Comment by nekopa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nekopa | Hacker News Reader

This is a very light treatment of an important case. It didn't go into the extensive surgery she had, and that her case wasn't for $20K, it was just to pay for her medical expenses.

Also, though maybe not important in this article, was the logic behind the jury's award. They placed the award at 2 days worth of McD's nationwide coffee sales.

But I am glad that they did mention the other 700+ suits filed against McDs, but they should have gone into a little more depth about how McDs used its extensive legal department to squash those complaints. A practice that still continues today.

Edit: And for more interesting reads, check out the Stella Awards site. Now defunct, it was devoted to finding really stupid law suits, and debunking urban legend law suits. The quoted aim was to show that there is a real issue with US law suits, that doesn't need fake "I microwaved my poodle because the instructions didn't let me know that was bad" to let people know there is an issue.

I teach lawyers English, and one of my more fun classes is mixing up a bunch of true and fake lawsuits and watching them try to figure out which is which.

Pro-Tip: The more ridiculous sounding ones are actually real.

Case in point - a couple who lost their 2 year old in a lawnmower accident at day care found out that the day care only had a $100K insurance policy. So they dropped the case against the day care center and sued the manufacturer of the lawn mower.

There was a safety feature that was invented 16 years after the mower was built that the mower didn't have. No recall statement or after action was specified by authorities. The jury awarded the couple a $2M award.

For me the question isn't about McDonald's being rigid and stubborn and refusing to pay medical bills for one of their customers. It's "the right thing to do".

On the other hand, coffee is hot. Coffee aficionados might quibble on the proper temperature for coffee --but the temp McDonald's served the coffee was not "wrong".

So, I could see them found guilty of providing an inadequate vessel for the coffee .. but she burnt herself trying to open the cup and adding sweetener, or something to that effect. How is that the company's fault?

Granted, if you see one of your customers accidentally hurt themselves, the humane thing is to help them --but how was McD guilty of contributing to her injury when we all recognize coffee is a hot substance. When you make it at home you know you are not to allow it to spill over yourself. I mean, I get that McD was callous in not wanting to pay her bill. I agree they were callous but how were they at fault for her injury?

There are many things which are intrinsically unsafe but we mostly operate safely around such things: gasoline, razor blades, knives, medicines, etc.

Is it believed servers should allow coffee to cool down to a safe temperature before tendering the drink?

> when we all recognize coffee is a hot substance.

190 degrees is not at all drinkable (though perfect for out of the brewer) and McDonalds had already received complaints about it being too hot.

So are they supposed to have a "cooling process" to bring the temp down to a standard temp? If there is no such standards, it kind of leaves things undefined and perhaps we should have one, although I imagine a few coffee bars flouting the standard.

The complaints may or may not be relevant, I think because you will have people complain it's not hot enough, or too hot, etc. and in terms of proportion to servings served it was a miniscule percentage. Never the less we all know from experience when we brew at home that coffee is hot. We know to be careful around the stove or range.

>So are they supposed to have a "cooling process" to bring the temp down to a standard temp?

No, just a warning label.

They didn't need a cooling process. The coffee was brewed and left in a pot on a warmer. They just needed to turn down the temperature on the warmer. They were literally selling a drink that was hot enough to burn/melt flesh. They were told this practice was dangerous several times and multiple people were injured, yet McDonald's still refused to decrease the temperature. Sometimes a lawsuit is the only way to get a business to stop dangerous behavior.

There's so much disinformation on this case. For instance, I was once told that the McDonald's franchisee was violating even McDonalds policy by keeping his coffee "even hotter"—because he liked it that way. And that one of the outcomes of the case was McDonalds removing the temperature control from their coffee machines to ensure consistency.

I have no idea if that's true, but I suspect not.

No coffee is drinkable for me when served, it's always at a temperature that will burn my tongue and gums. I always have to cool it down.

