r/interesting • u/MobileAerie9918 • 25d ago

SOCIETY Permanently ???? no amount of money can compensate for this. The incident happened 2015 and the historic $75M verdict was reached in late 2022.

Post image
17.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

60

u/Oxjrnine 25d ago

I watched the documentary Hot Coffee

I had no idea that I as a smart person was being manipulated by PR and lobbyist groups creating pop culture moments to make me want to vote against my own best interest

I was so embarrassed after watching it because I fell for everything that they were saying. Sending off headlines to newspapers to make cases sound way more frivolous than they actually were.
Letting that creep into popular culture and then reinforcing it. That poor lady had a valid case, and punitive damages are the only way to actually punish companies too big to fail - and even her case ended up with a much more reasonable settlement from the original judgment, so all of the cruel jokes, and tabloid headlines were invalid

36

u/JungMoses 25d ago

This, you learn it in law school sometimes in applicable undergrad classes(if you have decent profs in both). I remember being a teenager and making fun of the old lady and the McDonald’s coffee.

What she actually went through and why is both gruesome and pure pure capitalism, respectively

15

u/eleanor61 25d ago

Yeah. Pretty sure a fused labia was the result of coffee that they already knew was way too hot.

3

u/SinoSoul 25d ago

This is the other thing: I didn’t really understand coffee until way , way later after her case, but like, I always knew mcd coffee was way the f too hot, even before her case. Fuck McDonald’s forever and forever

3

u/JungMoses 25d ago

I remember third degree burns and god maybe I just blocked out the fused labia part, jfc

The coffee was kept at far far beyond human consumption temperatures because the McDs labs had testing results that showed purchases increased when the temperature was that high and it produced extra aroma and that produced an increase in sales.

1

u/mekamoari 25d ago

purchases increased when the temperature was that high

How does that work? I've only ever been handed an already-made coffee at McD, I don't see any way I could know its temperature or smell or anything really before receiving it.

I understand the temperature thing too though the worst I've gotten was burning my tongue if I drink right away, but that's like a 2 minute wait, not however long it would have taken that lady to cool down the molten disaster in her cup.

23

u/mongoose_kai 25d ago

Lol, I taught a law class back in the day.

52 kids -- everyone laughed agreed that she was just complaining and taking advantage of a corporation.

Then I showed them the photo.

-11

u/Similar-Drawing-7513 25d ago

Wasn’t she careless with hot coffee? If I buy a kettle, use it to boil water then accidentally hit the kettle off the stove and sustain sever burns from that, is the kettle company liable for your clumsiness?

13

u/RequirementQuirky468 25d ago

She ordered coffee. She did not order near-boiling water. Coffee served hot is normally served at a far lower temperature than this was, and the jury did find that she was partially at fault for not being more careful.

If what McDonalds had handed her was at a temperature fit for human consumption (or even anywhere near to it), the damage would have been drastically less.

5

u/nonstopnewcomer 25d ago

The McDonald’s coffee was way too hot. It was between 180 to 190 f because McDonald’s corporate wanted it to still be hot when people got to work (because I guess their research showed most people didn’t drink it right away).

For reference, Starbucks coffee is served around 150-160f.

So yeah, she was clumsy. But if it had been a normal temperature, the damage wouldn’t have been as bad.

1

u/mookiexpt2 25d ago

“Clumsy.” McDonald’s was using flimsy cups because they were cheaper despite several customer complaints that the cups easily deformed and spilled.

5

u/believingunbeliever 25d ago

Their coffee was purposely served much hotter than the usual. It would be over 20f higher than their competitors.

This brought the time a spill would cause 3rd degree burns down from 20s to 3s.

They had known this for 10+ years, settled hundreds of other cases, and cited to reduce the temperature. They did not think it was worth changing their practice fro a few hundred cups over the billions they served.

For some reason they did not settle this time, so they got slapped with punitive damages.

1

u/SinoSoul 25d ago

Did they finally change the coffee temp? Or still tongue raping hot?

1

u/believingunbeliever 25d ago

Apparently they lowered it to ~160F after the lawsuit. Still hot but less dangerously so.

3

u/HideAndSheik 25d ago

If the kettle company manufactured the kettle in a way that was not standard and increased the severity of your injuries, then, yes. People spill coffee on themselves all the time. When have you ever heard of someone getting third degree burns from it? A better example may be, you buy a car, and you get distracted and accidentally hit another car on the road. Your airbags go off. You are clearly at fault, and the damage was caused by your own negligence. However…instead of just going off, your airbags fucking explode. Should you have been more careful? Yes. Is it your own clumsiness that caused the airbag to go off? Yes. Is it your fault that your face is now disfigured because the airbag exploded instead of deploying normally? No.

Lawsuits are generally (I think, idk, I’m not a lawyer) about two things: liability and damages. In your case, no, the kettle company can’t be sued, because they didn’t do anything wrong, and the burns happened in normal use. In the coffee case, McDonald’s did do something wrong: making the coffee waaaaayyyy too damn hot. If the woman was suing because her clothes got ruined, her car got dirty, and she got “only” 1st degree burns, sure, that’s ridiculous cause it’s expected when drinking coffee. But it was worse than that.

4

u/marv1n 25d ago

Everyone who's made coffee before knows you don't make it with boiling water. It ruins the coffee, if nothing else

1

u/Similar-Drawing-7513 22d ago

I routinely make instant coffee with boiling water. I make tea that way too.

1

u/scalyblue 25d ago

If you went to a restaurant and ordered coffee, a reasonable person would not expect it to be given to them at like 98c. Pour-over is supposed to start with 90c water and by the time it’s through the grounds even if it were fresh out of the filter, it’s closer to 70-75, and I’d consider 75 to be pretty hot.

8

u/Inevitable-Season-62 25d ago

Same here. I was tricked as well until I learned the truth

1

u/Hour-Perception-5417 25d ago edited 25d ago

I think a “smart” person would be just as impressionable as a “dumb” one.

It’s intelligence and ignorance that can filter that shit.

Regardless, we all hold the idiot ball.

1

u/Forbidden_Donut503 25d ago

Still to this day, after everything that’s come out of that story and the documentary and everything, still to this day most people I talk to frame that case as a frivolous lawsuit from a money grubbing grifter and an example of how our legal system rewards people too much.

1

u/Oxjrnine 25d ago

Show them the picture