[pessimizer]

As a person who used to drink coffee from McDonald's in that era, it was extremely hot, with italics. My surprise about the reaction to that case was that I assumed that the vast majority of the US had had a cup of coffee from McDonald's. I'd been burned by their coffee before; it was just one of the many risks of my morning commute.

I just think that we rationalized the risks to our safety because a company as large as McDonald's must have done a lot of studies on their coffee and figured out a temperature that was the perfect compromise between preventing disease and putting meltdown hot liquids in the hands of people driving cars. I thought that their goal in making the coffee that hot was to lower their net liability (and hence, the public's net danger) rather than what it really was - a way to serve coffee that got very old.

It was a business decision that had a money value for the company. They undertook it in order to make money. Paying for the externalities in court is a good place for McDonald's to learn how to recalibrate how much injury is worth, and see if their price calculation for raising the temperature of their coffee still makes sense.

At the time, the reactionary corporate rhetoric parodied the position of consumer advocates as requiring businesses to cover coffee cups with long elaborate disclaimers about how coffee could possibly be hot. Go buy a cup of coffee at McDonald's today - you'll see nothing of the sort. Turns out you don't need much if you just don't serve coffee as hot as lava to save money.

[emn13]

According to wikipedia, coffee is still served at that temperature - the temperature was not reduced as a result of the lawsuit.