A lot of people apparently like coffee hot, so they can take it to work or wherever and it's not luke-warm 30 minutes later. I'm not one of them, but that doesn't mean this apparently popular product variant should no longer be offered by any vendor. It's not like McDonald's has an effective monopoly on serving coffee ...

Your argument is missing this concept of degree. They still serve "hot" coffee. Maybe had they sold "scolding hot" coffee they could have got out of it. I could go start selling "cold" drinks (cooling them with liquid nitrogen) but I should probably warn people their fingers are going to freeze and break off.

Coffee should be served safely drinkable for the same reason that Burger King doesn't hand you a beef patty while it's still on fire.

Ok, so are office Mr Coffees at work serving me coffee the wrong way? Should they serve coffee at lower temps? Or if I use a percolator....

So I agree McD was callous and unsympathetic. I also think they should have looked after their customer... But I still find the argument that McDs was at fault a bit unsettling because we all know that coffee is intrinsically hot. It's not something you gulp down. It gets sipped for a reason.

What you're not understanding is that the Mr. Coffee's and percolators you are using are not serving you coffee that is as hot as McDonald's was at the time of the lawsuit. The coffee scalded the woman instantly--she would have been injured whether it spilled on her or she tried to drink it. Indeed, at the levels served, she could have suffered far worse injuries if she had just tried to drink it, from the coffee scalding her throat and trachea.

Companies changed their behavior after the lawsuit. Now they serve coffee hot, but not scaldingly hot.

A Keurig brews at 192 degrees by default. After dispensing into a room temperature mug, it can fall 10-15 degrees. McDonald's served theirs at 190. 15 degrees may not sound like a lot, but it means the difference in 3rd degree burns is a few seconds vs. 10s of seconds.

When you're up above 80 degC, the difference between 2nd-degree and 3rd-degree burns is measured in tenths of a second. Granted, liquids don't stay that hot for long without a vacuum insulated vessel, but common sense says that you should not serve anything in a restaurant that can cause permanent disfigurement after a spill faster than the victim can possibly react to the situation.

You might as well serve cups of 10 M HCl. It doesn't matter how well you label it as "CAUTION! Strong acid! Do not ingest or touch!" because eventually, everything in a restaurant will get spilled. Logically, you would either serve it diluted to 0.1 M instead, and then keep an open can of baking soda within easy reach, or you would sock something away for the victims' compensation fund every time you sold a cup.

Everything spills in a restaurant. Everything. No exceptions. You absolutely cannot predicate your business strategy on the assumption that one particular thing will never get spilled on a customer. Every engineer knows Murphy's Law, and every last one could have predicted that serving 190 degF coffee will produce a nonzero quantity of hospitalizations.

Brew at whatever temperature you need. But don't let any human near it until the liquid cools to a safer temperature.

Here's the outline of the argument.

1. McDonald's knew or should have know that their temperature could cause third degree burns.

2. McDonald's received complaints and did nothing. They did not even put a warning label on the menu.

3. Because there was no warning label, plaintiff did not know she could receive serious injury which may have impacted her decision to not buy it.

You can make the argument that just because there was a warning label doesn't mean she would have read it.

But on the contrary, if the warning label is not there, she has no chance to read it.

> we all know that coffee is intrinsically hot.

I know that the coffee I come into contact with on a daily basis is cool enough, in a 2-minute walk from the machine to my desk, to poke a finger into it without being burned (momentary exposure is uncomfortable, but doesn't result in injury).

Consulting a burn chart [1], I've got to assume that it's a temperature somewhat under 160 degrees by that time. From a coworker's experience, at that point you can dump it on yourself and end up with 1st and 2nd degree burns, rather than the 3rd degree burns from McDonald's coffee. Still, by any reasonable measure, the coffee is certainly "hot".

The problem here isn't accuracy, it's precision. "Hot" might mean > 100F/38C. Or it might mean > 200F/93C. If a temperature isn't specified, you're likely to make a judgement based on the past experiences that inform your intuition.

