During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
It’s pretty screwed up how the media made light of this lawsuit.
A lawsuit that ended in gross negligence, and the media shamed the lady involved for a decade.
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This is ultimately why I hate capitalism.
These corporations spend tons more money fighting against stuff than they do paying it out. The woman wanted her hospital bills paid, that was it. Instead, they go to town spending so much money with the intent to misinform and spread propaganda than just paying it.
Many of these large employers do the same with unemployment cases and on-site work injuries. Spending more time and money doing fuck all than just paying it out like the greedy pigs they are.
This has little to do with capitalism, capitalism doesn’t dictate that the more powerful smear the weaker into submission and autocracies around the world show that it doesn’t need capitalism for the powerful to suppress the weak. This was a failure of the justice system. They could’ve ordered McDonalds to spend as much money as they spent on smearing the lady to fully admit guilt and apologize. It is the justice system that failed.
It’s literally capitalism. It’s not “smearing the weak”, it’s a company spending money to potentially save money later, regardless of the consequence to anyone else. That’s the point.
Edit: lol I got blocked. Weak as piss.
And that still has nothing to do with capitalism. Unjustly exerting power happens under any system. It’s the justice system that allowed for this exertion of power to occur, if you want to blame anything, blame the weak laws protecting individuals against smear campaigns.
It might not be a DIRECT result of capitalism, but guess what screwed up the “justice” system? Underregulated capitalism!
It’s specifically designed to work for the rich and powerful and against everyone else, because that’s who make the laws and keep the lawmakers in somehow legal bribes.
Capitalism didn’t screw up the justice system, the justice system failed to be impartial. It failed just as much in the USSR. Western european nations also have capitalism and they are far better off than the US is. It is not capitalism that is to blame that bribery is all but legal in the US.
It has everything to do with capitalism
A lot of people around here say “capitalism” when they mean something more like “the Kali Yūga”, “this fallen world, this vale of tears”, “the age in which the Tao is lost”, or “this age of muck and clay, in which we are lesser than our fathers of iron, who were lesser than their grandfathers of silver, who were lesser still than the ancients of gold.”
The folks who speak this way, if you asked them, “Was there any wrongdoing in the world before the first stock certificate was issued?”, would say “Of course there was!”
If you asked them, “Did pre-capitalist kings or judges ever favor the unjust over the just because the unjust gave them riches?”, they would say “Yes, they did!”
If you asked them, “In ancient times, were there rich and well-fed tribes, and poor and starveling tribes, and did the richer tribes lord over the poorer ones?”, they would say “Certainly.”
Which all goes to show, at some level they do know they’re not really talking about “capitalism” in the economic or historical sense. They’re not talking about an economic structure or a stage of Marxist history. They’re taking about wickedness, graft, injustice, abuse of power – things which are much, much older than capitalism.
They’re merely using their favorite snarl word instead of just saying “evil”.
Ok, and we still create laws to combat it. I don’t think “evil always existed, so let’s not have the FDA because it’s not that we’re protecting citizens from bad food, but simply from evil.”
This is such a weird “I’m 14 and this is deep” take.
Of course it needs laws to curtail the worst of the impacts capitalism has. Capitalism is a system that distributes a finite amount of resources between demand that outstrips supply. It doesn’t concern itself dishonest actors, that is what the judicial system is for. McDonalds was such a dishonest actor and that they got away with it is a failure of the judicial system.
You’re confusing actual institutions with its philosophy.
Capitalism is also not the only system to distribute resources. Capitalism isn’t concerned with anything as it’s not an actual living thing. But to pretend that it doesn’t incentivize ruthlessness or greed is simply untrue.
My mom broke her tooth on a small stone in some cereal while all that was swirling around the collective consciousness. She wouldn’t sue because she “didn’t want to be like the McDonald’s lady.” The dentist wasn’t even suggesting to sue for some kind of “pain and suffering” money, just literally the $1500 it cost to fix the tooth.
It’s pretty scary how media can influence us so much, even when we think they aren’t, and even when we think “only dumb people fall for it.” No my friend, the majority fall for it. Not cause they’re dumb, but because they’ve scienced the hell out of human nature and know precisely how to do it right under our noses. It started with marketing and advertising that works well, unfortunately. They’ve cracked the psyche code. Media adopted it. Big tech improved it. Gah… this is turning into a rant about capitalism; I didn’t intend to go there. Eek.
Manufacturing consent is a good book on this topic.
I’m just glad for her that almost no one knows her name. Can you imagine the doxxing and death threats she would be getting if this happened today?
The woman’s scalds were almost enough to kill her. She spent weeks in hospital and needed skin grafts. To make it worse, McDonald’s had received multiple complaints about the temperature of their coffee.
Her lawsuit was just to help cover the medical expenses. McDonald’s didn’t want a precedence of being sued so their PR cooked up a narrative of greedy frivolous lawsuits and America bought this story hook line and sinker.
It fused her labia together. The coffee was so hot and the burns were so bad that her labia fused together.
They had a slush fund set up specifically to pay out settlements for coffee burns.
They knew it was a problem, but decided it would be cheaper to pay off burn victims than to serve their coffee at a safe temperature.
When you dive into that case, you definitely side with the lady. She had some pretty serious burns, like way beyond what most of us would get if we spilled coffee that we made at the house.
