I think the argument is that she was unaware that the coffee was hot enough to do massive damage, and did not treat it with the caution that it deserved. Caution is a continuum, not a yes or no statement. If I have a cup full of lukewarm water, I’ll try to not spill any because I don’t want to get wet, but it will only capture a portion of my concentration because the consequences are minimal. If I have a cup full of strong hydrochloric acid, I’ll spend a lot more effort to ensure it stays unspilled because the consequences are much more dire.
There’s a difference between “hot” and “emergency room/3rd degree burn/skin graft/fused labia hot”. One suggests that you use caution when adding cream and sugar or drinking in the car. The other suggests that maybe I shouldn’t try at all to take the lid off to add cream and sugar while I’m sitting in a car, nor should I try to drink it in the car even though it has a “travel” lid and they sold it to me from a drive thru.
cj finn made my next point for me. It is irresponsible to sell a product that is clearly dangerous when used as expected.
I think we are all running around in circles here. It all hinges on how hot we believe is reasonable to expect coffee to be served to us. If you say there’s a limit to this expectation, then you’re right that is follows that if it was served hotter than that people were caught unawares and have reason to complain.
My argument is that no such expectation is reasonable and that therefore we should be prepared to deal with a cup of near boiling liquid. How you manage to safely do this is your own problem. If you think it is worth your while trying to do it in the car that’s your outlook. I you think you can manage in a roller coaster, be my guest. If you’re scared then sit a table, poor in cream and wait a while. It’s all your outlook as a free grown up person. Just deal with the consequences of your actions, don’t blame the restaurant or the coffee.
(Not that this furthers my argument, but for the record I don’t ever drink coffee in my car. Europeans- well Holland, Ireland, Germany and the UK is where I have observed these habits- don’t tend to do that. I find it too tricky whilst shifting gears.)
You mean it’s reasonable for someone to put a paper cup of coffee between their knees and then take the lid off?
To me that just screams ‘recipe for disaster.’ It’s not something I would ever consider doing, not even if I expected the coffee temperature to be 150 F.
When did it become something a reasonable person would do?
My steering wheel doesn’t exactly come with a tray table attached. Opening it on the dash just puts it a foot above your lap rather than in your lap. Opening it on the console puts it next to your lap (better for safety) but right above your cars electronics and on top of buttons or the shift lever. You can try shoving it in a cup holder, if your car has one that’s up to the task, not all cars do.
Cars are not known for having a vast array of convenient and safe flat surfaces to deal with piping hot coffee.
Oh, and McD sells their coffee in insulated foam cups, not paper, so it’s also much harder to tell what temperature the coffee is at.
About the same time it became reasonable to do anything in a car except drive. Food is for restaurants and kitchens. Videos are for family rooms. Cell phones are for satan worshippers. Doing anything in a car that may distract the driver is a ‘recipe for disaster’, IMHO.
I don’t understand the defense of McDonalds’ position, clearly the court decision was correct. It is reasonable for the woman to expect the coffee to be 40 degrees colder than it was, since that is what nearly everyone else in the world serves it at. McDonald’s admitted that the coffee was undrinkably hot when served, was aware of the safety issues, and refused to change policy. With so many drive thru customers, it’s reasonable to assume that people will drink in the car and it’s reasonable to assume that many without cup holders will hold the drink between their legs. The high temperature of the coffee was a major factor in the severity of the burns and the verdict was reduced in proportion to the contributory negligence of the plaintiff. The system worked- what’s the problem?
I’m convinced that common sense warnings like “cape does not enable wearer to fly” are a conspiracy by corporations to dissolve the consumer’s last line of defense against corporate irresponsibility (litigation). Every time a dope like the OP sees one of these intelligence insulting warnings she thinks “Sigh, frivilous lawsuits are the cause of warnings like this. What we need is tort reform!”
I remember reading that McDonalds’ defense of this case was rather lackluster, and the writer felt that contributed not only to the jury’s decision against McDonalds but also the (ridiculous and sharply reduced) size of the jury damages. Unfortunately, this case is very old and it was a print publication whose title I have long since forgotten, else I’d give the Teeming Millions their cite.
For every point made by the plaintiff, an effective defense could have countered and raised a doubt in the mind of at least some of the juror’s.
I tend to side with McDonalds, but not very strongly. Their coffee was dangerously hot, uncommonly so but not unheard of among coffee houses. If I had to choose complicity in the injuries of the woman, I likely would have said 60-70% woman / 30 - 40% McDonalds, based on what I’ve read regarding the case. The woman engaged in a risky activity with a potentially dangerous object. Perhaps the object was more dangerous than it should have been, but opening up a cup in one’s lap in a stopped vehicle is not safe handling.
There’s so much here to respond to but I’m tired at the moment. But I’m still wondering what it is you folks expect McD’s to do? I guess they’re policy is changed but I’m not sure how they’ve implemented the change into the process.
If we all can agree that 190+ degrees is the proper brewing temp, then do you not expect that a fresh cup of coffee is going to be pretty darn close to that temp? Was the infamous woman served a fresh cup of coffee just brewed or was it older coffee purposefully heated to that temp? If it was fresh, which I should hope is a reasonable expectation even at McDonald’s, what did they do wrong? Their product was not defective, therefore they had no liability for misuse.
If coffee can’t be served at its brewing temp, what do customers expect servers to do with the coffee before its served to reduce the temp? Delay serving it until it’s naturally cooled? Add ice? What? You ordered coffee, I just brewed coffee, but I can’t serve it to you until it’s safe? I’m mystified. Where I work it goes right out of the brewer into the cup into the customer’s hand. We do not fuck with the temperature unless you ask us to. Nobody is complaining.
