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The question is - what is the right temperature for hot coffee to be called hot? Coffee served by McD (180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit) will give a person third-

• emn13 12y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to assume it was just 80% the seller's fault, however. Dealing with hot liquids can be dangerous, yes. But you need a good portion of bad luck to suffer burns serious enough to require surgery simply because there's just not that much coffee in a cup (indeed, its conceivable she would have healed without surgery, albeit with more scarring). That's not to say the seller is faultless - but the verdict still strikes me as entirely disproportionate. Then again, that's the norm nowadays, isn't it?
  • Retric 12y ago
    Without surgery there is a significant risk she would have died. I understand people get stuck on the 'coffee' aspect, but many acids cause similar levels of tissue damage. There is a huge difference between water at 140f and 190f. To put things in perspective an autoclave at 134 °C for three minutes is as effective as 121 °C for 15 minutes. Steam at 134 °C can achieve in three minutes the same sterility that hot air at 160 °C can take two hours to achieve. Granted, 249.8F = 121 C, but water can transfer a lot of heat vary quickly.
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    • emn13 12y ago
      The amount of liquid in a coffee cup is, however, limited. Furthermore, steam is a lot more dangerous due to the heat freed in condensation. Furthermore, there's a pretty large difference between 134 °C and 90. Finally, I don't think the mechanics of destroying infectious agents is really a great analogy for the mechanics of skin burns: the speed of reactions indeed increases non-linearly, yet the energy increases linearly. The energy in a coffee cup isn't nearly enough to damage the entire body; therefore the amount of damage is likely linked to the amount of energy released. Not that I'm volunteering for an experiment, admittedly. You mention the amount of time needed for serious burns to occur, yet that amount of time is huge compared to the time needed for water (or coffee) will flow away off or for people will to react. For her to remain exposed to the full load of coffee for around 12-15 seconds requires a pretty odd set of circumstances. For those burns to be large enough to be life-threatening normally requires a large surface area to be burnt, and that requires a large amount of coffee for a long time. (The 12-15 number is from wikipedia which says her lawyers produced evidence that this is the duration t 82 degrees celsius that "may produce third-degree burns"). Of course, there's the complicating factor here that she was quite old; at 79 she would not have been as resilient as younger person. And while that's a terrible shame, it's unreasonable to blame macdonalds for aging. Reading, she weighed just 47kg before her injury, which is low. I don't believe that a healthy person would have sustained her injuries. It sounds implausible that she could have managed to sustain those kind of injuries given the circumstances - unless some other factors played a role (such as frailty due to aging). It's terrible she suffered as she did, but I still don't see how that could have been reasonably foreseen by macdonalds (and therefore the verdict seems unreasonable). The point of the lawsuit isn't (just) about what happened to her, but critically also about the degree to which MacDonalds' was taking unreasonable risks. And as wikipedia points out, there have been many, many similar lawsuits, that apparently were not successful. (And note that coffee is still served at that temperature).
      • Retric 12y ago
        Are you trying to argue that 3rd degree burns over 5+% of your body is not somehow a serious medical issue? Or that being younger or heaver somehow adds protection to your skin? As to water vs steam, steam has effectively a much higher heat capacity but far lower density. 90c water can cause 3rd degree burns in as little as 2 seconds but clothing generally extends the exposure duration significantly. PS: In the end it was a low cost lawsuit which was settled for presumably less than 600k and well within the cost of doing business. They changed cup design not temperature, but that's about it. As far as their concerned the issue was not the actual cost but discouraging people from suing in the future as it's been 20 years without a repeat.