If my memory serves me well, she originally only asked them to cover the medical expenses. So their greed ended up costing them far more.
The injuries involved the phrase “labia fused to leg”.
Oh… I can’t unread that…
And you canot unsee it if you ever saw the court pictures
And you can’t unsee the imagined version of that if you imagined what that eould look like
Well then. TIL that third degree burns can fucking fuse your body parts together. Jesus Christ
but yet people will still dismiss it as a stupid lawsuit by some greedy woman. gotta protect those big corps
but yet people will still dismiss it as a stupid lawsuit by some greedy woman. gotta protect those big corps
People, or “people”?
Redirecting the narrative away from your faults helps protect your profits.
both. the corporation for starting a smear campaign and the public for buying into it and not doing their own research
Both can be true.
She didn’t seek out that much money. She only wanted money to cover her medical costs. If you feel upset about the amount then you should blame the jury. They’re the ones who came up with the amount. (Which the judge lowered.)
It’s not about the money. Its about her being as dumb and as irresponsible as mcds.
How was she dumb? How was she irresponsible?
Gee I spilled hot coffee in my lap…let me just do nothing and sit in it.
Ur labia don’t get fused cuz coffee gets splashed on them.
They do if the coffee is as hot as McDonald’s had it.
The temperature it was at can cause third degree burns in three seconds. Please tell me how an elderly woman buckled in a car can get all of the scalding coffee off of herself in under three seconds.
They do if the coffee is just that damn hot which it was.
Yep cuz she spilled it on herself trying to put cream in and then she sat in it for like a minute. No way some coffee just poured on ur arm is hot enough to instantly fuse flesh .
Mcd should have paid the initial settlement I agree but the vast damage from this lady’s experience was a result of her own actions.
That’s what people can’t get over.I get how a jury could get it wrong and pay her for her suffering. And I pity her this experience What I dont get is why people completely absolve her of any responsibility here when her own actions were the first contributing factors.
Even if the coffee wasn’t “too hot”. Her own actions still would have left her burned. That is a fact.
They had also been warned several times previously to stop doing it.
No pictures? Disappointed, McDonalds spent millions trying to scrub them from the Internet.
EVERY coffee shop overheats the drinks in the UK and it’s infuriating. Every chain coffee just tastes like scorched milk and burnt beans and you can’t drink it for 30 mins.
I’m unsure whether, unlike this case, they serve it hot enough that if you spill it, your labia fuses together from the heat of the burns. Horrifying.
It is less negligent to hand boiling water to you over a counter than it is to pass it down to you into a vehicle where you are seatbelted in place.
That was part of the case
Everyone else has finished their drinks half hour ago and I’m still sipping on my black coffee trying not to burn myself…
You know how you know if someone drinks black coffee? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
If only I was vegan too.
I switched to iced coffee years ago for precisely this reason and never looked back. I’d rather have watered down coffee than sit there for half an hour waiting for it to cool. I have an ice tray for big cubes that don’t melt as fast, so I freeze coffee in them. That way I don’t water down my coffee at home and it’s perfect.
Can someone explain this to Dunkin Donuts and their molten coffee?
Ask for less ice, or even better than that, make coffee at home.
Fun fact. The guy who served her the cup of coffee is related to the owner of a Panera franchise that I use to work for. Both him and his brother-in-law (I think that’s how they were related) would talk about how that was their claim to fame back when they we’re franchising with McDonalds
That must have been not far off boiling!
190 degrees Fahrenheit. They served it that hot to make it less obvious that they (usually) weren’t selling fresh coffee.
How much is that in degrees Celsius?
87.8°C
This is 12.3°C below the boiling point.
I always make coffee and tea at 100°C and drink it when it’s cooled off.
Only a couple degrees off, yeah. The elderly woman who spilled it ended up getting third degree burns across her entire lower torso and had to have multiple skin grafts done.
Makes sense in light of their new decision to do away with self serve soda fountains to fight “food theft.”
My rule of thumb is if it’s hot enough to make utensils burn you imagine what that drink is doing to your insides
At home my breville delivers espresso’s at 93 degrees C. But it cools quickly in porcelain cups. Did they serve the coffee at boiling temperature?
82-88 *C, according to the Wikipedia page for the Liebeck vs McDonald’s case. McDonalds also serve their hot coffee in paper cups. I’m not a materials expert, but I have to think paper wouldn’t dissipate that heat as quickly as ceramic.
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I still have trouble understanding this. The last time I saw this discussed, someone said they super heated the coffee, but this articke says it was 180-190 °F, which is still quite a ways below what it would be when you make it (92-96 °C = 197-205 °F). Would coffee normally lose a lot of heat when being poured and this was somehow poured differently so that didn’t happen? Because when I make coffee and it’s near boiling, I pour it and drink it almost immediately.
You likely make coffee by boiling some water… then let it fall into a cold container that soaks up much of the heat, and maybe even pour it into another cold container afterwards, which is where you drink it from.
They brew the coffee the same, but then keep it in a heated container, and pour it into another disposable container (paper cup, styrofoam) that doesn’t soak out barely any of the heat.
They don’t make it fresh for every customer, it’s heated up to almost boiling temperature.
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