Summary
A California jury awarded Michael Garcia $50 million after he suffered severe burns from a spilled Starbucks hot tea, requiring skin grafts and causing permanent disfigurement.
Garcia’s lawsuit alleged a Starbucks employee failed to secure the drink in a tray, leading to the spill. Starbucks offered a $30 million settlement with confidentiality, which Garcia rejected.
The company plans to appeal, calling the damages excessive.
The case echoes past lawsuits over hot beverage burns, including the famous McDonald’s coffee case from the 1990s.
That McDonald’s case is going to fuck them up. It’s clear precedent for a largely similar case. The extreme publicity around it also means Starbucks can’t claim ignorance of the danger of hot coffee via the drive thru as any sort of defense.
Black tea needs to be brewed pretty close to boiling, and even green tea is brewed at 185, the same temp as the McDonald’s coffee incident. I don’t know how you can brew tea to order and hand it to someone a moment later without it still being at almost the exact same temperature. Tea also needs 3-5 minutes to steep, and you can’t hold up a drive through just to hand it over.
I’m not much for Starbucks, so don’t take this as me defending them, but I think most honest people would have trouble articulating why this merits a $50mm lawsuit. Imagine a similar ruling coming down on your local cafe.
A reminder that for the McDonald’s claim, she only wanted her medical bills covered, it was McDonald’s that refused a much smaller claim of some tens of thousands and instead insisted on taking it to court. Plus they had been advised numerous times previously from customers about burns due to their decision to maintain the temp of their brewed coffee so high for so long after it was made, solely to minimize profit loss. They were scraping pennies and ignoring customer warnings.
“Starbucks offered $30m to settle but wanted confidentiality. We said we would settle for $30m without confidentiality and only if Starbucks agreed to publicly apologize and promise to change policy to prevent this from happening again,”
Starbucks offered the guy $30M with a confidentiality agreement. They were already clearly thinking it warranted an amount in that region, which would only be if they thought they could be liable for even more.
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I get if you are doing something different personally, but its literally the recommendation on the box. When I was learning about coffee I found that water into the brew basket or pour over at 185 would produce a terrible sour flavor, and that is well known in specialty coffee. Tea seems to be more forgiving, but I still let my water hit a boil before I brew mine. First result on google for a tea shop states the same thing: https://artfultea.com/blogs/101/tea-brewing-temperature-guide
I’m all for ganging up on mega-corps and watching them squirm when a lawsuit comes around, but it may have been a bit extreme to call my statement false. If Starbucks did anything wrong here, to me it was the cup not being seated in the carrier, not the water temperature.
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Black tea needs to be brewed pretty close to boiling, and even green tea is brewed at 185, the same temp as the McDonald’s coffee incident
What the f- oh, American units
I was wondering what the heck kind of green tea needed that kind of treatment, lol
Seems like a pretty solid “fuck Starbucks” decision. Good job jury.
The incident:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rmUichSTMfckx3NkZ4rcv-XxibJo2-o4/view2nd Cup is at 2:30 and third immediately after.
Looks to me like she at least attempted to seat the cup firmly in the tray. So IDK?
As sad as this is for the driver, it seemed stable enough when she handed it over, but the driver unbalanced them.
EDIT:
On my 3rd review of the situation, it seems the 3rd cup looks taller in the tray. If they are supposed to be similar size cups, it is clearly not seated like the others.Still I’d say the driver does carry some of the blame, he fumbled it after he had 100% control of the tray.
And although the driver can never be restored by any amount, $50m seems insane by the standards of “normal” countries.
Much like the insane judgements on copyright infringement, and death penalty to people who turn out to be innocent in USA.Maybe ask yourself this: If the driver was drunk, and fumbled the tray, would that still be the fault of the server?
Now he probably wasn’t drunk, but it was still him that fumbled the tray, maybe because he wasn’t focused?The issue with this is not likely to be the fault of whoever dropped the cup, but rather like the prior McDonald’s case that the restaurant was maintaining the drink at far too high a temperature to be safe. Therefore guaranteeing injury if it is spilled on someone – regardless of how it is spilled.
Expecting that drinks will never get spilled on anyone is completely unrealistic. Maintaining drink temperature at a reasonably non-injurious level for when (not if) one will be spilled is therefore mandatory.
This dude required skin grafts. That’s not a case of, “Oops, it spilled and now your shirt’s wet.”
he restaurant was maintaining the drink at far too high a temperature to be safe.
I think that’s absolutely an issue, and I was wondering a bit about that, but that would also ruin the flavor of the coffee. I’ve never been to a Starbucks, but AFAIK Coffee is their main product.
Expecting that drinks will never get spilled on anyone is completely unrealistic.
Good point.
AFAIK a normal coffee machine heats the water to about 93° C, as a supposedly optimal temperature for the beans. I’d guess about 90° would be a pretty normal temperature for coffee.
But I also think that 60° would probably be hot enough to serve the coffee at.
Since our body temperature is about 37, the delta at 90 is 53, but the delta at 60 is only 23 which is way less than half, meaning that keeping it a bit colder would have an enormous impact on burn damage.If you went that low, coffee snobs would probably riot. I don’t know the correct number, though. I’ll leave you with an anecdote, which is this:
I once spilled a cup of coffee water directly on my crotch at camp, via the expedient of not realizing my collapsible silicone camp cup was not fully deployed. I had just taken the pot off of my camp stove where it was at a rolling boil, poured it straight into the cup, which collapsed, and then onto myself. Total time from taking the boiling pot off the fire to dousing myself was about four seconds. That’s basically as hot as water can get unenclosed, under normal terrestrial conditions.
That hurt like a bastard for about 30 seconds, and my thighs were red for the rest of the day. I obviously didn’t require any skin grafts. (I was also able to stand up right away and fan off, and wasn’t trapped in a car.)
If the plaintiff was burned to the point that skin grafts were necessary then there was definitely something wrong with that cup of coffee.
Edit: Actually, for science. I just poured a cup straight out of my home coffee maker and bunged a thermometer in it. 170° F, or 76.66° C. I drank it and didn’t feel even a little bit like rioting, so that temperature is probably decent for serving. (Not necessarily brewing, which is 90-something C.) In fact, I would be immensely surprised if Starbucks did not have some kind of corporate guideline or policy about this, especially in the post-McDonald’s case world.
But as you state yourself, it cannot be hotter than boiling.
In open air, and cooked via thermal transfer, i.e. a heating element or a flame. It can be hotter if it’s been microwaved.
I have no idea how the drink in question was prepared.
Just lucky he didn’t put a balm on it.