It follows that a company selling a product, without providing more precise information about its properties, should provide it in a state that matches a reasonable customer's intuition of what they're buying. I don't think that's an unsettling concept. I think it's one that most people would take as a given.

[1] https://www.armstronginternational.com/files/products/valves...

I have never seen a coffee served drinkable in my life.

On the other hand, I've never seen a coffee served that was so hot as to be undrinkable within 5 minutes. A 190 degree cup of coffee is much hotter than I would expect, based on past experience.

These are the topics the jury received evidence on, heard from expert witnesses about, and was argued thoroughly during the case. Perhaps your questions will be answered if you look into the case further.

Of course this case is settled. But my question is not about this articular case but rather a more general question. And also assuming that cases and precedents can be overturned. Or simply have different outcomes in different jurisdictions.

Let say I prepared my own coffee at home -and let's say I made it scalding not expecting to have to drink it till I got to the office 5 minutes later... but as I step out my door someone runs by and knocks the coffee out of my hand and spills it onto themselves and me ... Am I at fault, is anyone?

How about you bump into someone at Starbucks who just got his fresh coffee and coffee spills over you? My expectation wouldn't be that the coffee is so hot that I get 3rd degree burns.

Kind of like when I'm cooking at home and I don't expect children to bump into me while I'm cooking hot meals? I mean, accidents happen. I don't expect that to happen but it very well could.

To make a more obvious case, a hotpot restaurant. You cannot get around having a very hot plate. Accidents will happen. People get burned. Should we close them down or else ensure the plates are not sizzling?

If people kept getting serious burns from plates at a hotpot restaurant, I would really hope that the restaurant would get punished. If you cannot safely provide your service/product, you should adjust your service to make it safer. McDonald's was serving extremely hot coffee in flimsy cups, and people were getting seriously burned by their coffee. McDonald's refused to make their product safer and got punished for it.

So you think it's OK to get 3rd degree burns when somebody spills coffee?

NO, obviously not. Just like I don't think people should get seriously injured in traffic accidents. But people do and car manufacturers are not liable unless there was a defect or there was negligence somewhere.

I am pretty sure they are liable if there is a known problem and they refuse to address it. I would compare the coffee temperature issue with a car killing you if you bump into another car at low speed. Well known issue and avoidable.

> When you make it at home you know you are not to allow it to spill over yourself.

She was served coffee, they got in a car and drove a few minutes, the car pulled over and she burnt herself so severely she needed several surgeries and her life was at risk.

I suspect that most coffee made at home would be at a lower temperature after the same length of time. Mostly because mugs and metal teaspoons conduct heat better, and people use chilled milk, and mugs don't have lids.

And while we all know "coffee is hot" we don't expect it to cause life threatening injury. That's the thing that really bugs me about this case, is that people don't understand just how serious full thickness burns are.

In England if you get a full thickness burn, especially on any joints or the face or neck or genital regions you make your way to your nearest A&E department or MIU, and that hospital then transfers you, by ambulance, to a more specialist burns unit.

Having been inside several burns units (Bristol Frenchay; Salisbury; Birmingham Selly Oak; and Chelsea & Westminster) I know they're not fucking around when it comes to burns.

> but how were they at fault for her injury?

Several safety organisations had called for coffee to be served at a reduced temperature. That's still too hot to drink, and will still cause burns. It just reduces the risk of severe burns. McDonalds decided to ignore that request to reduce temperature.

And no-one is asking them to stop serving extra hot coffee. They just asking them to only serve it on request.

I think you make a pretty good case for the regulation of the temperature at which coffee is served. And if we had such then yes, McD would be at fault for violating the law. It would make sense to me that if coffee injuries are seriously injurious that we should have such regulation. As it was though, there didn't seem to be such regulation and as such I would imagine that common sense on the side of the producer and consumer would have been expected and in such case we'd have split the fault more 50:50 rather than the 90:10 it was.