  • PM_Tech 12y ago
    You have been voted down but what they have failed to add is the following - Mcdonalds have not changed the temperature of their coffee and the legal precedence has not been replicated. Probably because hot coffee causes injuries when spilled and the case was, as McDonalds maintain, a legal fluke. She got lucky. In McMahon v. Bunn Matic Corporation (1998), Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote a unanimous opinion affirming dismissal of a similar lawsuit against coffeemaker manufacturer Bunn-O-Matic, finding that 179 °F (82 °C) hot coffee was not "unreasonably dangerous".[21] In Bogle v. McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd. (2002), a similar lawsuit in England failed when the court rejected the claim that McDonald's could have avoided injury by serving coffee at a lower temperature.[22] Since Liebeck, major vendors of coffee, including Chick-Fil-A,[23] Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, Wendy's, Burger King,[24] hospitals,[25] and McDonald's [26] have been defendants in similar lawsuits over coffee-related burns. The courts in these lawsuits did not find hot coffee unreasonably dangerous or defectively manufactured. Judge Easterbrook: "The smell (and therefore the taste) of coffee depends heavily on the oils containing aromatic compounds that are dissolved out of the beans during the brewing process. Brewing temperature should be close to 200 °F [93 °C] to dissolve them effectively, but without causing the premature breakdown of these delicate molecules. Coffee smells and tastes best when these aromatic compounds evaporate from the surface of the coffee as it is being drunk. Compounds vital to flavor have boiling points in the range of 150–160 °F [66–71 °C], and the beverage therefore tastes best when it is this hot and the aromatics vaporize as it is being drunk. For coffee to be 150 °F when imbibed, it must be hotter in the pot. Pouring a liquid increases its surface area and cools it; more heat is lost by contact with the cooler container; if the consumer adds cream and sugar (plus a metal spoon to stir them) the liquid's temperature falls again. If the consumer carries the container out for later consumption, the beverage cools still further." McMahon v. Bunn Matic Corporation, 150 F.3d 651 (7th Cir. 1997) Judge Field of the Queen's Bench wrote: "If this submission be right, McDonald's should not have served drinks at any temperature which would have caused a bad scalding injury. The evidence is that tea or coffee served at a temperature of 65 °C [149 °F] will cause a deep thickness burn if it is in contact with the skin for just two seconds. Thus, if McDonald’s were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55 °C and 60 °C. [131–140 °F] But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85 °C and 95 °C. [185–203 °F] Further, people generally like to allow a hot drink to cool to the temperature they prefer. Accordingly, I have no doubt that tea and coffee served at between 55 °C and 60 °C would not have been acceptable to McDonald's customers. Indeed, on the evidence, I find that the public want to be able to buy tea and coffee served hot, that is to say at a temperature of at least 65 °C, even though they know (as I think they must be taken to do for the purposes of answering issues (1) and (2)) that there is a risk of a scalding injury if the drink is spilled." Bogle & Ors v McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd. [2002] EWHC 490, at 33 Virginia Record (Madison County Record, Inc). Retrieved 2013-03-22.
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  • pessimizer 12y ago
    As a person who used to drink coffee from McDonald's in that era, it was extremely hot, with italics. My surprise about the reaction to that case was that I assumed that the vast majority of the US had had a cup of coffee from McDonald's. I'd been burned by their coffee before; it was just one of the many risks of my morning commute. I just think that we rationalized the risks to our safety because a company as large as McDonald's must have done a lot of studies on their coffee and figured out a temperature that was the perfect compromise between preventing disease and putting meltdown hot liquids in the hands of people driving cars. I thought that their goal in making the coffee that hot was to lower their net liability (and hence, the public's net danger) rather than what it really was - a way to serve coffee that got very old. It was a business decision that had a money value for the company. They undertook it in order to make money. Paying for the externalities in court is a good place for McDonald's to learn how to recalibrate how much injury is worth, and see if their price calculation for raising the temperature of their coffee still makes sense. At the time, the reactionary corporate rhetoric parodied the position of consumer advocates as requiring businesses to cover coffee cups with long elaborate disclaimers about how coffee could possibly be hot. Go buy a cup of coffee at McDonald's today - you'll see nothing of the sort. Turns out you don't need much if you just don't serve coffee as hot as lava to save money.
    • emn13 12y ago
      According to wikipedia, coffee is still served at that temperature - the temperature was not reduced as a result of the lawsuit.