still cause an injury. Does Starbucks need to serve their hot coffee at 98.6F? I don't know. It just starts to sound ridiculous on how sellers are supposed to completely protect us from ourselves when we misuse the products we buy. WalMart sells guns, and those can be horribly misused quite easily.
    • tbrake 12y ago
      I think it should be made clear that someone sympathetic to Liebeck's case is not necessarily in favor of treating all coffee spills the same nor in favor of this transparently constructed slippery slope towards nanny-statism you're building. Nor are they under any compulsion to defend it. The details of the case are there for all to see and in no way do they paint a picture of common coffee incidents, despite the gratuitously oversimplified and cliched versions pandered to us by a generation of comics.
    • sitkack 12y ago
      Why don't you go look at the pictures.
• aaronem 12y ago
  Your opinion isn't unreasonable per se, but the jury which evaluated the merits of Liebeck's claims disagreed, and it's as simple as that; the opinion which matters, from a legal perspective, is that of the jury which considered and ruled on the case. It's hard to blame them, too, given the facts of the matter; even the Priceonomics article considerably understates the severity of her injuries, as is common even in the most sympathetic recountings of the tale, because phrases like "external genitalia essentially destroyed" aren't pleasant either to write or to read -- or to imagine; of all the places on the human body where it's possible to sustain full-thickness third-degree burns, that's got to be the most awful. (Which says nothing of the expenses involved in surgical repair and follow-up care; given the extent of both which Liebeck's injuries required, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that her total medical expenses were pretty closely comparable to the total figure awarded her by the jury.) Had I been on that jury, I feel certain I'd have argued for finding in Liebeck's favor from the start. Had you been on the same jury, perhaps you'd have argued otherwise -- or perhaps not; it's awfully easy to play Monday-morning quarterback on stuff like this, when everything looks so much simpler than it does from within the jury box.
  • SilasX 12y ago
    >Your opinion isn't unreasonable per se, but the jury which evaluated the merits of Liebeck's claims disagreed, and it's as simple as that; the opinion which matters, from a legal perspective, is that of the jury which considered and ruled on the case. Perhaps I misunderstood you, but it sounds like you just defined away the possibility of systematic, correctable jury error, the very thing we have eg rules of evidence for.
• andrewtbham 12y ago
  The downside of cases like this is, if they stand, we end up with cold coffee. We end up with no products or services that have any risks. We all get treated like morons because of liability reasons. And we will have to pay a premium for any product that can be misused. Thankfully, coffee is still served at the same temperatures, and the only change was added a warning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...
  • andrewguenther 12y ago
    No, we wouldn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
    • mindslight 12y ago
      Different people enjoy their coffee at different temperatures. Those who enjoy drinking steam should be able to make that choice without being "protected" from themselves. I'd love it if the serving temperature of the coffee became more of a prominent option - I personally have to let freshly brewed coffee sit for ~20 minutes to be drinkable, and I even go so far as to delay adding cream (if I am going to) so that it loses heat quicker. But I still respect that my preference isn't universal.
      • andrewguenther 12y ago
        Did you miss the part where the coffee was hot enough to melt skin and incur third degree burns? If you want that, then yes, I would say you need to be protected from yourself.
        • aaronem 12y ago
          I wouldn't go so far as to say that such a person needs to be protected from himself. But, as with any other bizarre fetish revolving around self-harm, the proper place to indulge it is at home.
        • 12y ago
• akira2501 12y ago
  The jury made a number of findings in the case, one of which was that the warning on the cup wasn't large enough nor sufficient enough to convey the dangers of the temperature of coffee that they serve. I'm sure they also took into consideration that Stella Liebeck originally asked for $20,000 for damages and had tried to negotiate several times before the case went to trial; she clearly went to some length to avoid this.
  • SilasX 12y ago
    >The jury made a number of findings in the case, one of which was that the warning on the cup wasn't large enough nor sufficient enough to convey the dangers of the temperature of coffee that they serve. So what warning difference resulted from this case? And would Liebeck really have acted any differently had that been the warning all along?
