[nemo]

Read the actual trial history. Your analogies don't reflect what actually happened, which is why you can't understand it.

Liebeck was hospitalized for 8 days with multiple skin grafts. She asked asked McDonalds for medical expenses from the injury from the coffee and lost wages (<20k). McDonalds offered $800.

At that point she got an attorney. They tried to settle. McDonalds refused. In the trial it came out that McDonalds had more than 700 reports of medical injuries from the coffee that they were aware of. Their internal quality control manager reported that they recognized that they were posing a burn hazard to customers with the heat of their coffee, but that it was a minor concern that they were unwilling to adjust.

McDonalds admitted that not only were they burning customers who drank the coffee straight from the cup, many of whom needed medical treatment, but that this was something they were unwilling to change.

That's why the jury hit McDonalds with punitive damages of the profits of two day's sales of coffee (which the judge reduced). Through the whole process McDonalds was acting like a criminally negligent bully unconcerned with injuring customers. Punitive damages did correct this.

[sumedh]

> punitive damages of the profits of two day's sales of coffee (which the judge reduced)

Why did the judge reduce the penalty and what is the point of the jury giving a penalty fee which the judge can reduce later?

[chimeracoder]

I'm not sure of the judge's reasoning here, but in some cases there is a statutory limit on the damages that can be awarded[0]. So a jury can award any amount that they see fit, but that will be reduced to the maximum amount permissible by law.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727175

[marcosdumay]

You mean, from the several million people they served coffee every month, 700 accidents happened?

What coffee is not a burn hazard?

[nemo]

Something like that. Perhaps you might like to read all about it? I am sure you are aware that cases like this are primarily significant in their individual details, and not in vague generalizations.

"What coffee is not a burn hazard?"

All coffee is a burn hazard, though the higher the temp. the greater the hazard.

Please, if you'd like to reply, and want to refer to burns, do me the huge favor of referring to "third degree burns." It's one of those things that indicates the difference between discomfort and hospitalization, very germane here, especially in the distinction between specific facts and vague generalizations.

[marcosdumay]

I've suffered 3rd degree burns more than once, I'm luck they were small. I've burned myself with boiling water, hot pans, soldering irons, weird kinds of fire... I've been inside an ethanol explosion. I can begin to understand how large burns feel, and the little that I can imagine is already plain horrible.

But none of that changes the fact that coffee is a hot drink. When you go into some store, and order some potentially harmful item, you should expect to get a potentially harmful item, and handle it accordingly. It's not the store's fault if you fail at doing so.

(As an unrelated note, insulating cups are dangerous in that they enable careless handling. It's again not the store's fault, consumers demand those cups, but it's something worth warning people about.)

[TheCoelacanth]

Coffee is a hot drink, and it can reasonably be expected to cause burns. However, McDonalds served its coffee at a higher temperature than anyone else in the industry and had been previously warned that their coffee caused more severe burns that would be reasonably expected.

Had McDonalds served their coffee at a temperature that a reasonable person would expect it to be served at, they would not have been liable for any burns caused by the coffee. This is why you don't see Starbucks getting sued for coffee burns.

McDonalds wasn't sued for serving coffee that is hot enough to cause burns. They were sued for knowingly serving coffee hot enough to cause burns far more severe than a reasonable person would expect and far more severe than the burns caused the coffee served by the rest of the industry.

[chimeracoder]

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns.

I'm not going to link to them directly because they're very gruesome (as well as slightly NSFW[0]), but if you Google "mcdonalds coffee burn", they're the first things that pop up. We're talking burns far beyond anything I assume (hope) you've ever experienced.

This case in particular is one that irks me, because it's very easy to distort the facts (and ignore McDonald's wilful negligence, which was mentioned above[1]).

[0] You can see her vagina, because the burns were between her legs - though trust me, that's not the part of the picture that will grab your attention.

[1] Note that the jury awarded punitive damages - this means that above and beyond the damages owed to Liebeck, they determined that McDonalds needed to be punished financially for their actions; this is a much higher bar than the "typical" civil suit.

[crusso]

Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns.

At least two people in this thread want me to stare at grisly pictures. Yes, they're awful. I sympathize with the lady for having to go through that pain.

That said, I can point you to grisly pictures of car accidents, gun accidents, and animal attacks all day. What does that have to do with understanding the nature of responsibility in our society and the impact of transferring responsibility for all accidents to the providers of products and services that are giving consumers exactly what they're asking for.

Good to-go coffee is served hot. That's what consumers want. That's what I want. What do you think that lady would have done all those years ago if McDonalds had served her some 115F coffee? My guess is that most people would take it back and ask for hot coffee.

As a matter of ethics, I espouse maximizing individual liberty and consumer choice. It's a bad thing to saddle everyone with lowest-common-denominator products and services because an extraordinarily small minority of people are unable to make decent decisions.

[DanBC]

Good coffee does not come from McDonalds.

Other places were sucessfully selling coffee at a lower temperature than McDonalds. While burns are still possible at those lower temperature a few extra seconds would have given her time to remove her clothing which would have eeduced the severity of the burns.

People are not pushing personal responsibility onto McDonalds - McDonalds took responsibility when they admitted that they preferred to settle 700 cases (some including full thickness burns) out of court than adjust their procedures.

Your personal preference is for undrinkably hot coffee. McDonalds could have offered two temperatures - regular and extra hot. Someone asking for extra hot is taking personal responsibilty for that choice, and is declaring that they know the liquid is very hot.

