What’s next? Someone suing a restaurant chain for serving hot coffee?
Children’s games aren’t always games of chance and either way they don’t usually come with valuable prizes do they?
I haven’t been anywhere near a Chuck E. Cheese for years, but they don’t have anything that could credibly be characterized as a game of chance, do they? They are all games of (kiddie appropriate) skill, as I recall.
The case has already been voluntarily dismissed, BTW.
As for the prizes, it depends on your definition of ‘valuable’, I guess; the games at Chuck E Cheese pay out tickets (the better you do at a game, the more tickets it pays out); after the kid has spent all her money, and all the additional money her parents will give her, she can redeem the tickets for crappy trinkets. If you amass enough tickets, you can certainly get up to prizes that would have a retail value of $25.00 or more, but I can’t imagine how much money you’d have to spend on the games in order to do that!
Most of the games at Chuck E Cheese are games of skill, like Skee Ball, Whack-a-mole, basketball hoops, etc., with a few games that are pretty much chance (like the machines that have the two ‘levels’ with all kinds of money and trinkets on the upper level, and a push-thing that scrapes that stuff ever closer to the edge; every coin/token you put in there moves the stuff even closer; theoretically, this is a game of skill as well, since you can ‘aim’ the coin/token to the most advantageous spot).
Chuck E Cheese is annoying as hell if you’re over 12, but to say it encourages gambling is really, uh, stupid.
It’s a moot issue now, but there was never a case there at all – there is no skill-based reward.
At a boardwalk skee-ball machine, you get tickets based on how many points you score in the game. At CEC, you get four tickets – never more, never less, no matter the game. That ain’t gambling.
I know what you’re trying to get at, but one of my personal pet peeves is when people use the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit as the archetypical frivolous American lawsuit. That McDonald’s served their coffee at around 170-180 degrees, over 30 degrees hotter than it should have been, and the woman who spilled the coffee suffered huge third degree burns requiring surgery. They were guilty.
Thank you. Also, the plaintiff repeatedly offered to settle the claim for considerably less. There were multiple prior claims for similar injuries, so McDonald’s clearly knew there was a serious safety concern, yet they ignored the problem.
That’s not my experience at all… just two weeks ago I was at CEC. The skee-ball always gave you at least 1 ticket. But you could get many more. The most I got was 15. But far more like gambling were the games like Plinko, where I got as few as 0 tickets and as many as 100. And there was more or less no skill at all involved in Plinko. It was more or less random.
Well, that’s quite a difference then. I’ve never been in a CEC outside of Jersey, so perhaps its a state law thing. I had always figured it was corporate policy exactly because they would want to avoid accusations of gambling promotion. Guess not…not smart on CEC’s part.
I’ve been to Chuck E. Cheese and I’ve always said it’s the gateway drug for casinos. The atmosphere is almost exactly the same. Not that it’s good or bad, but just an observation.
Chucky Cheese is known for it’s drunken parent brawls not gambling. They’ve had to make accommodations with the local cities on occasions to address this.
One of my personal pet peeves is for people to assume that those of us who believe the lawsuit was frivolous simply don’t know the facts of the case. The woman ordered a beverage made from boiling water, balanced the cup in her crotch while sitting in a parked car, and then blamed the manufacturer when she knocked it over and scalded herself. The assertion that the coffee should have been served at a lower temperature has no basis in fact, is contrary to the National Coffee Associations suggestions, and likely would not have prevented her from being burned. What would have prevented it was for her to act like an adult and treat a scalding hot beverage like a scalding hot beverage.
I don’t know about the (likely dubious) merits of the lawsuit, but the place is a lot like a casino; a bunch of lurid lights and no clock in sight; they have games where you’re just sort of dropping tokens into a machine and where it lands is fairly random. Plus, they have those things where a bar pushes the pile of tokens over the edge (or not). It’s not technically gambling, but it sure as shit quacks like a duck.
Plus, the pizza sucks and it’s like a Bloods/Crips/MS-13 party there, which is a better reason to avoid the place than its similarity to casinos.
It’s not just about knowing the facts, but how to use them.
So you’re arguing that since she knew it was boiling water, she should expect to be severely burned in the case of an accident (in which McDonald’s produced documents demonstrating this had happened over 700 times in a 10-year span?). You’re also suggesting that it’s okay to serve coffee at 212 degrees, is that right?
Basically, no one else serves coffee that hot and there was no reason to suspect that McDonald’s would be anything but the standard temperature, and not 40-50 degrees hotter.
The lawsuit isn’t that just that the plaintiff accidentally spilled her coffee (the jury found her 20% responsible and reduced her compensation as such,) it’s that the coffee was served at unsafe temperature and was a potential danger to anyone.
Coffee isn’t made from boiling water. To use a fact directly from the NCA website (which I’ve never heard of before you mentioned it) it should be brewed with water that’s between 195-205. Damn close, but not quite there.
Anyways. I’ve always argued the same as Swords. That people shouldn’t bring that lawsuit up in this way, since their coffee was supposedly so much hotter then it should have been and that they had been asked to lower the temperature before due to other people burning themselves. But then I found out, it really wasn’t
According to wiki, they serve their coffee at 180 degrees which seems about right. Just recently we had the temperature on our coffee pot at work turned up. The coffee coming out of it was about 177 IIRC and by the time people would add milk and sugar they would would be complaining that it was too cold. (One lady stuck her finger in it to demonstrate). Upping the internal tank from 202 to 204 brought the coffee temp to 180 and that’s reduced the complaints of it being too cold.
I’m not sure if that changes my mind on whether or not the lawsuit was frivolous (I never thought it was) or not but it’s something to think about.
These machines are called pushers or quarter pushers, and only rarely do they pay out. I don’t believe that aiming makes any difference at all. Yeah, I know that the manufacturers claim that they do…but I’ve never seen anyone get a payout from one of those machines. On the other hand, all of the skeeball games that I’ve played will pay out tickets based on the score, not on just putting coins or tokens in the slot. That IS skill based.
As for McDonald’s coffee, let me just point out that originally the woman had only asked for medical expenses. And that there were several victims who were also burned by overly hot coffee, not just this one woman, and that McDonald’s had been advised to lower the serving temperature.
This is something I always hear about this case (I even mentioned it myself). But something I always wondered…advised by who?
By prior complainants who had been injured, including minors. Or rather they had been advised by counsel but they decided that paying out the occasional settlement was just a cost of business compared to the savings they enjoyed from using superheated water – it allows you to change the coffee grounds less often. That’s why the jury decided that heavy punitive damages were called for because otherwise McDonald’s had no incentive to stop.
On that we agree, but in my opinion you’re the one using them incorrectly.
Yes, any adult should expect to be burned if they spill a cup of fresh coffee in their lap. They shouldn’t need to be warned of this. I was incorrect in describing it as boiling as Joey P pointed out, but I was mostly trying to be hyperbolic in order to point out that the beverage is intended to be very, very hot, according to the NCA between 180-205 degrees.
This is simply not true. It was argued, and from what I’ve read it was based on the scientific expertise of a law student hired by the plaintiff’s lawyers to stick thermometers in cups of coffee in shops around Albuquerque, but there is no conclusive evidence that McDonald’s coffee is or was significantly hotter than other establishments, much less 40-50 degrees hotter. Furthermore, several courts have since ruled that the industry standard for coffee is in the realm of 170-205 degrees.
I don’t know if I want to keep this hijack going, as Chuck E. Cheese deserves his own thread. I was just trying to point out that it irks me when people assume that anyone who thinks it was a bogus case simply isn’t aware of the details and have fallen for a pop culture meme.