The underpinning of your thought process here seems to be something like "People can't be fully liable for harm they cause if they weren't breaking the law in the process." But that's not so. If I wildly wave my arms around in a somebody's house and break their expensive china, that's not against the law, but I can't say, "Oh, I only owe you half the cost since it's your fault you didn't protect yourself against the perfectly legal action of me flailing around the room."

I think the point is exactly that the serving termperature was, in fact, wrong. It was hotter, several minutes after being handed to the customer than the average person's intuition would lead them to expect. And that difference was enough to cause life-threatening injury. That's a reasonable fault, in my opinion.

Then there's the angle of why they did this. Disclaimer: I haven't sourced this, so maybe I'm mistaken, feel free to verify this info. It's been pointed out that McDs benefited from serving coffee hot enough that customers were unlikely to be able to consume it before leaving the store. They were using free refills as a marketing technique and someone figured out that the hotter you served the coffee, the less free coffee was given out, while presumably still getting most of the benefit of offering it. This explains why they wouldn't lower the temperature when told it was unsafe, and also why it makes sense to hit them with a large cash penalty, to counter the financial incentive to continue unsafe but profitable practices until you get caught.

That is how I end up looking at this kind of lawsuit. You can't regulate every single potentially unsafe idea anyone can have. But having a flexible system that makes the risks of getting sued outweigh the financial benefit of potentially unsafe but lucrative practices means we get an overall safer environment, because it aligns the best interests of consumers with the best interests of the big companies.

That was 700 complaints out of 171 BILLION customers over the course of 10 years. This is statistically nothing.

$20,000 x 700 cases = $14,000,000 out of $1,000,000 PER DAY in coffee revenue over decades is also statistically nothing.

McDonald's judged that injuring people and pounding them with lawyers was more cost effective than customers not having hot coffee after they drove to the office.

McDonalds got off lightly.

What does statistical significance have to do with this?

If you want to re-litigate it in the court of public opinion, fine:

It's not the volume of product sold that matters. It's the damages that one product can have in one specific case.

And besides, if they really had a case, they should have appealed rather than settled and then re-litigate it in the court of public opinion. Winning a case is always a stronger argument than trying to prove you were right afterwards.

Actually, the vast majority of cases where people sued over hot coffee that was as hot or even hotter than the liebeck case are dismissed as "frivolous". The liebeck verdict was more of the exception, rather than the rule. Source (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau.... (in "aftermath" section)

So what you're saying is, had they appealed, they would have had a bunch of case law on their side, which may or may not have mattered to the appellate court.

Again, if they felt they would have won, they should have appealed.

I'm saying that the liebeck case was an outlier. The vast majority of judges throw off hot coffee cases (as hot or hotter) as "frivolous".

Exactly. It should have been in the appeal. Oh... wait.

We would have to ask the McDonald's lawyers. Maybe they had a good reason to not appeal, we don't know.

A lot of people do not report issues, so the 700 complaints should be treated as very low ball estimate. Similar to how relatively few people report cases of food poisoning, I imagine relatively few people reported burned tongues/limbs/etc.

That's now how statistics works. Like, if were were comparing McDonald's coffee burns to Burger King Coffee burns and the different was only 700 people we might say that there isn't a statistically significant difference between the rate, but you can't just say a rare outcome is statistically insignificant on it's own.

Statistically insignificant outcomes are, by definition, rare.

No they aren't. First off nothing can just be statistically insignificant, it has to be statistically insignificant compared to something. So you can say that people are not more likely to be burned by McDonalds coffee then Burger King, or at home. This could be true even if lots of people got burned by McDonalds coffee, so long as lots of people got burned by Burger King or their home coffee. You can also have a statistically significant outcome that's rare. Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare side effect of some vaccines, but's it's not statistically insignificant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com