(About those 700 burns, including full thickness burns: full thickness burns are a medical emergency. They can be fatal. They require specialist medical attention involving painful procedures that leave scarring and possibly loss of function. McDonalds made a careful conscious choice that allowing these burns to continue and then settling costs out of court was preferable to complying with national advice about beveridge temperature. You are asking people to take responsibility for their actions: the jury decided to make McDonalds responsible for that choice.

[crusso]

Good coffee does not come from McDonalds.

Well, okay, we can agree on that; but "safe temperature" McDonalds coffee is even worse than hot McDonalds coffee.

when they admitted that they preferred to settle 700 cases

There's no business on earth that does McDonald's level of product distribution that doesn't have hundreds or thousands of attempted baseless suits. It still says nothing about whether or not McDonalds was distributing a product that its customers wanted in the way they thought their customers wanted it - and whether or not they're responsible for resulting mishaps.

McDonalds could have offered two temperatures

As though the woman didn't have the choice to not order coffee at all? The woman could have made the decision to go into McDonalds and cool it herself by putting cream in the coffee or even a piece of ice. McDonalds did not force her to buy coffee on that day.

full thickness burns are a medical emergency. They can be fatal

A car accident over the speed of 50mph (for argument's sake) can be fatal too. Would you suggest that any auto manufacturer that offers an automobile that goes over 50mph is responsible for any accidents that occur at that speed?

[mirkules]

Thank you. I simply cannot fathom why people seem to believ that service providers can be held liable for their own stupid decisions. Putting hot coffee in your lap is a stupid decision.

When I was a kid, I got a pretty decent electric shock from a neighbor's improperly mounted doorbell. The doorbell did not work, so I flipped it over (it was dangling on some wires) and tried to fix it on the spot (as if I knew what I was doing...) and got shocked.

From that moment on, I knew not to touch exposed wires. I knew that it was my own damn fault for touching the wires and getting shocked. My parents got really angry at my neighbors for having exposed wires like that, but I was scolded too for doing something I had no business doing.

The point is if the coffee lady had any common sense she would not have put coffee between her legs (I feel bad for her injuries as any person would, but I still fail to see McDonalds' responsibility here). The worst thing to happen to our judicial system isn't the hot coffee case - it's shifting the onus of personal responsibility to the service or product providers.

edit: I'm speaking strictly about the hot coffee case and ones similar to it. The article goes on about medical cases which are obviously much more complex

[oneeyedpigeon]

People take risks. No-one is going to eliminate all risk from their life. People modify their behaviour according to the risk involved. Putting hot coffee in your lap is a risk, but the level of risk depends on exactly how hot that coffee is. No-one wants coffee of any temperature soaking their lap, but coffee that causes 3rd-degree burns is a lot different from coffee that hurts a bit. I would personally try to avoid spilling coffee in my lap, but I would treat coffee very differently if I knew it would cause 3rd-degree burns, and I would not expect any coffee served to me to ever be that hot. Maybe I'm partly to blame for my own ignorance, but it also seems reasonable that McDonald's either a) remove that risk by serving coffee at a lower temperature b) mitigate that risk by informing customers just how dangerous the coffee they're serving is when in contact with skin.

[blisterpeanuts]

Most people don't think and behave that logically.

If this coffee is < 200F, then I can safely put in lap. Else, I will ask nephew to hold.

Nope. People don't do that. They just do the right thing most of the time, dumb things a small fraction of the time. Some people do more dumb things than they should.

The Liebeck situation is an edge case. McDonald's sells tens of millions of cups of coffee a day (depending on the source, 10 million/day or 300 million/month or 500 million a month). If there are several burn cases a year, or even several hundred, that probably does not constitute a significant trend.

There are thousands of people who burn themselves, electrocute themselves, crash their cars, choke on a bone, and do other things that are unfortunate but avoidable with a little common sense.

You can't protect everybody from every contingency, nor would you want to; we would become a nation of prisoners in soft rubber cells, protected from every possible danger. I read a sci-fi story about that once and it was rather unpleasant!

[Crito]

> but coffee that causes 3rd-degree burns is a lot different from coffee that hurts a bit.

Fresh black coffee from just about any shop will cause 3rd-degree burns if you spill it in your lap. Mcdonalds coffee was not somehow unique in that respect, despite opinion to the contrary.

In this thread, meaning to condemn Mcdonalds by holding the "reasonable Starbucks" up as an example, Starbucks coffee has been pegged at "145-165F".

145F coffee can cause 3rd degree burns in less than five seconds. 165F coffee can cause 3rd degree burns in less than one second.

Industry standard coffee causes third degree burns.

[chimeracoder]

I asked you to look at the pictures because you seemed unfamiliar with the details of the case - and when you're drawing an opinion about a legal case, details really matter.

The fact that you say that this is a matter of "an extraordinarily small minority of people [who] are unable to make decent decisions"[0] leads me to believe that you still don't understand the details of this specific case - including details pointed out elsewhere in this thread (let alone available elsewhere online).

We're not talking about some hypothetical woman with hypothetically hot coffee from a hypothetical company - we're talking about a specific incident in which the facts are actually very readily available.

[0] You also draw a completely false dichotomy when it comes to "individual liberty and customer choice", since that's actually not the issue that was litigated here. If you want to find out the issue that was actually litigated, I'd invite you to read up on the case to the point where you understand that the temperature of the coffee itself wasn't actually the reason that the jury awarded the punitive damages (the civil damages, yes, but not the punitive damages).