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Comment by BartjeD | Hacker News Reader

For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages. But for killing more than 200 people and trying to hide the evidence, we'll charge you 200 million and call it a day.

That's less per person than the price of a hot-coffee spill.

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>For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages

Unless you're talking about a different case the actual amount was way less than that.

>The trial judge reduced the punitive damages to three times the amount of the compensatory damages, totalling $640,000. The parties settled for a confidential amount before an appeal was decided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

More to the point, it's the difference between a jury trial where jurors are likely to award high amounts from a unsympathetic defendant (a big faceless multinational) to a sympathetic plaintiff (79 year old women), and a settlement (presumably the government didn't think they had a strong case so they didn't take to trial).

Please learn the specifics of the case before regurgitating this low effort trope.

What, do you think, would be an appropriate damage amount for the coffee spill that caused third-degree burns? Something much less than this?

> For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages.

What's the context here?

A woman spilled McDonald's coffee on herself, fusing her labia together and receiving third-degree burns. She needed skin grafts.

McDonald's knew that their coffee was dangerously hot and had been repeatedly warned about it, so the jury awarded punitive damages.

FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

> FYI their coffee is still just as hot, but they changed their cups.

This doesn't even make sense—water that hot destroys the flavor of the coffee. Why do they not just make and serve the coffee at a temperature people actually expect? Is it so hard to not be an asshole to your customers?

I believe the general consensus is that if they served the coffee cooler, by the time take-out customers got around to drinking it, it would be cold. Erring on the side of too hot maximizes customer satisfaction because the number of customers who would be upset at cold coffee is greater than the number of customers, buying coffee at McDonalds, who have sophisticated coffee tastes.

Anyway, Starbucks also serves their coffee about as hot as McDonalds. Turns out, coffee hot enough to cause horrific injury is rather common.

> Turns out, coffee hot enough to cause horrific injury is rather common.

So much for litigation as a way to incentivize behavior....

Sounds like someone needs to invent paper based vacuum insulated cups, and license them to McDonalds and Starbucks (etc). ;)

Adding to the sibling comments:

There was also a lot of public mockery and political grandstanding, at the time, based on a mischaracterization of the suit.

Wonder whether the victim should have sued the bad PR machine and set precedent, since this year a woman suffered an injury of similar order of magnitude (I assume) and all the papers go "woman gets wedgie in water slide muhahaha" due to PR spin.

Not OP, but I'm guessing this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Rest...

Bulk discount. :(

Bulk MIC discount.

> For spilling a hot coffee cup you get $ 2.7 million worth of punitive damages

Dude it literally melted her labia together. She deserved that 2.7 million and only got a small portion of it.

Nevermind that she only asked McDonalds to cover like five figures worth of medical bills, which they rejected. The JURY selected that figure, explicitly as a fuck you to the corporation that had a documented history of giving people coffee hotter than industry recommendations for safety, people getting really hurt from that coffee, and McDonalds sweeping those instances under the rug without making any changes to their coffee temperature.

Now, instead it is a definitive PR win, with an entire generation of entitled asshole business owners swearing up and down that we need "Tort reform" because "a lady spilled coffee on herself and got $2.7 million", which was explicitly caused by a megacorp going out of their way to be dangerous.

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