Someone mentioned tea. We serve tea using the same water our coffee is brewed with. Yeah, it’s 200 degrees. It’s surely hotter than the coffee because it didn’t through a big urn. But in order to taste good it needs to steep in extremely hot water. But we don’t wait for it to steep and cool before handing it off to the customer. Nobody is complaining!
And, yes, I’ve accidently gotten my hand under the spigot on the brewer and sloshed coffee as I’m pouring it onto the tender webbing between my thumb and forefinger. Ouch. It freakin’ hurts. The affected area usually ends up bright pink for a couple of days. I’m guessing that constitutes a first degree burn. I rinse it immediately in cool water and put burn gel on it. Workplace hazard. It’s pretty common and pretty minor in my mind. You can’t work with hot stuff and not get burned. But when you do find yourself handling potentially harmful stuff, you take precautions and deal with it immediately when it harms you. Can’t do that in a car.
In any case, does anybody eat pizza? It’s cooked at around 400 degrees. The sauce and cheese get pretty damn hot in the process. Ever had a piece of melted cheese break, smack you on the chin and sticking to your skin with the extremely hot sauce burning the hell out of you? I have. Should I sue Pizza Hut? Or is it a reasonable expectation that something that just came out of a 400 degree oven is going to be fucking hot? Hmmm, I think I’d rather wait the extra 5-10 minutes twiddling my thumbs while my pizza cools down safely in the kitchen. Wrong.
When are you people going to stop treating corporations like they’re your mamas? They provide a product. Nobody sells common sense. Hot coffee/food is hot. Knives are sharp. Cars are big, hulking chunks of metal that squish and can be squished. Use them properly. Be aware of those products inherent dangers. Respect the danger and act accordingly.
CG, I understand you’re stepping out for a bit. I just hope you read (or reread) **BobLibDem’s ** post a few posts above, and think on it for a while. No one is saying coffee isn’t inherently “dangerous”. What people are saying is that McD’s provided an overly dangerous product, knew about the extended dangers beyond a normal set of expectations their product contained, and still continued the practice (how many similar cases did they settle prior to this one regarding the exact same practice?).
Get out the thermometer and tell us the temperature at which the coffee is served. This is the significant temperature, not the one at which it’s brewed. Coffee has ample opportunity to cool down between brewing and serving.
A car is not a good place to be drinking hot beverages. A moving car is a completely unreasonable place to be drinking hot beverages. Just because it is commonly done does not mean it is wise or safe.
I’m working tonight. Upon your request for data, I will calibrate the brewing equipment to assure it’s brewing at the proper temp. (Our brewers are relatively new, so I’d expect them to be accurate, but it never hurts to be sure. Especially when performing an experiment like this.) Then I’ll brew a pot of coffee. I’ll immediately pour it into a cup and measure its temp with a digital thermometer. I’ll report my findings. I’ll even drink said cup of coffee and report my sensations. Perhaps I will measure the temp at specific time intervals to see how fast it cools in a covered cup and in the urn.
I don’t think that’s what Bippy meant. Someone ordering coffee at a drive-through is going to drive away from the drive-through thereby moving their car.
Nobody I know eats a pizza right out of the oven. It cools for about 5 minutes or more before it actually is put into the mouth. Plenty of time for the cheese and sauce to lose the heat and cool down to 120 or so degrees F.
Same with your tea. If you measure the temperature of the tea, you will find it isn’t nearly as hot as you think it is. Water cools quicker the higher the temperature, so in the first 5 minutes it is likely to cool off by 25 degrees, in the next five minutes it might only cool down by 5 degrees. (numbers are just made up btw) The higher the temperature compared to room temperature, the more the initial drop in temperature.
If 200 degree water hit your thumb, it wouldn’t be a first degree burn, it would likely be 2nd or 3rd degree burns. At 155 degrees it only takes 1 second of contact to get a 3rd degree burn. At 200 degrees it would be much less time, a half a second contact would cause blistering and/or blackening.
Four hundred degree cheese wouldn’t even be edible. The temperature of the oven may be 400+ degrees, but the pizza never reaches that temperature as far as I know. That is why you can cook a pizza at lower temperatures with a longer time. The pizza would be burnt by the time it reached 400 degrees.
Since I had the opportunity to provide some empirical data on this subject, and also I wanted a cup of tea, I performed the following experiment.
The tea today is Keemun Hao Ya B, a deep and complex black tea from the Anhui province of China, with hints of port and cocoa and a soft, roasty edge.
As a Certified Tea Geek[sup]TM[/sup] I happen to have at hand a Pyrex digital thermometer, to ensure the proper brewing temperature. I heated water in my hotpot to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, confirmed by the thermometer (and also the vigorous bubbling.)
I poured it into a standard room temperature ceramic mug containing metal a tea filter and 1 heaping teaspoon of the abovementioned ambrosial Keemun.
Upon hitting the mug, the temperature of the water decreased rapidly, cooling to 185 degrees within five seconds and continuing to drop precipitously. After three minutes of steeping, the temperature is 158.4 degrees Fahreneheit.
I have no further requests, and I thank you for agreeing to bring data into the discussion. In the interest of getting additional data points, I’ll take my trusty Taylor instant read thermometer over to the local Starbucks and get myself a tall cuppa joe.
Hey, when you do, find out which brewers they’re using. There has been newer brewers introduced this past year. I’m curious if all the stores are so equipped. The difference between the old ones and new ones is significant.