Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveeq1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

What does statistical significance have to do with this?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com