    • akira2501 12y ago
      What warning difference? It's hard to find any definitive answers, but the case happened in 1992. Based upon my own recollections, this was the time where every fast-food chain started putting warnings on everything. McDonald's even added warnings to their hot apple pies and other "served hot" foods. Would Liebeck have acted differently? That's not the objective of the jury in this case, especially considering that McDonald's conceded that their warnings were likely inadequate. To the extent that it is relevant, the jury did find Stella Liebeck 20% at fault for the accident and so the damage award was adjusted accordingly.
      • SilasX 12y ago
        I'm just asking the natural follow-up question to the claim that McDonald's is partially at fault for insufficient warning. If you believe that Liebeck would have done the same thing with or without the improvement to the warning, you can't really blame the substandard warning.
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  Sorry, I'm still someone who doesn't get it. Coffee is brewed hot (195 - 205 degrees F), and I personally like it to be freshly brewed as I drink it. Detail often missed: she had a lid on the styrofoam cup, properly placed. It wasn't an open cup. The cup and lid were of low quality and, while they passed at lower temperatures, deformed at the serving temperature, enough that the lid popped off, causing the spill. In addition to the serving temperature, one aspect of McDonalds's liability was the quality of the cups and lids: squeezing a coffee cup, with contents at the serving temperature, shouldn't cause the lid to pop.
  • malandrew 12y ago
    Yup, establishments shouldn't even serve liquids in inadequate containers. Either the customer should provide their own travel mug (such as a zojirushi or thermos nissan mug) or they should provide much safer disposable mugs. The crap cups that McDonalds offers are simply not up to the task. If necessary, they can do the same thing as SF does with the bag fee: -- coffee in your own mug costs like 69 to 99 cents. -- coffee in a disposable mug that is adequately safe costs 99 cents plus the cost of the safe mug. TBH, even for situations where safety isn't a concern, I'd love to see the bag fee concept extended to pretty much everywhere where disposable containers are used.
    • mindslight 12y ago
      As much as I'd like to see less general waste, it's important to keep in mind that any large disposable hot coffee cup is a flimsy piece junk with the lid removed, millions are sold per day, those lids even sometimes pop off, and yet we're talking about a 22 year old case for its remarkability.
      • aaronem 12y ago
        Is it remarkable because of how rare it is for admittedly insufficient disposable coffee cups to negligently discharge their contents all over their users, or because of how rare it is that such discharge results in life-threatening injuries and years of reconstructive treatment to try to repair destroyed genitals?
• orbitingpluto 12y ago
  I think the crux of the matter with regards to the coffee temperature is that it's a drive thru restaurant. While handing over a live chainsaw is at best inadvisable, it is all the more so to throw a live chainsaw into the juggling pattern of a clown on a unicycle.
  • gscott 12y ago
    Echoing your point, I can't tell you how many spilled soda's have happened at the drive through with me. Sometimes the lids are not put on right and when I go to grab the cup it collapses spilling into my lap.
• nemo 12y ago
  Read the actual trial history. Your analogies don't reflect what actually happened, which is why you can't understand it. Liebeck was hospitalized for 8 days with multiple skin grafts. She asked asked McDonalds for medical expenses from the injury from the coffee and lost wages (<20k). McDonalds offered $800. At that point she got an attorney. They tried to settle. McDonalds refused. In the trial it came out that McDonalds had more than 700 reports of medical injuries from the coffee that they were aware of. 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's why the jury hit McDonalds with punitive damages of the profits of two day's sales of coffee (which the judge reduced). Through the whole process McDonalds was acting like a criminally negligent bully unconcerned with injuring customers. Punitive damages did correct this.
  • marcosdumay 12y ago
    You mean, from the several million people they served coffee every month, 700 accidents happened? What coffee is not a burn hazard?
    • nemo 12y ago
      Something like that. Perhaps you might like to read all about it? I am sure you are aware that cases like this are primarily significant in their individual details, and not in vague generalizations. "What coffee is not a burn hazard?" All coffee is a burn hazard, though the higher the temp. the greater the hazard. Please, if you'd like to reply, and want to refer to burns, do me the huge favor of referring to "third degree burns." It's one of those things that indicates the difference between discomfort and hospitalization, very germane here, especially in the distinction between specific facts and vague generalizations.
      • marcosdumay 12y ago