I’m thinking one refill while eating, and then one refill as you leave to take it with you. That seems to be about the norm with regular soft drinks.
I would not at all expect someone to drink that much coffee. If it’s free refill coffee, it’ll be in 6oz cups. If it’s something like Starbucks, then it’ll be too fancy to get free refills.
It just seemed weird to me that people talk like you’d only fill up one cup when this whole thing is about having free refills.
True but again, this is a person who has a medical condition. Young people are probably more likely to ignore health hazards. Older people tend to be more realistic. Yes there are examples of both groups throwing caution to the wind and those are the people with shortened life spans.
If she had lived through this it would probably have altered her future decisions.
Yep. It’s never ever worked out for me to throw caution to the wind and eat, say 3 candy bars. Would kinda kill me, in fact. Or make me so ill til I wished I’d die.
I know better. She should have. If there were some reason she didn’t understand she should not have been alone to decide her drink choice.
Puzzlegal’s right. My wife used to teach a class in hospitality law. Any corp the size of Panera is going to have legal review any potential dangers from a new product, labelling/signage, etc.
The warnings posted at the Panera drivethru last night included a note that caffeine intake should be avoided by a list of persons, including those that are pregnant or nursing. I’m sure that’s an upgrade from the old notices.
But this is exactly what is wrong with the situation! If they needed an access hole to this box, there are many other shapes they could have designed that fulfiled whatever other design constraints of a hole while also making it impossible to be used as a handhold. Instead, they went with the lazy route of putting a warning on the box and disclaiming whatever responsibility for the inevitable injuries that will occur.
This has been known about in design research for decades, Don Norman was writing about this in the Design of Everyday things how if you put a loop handle on a push door, you can put as many warnings as you want, some predictable, high percentage of people are going to try to pull the push door first.
There are an infinitude of ways that Panera could have redesigned the experience so that this confusion could have never existed while still fulfilling their other goals. For example, they could have a normal uncharged lemonade and then provide tiny “charge shots” beside it where each shot clearly labeled it was as much caffeine as a single espresso and the user could choose how much they wanted to charge the drink up to a maximum amount. By making it an affirmative step, you prevent any inadvertent confusion between charged and uncharged drinks.
It’s depressing that Panera did not go through a redesign process as soon as the issue was raised over 9 months ago and it’s depressing that they’re doing the same shallow response of just playing around with different signage which we know does not work but at least gets liability off their backs. It’s especially depressing that the conversation on SDMB has persisted for so long and the overwhelming thrust is on whether the sign was big and obvious enough and where the liability lies and who is to blame. Nobody is to blame, the system is to blame. This was all easily avoidable and trying to pin blame on any one person only has the side effect of us never considering holistic system redesign.
This is the core to the “Vision Zero” philosophy when applied correctly. Car accidents are not an act of malice or mistakes, they are a design problem and need a design solution. When there are car accidents that take place, we take a holistic design view of the problem and come up with a solution that solves the problem for good. Do it enough times and you eventually get the number of deaths per year down to such a low number that going any further becomes intractable. We do not know when we get to that point until we get really good at design. Core to the entire process is a 100% blameless culture. It is an us vs the problem approach rather than a you vs me approach.
I’ve been trying to identify what has so bugged me reading this thread for so long and I think this is it. Everything about this was just so pointless and everyone is choosing to focus on the irrelevancies rather than just fixing the problem.
If the hyper woman in the YouTube video is correct, allowing customers to intentionally add “charge shots” to the lemonade would not have served Panera’s goal of discretely hooking customers on the caffeine.
But the broader problem is that our society is designed around assigning blame. Hurt? Well, if you can prove someone else is liable in court, you can get them to pay your medical bills. Otherwise, sucks to be you. Your whole family can be dragged into bankruptcy by your medical bills.
The one weird exception is workers compensation, a law passed during a brief populist moment in US history against the pushback of the legal industry (which did kill the first several workers comp bills). It provides no-fault payment of medical bills and indemnification of actual financial losses to injured workers. And has, not incidentally, been responsible for massive improvements in workplace safety.
No, I disagree, this is clearly happening out of incompetence, not malice. The “charge shot” idea was just to illustrate one of the plentitude of ways design can solve this problem. The art of design is to gather all the requirements and find of all the plentitude of ways, the way that actually best solves the problem and that requires analysis and hard work which is unavailable here.
Hasn’t it? Workplace safety is one of the hidden modern wonders of the Western world and arguable OSHA itself might be responsible for a decent chunk of the difference even between the US and Europe. If you go to a developing country and spend some time, you realize how holistically workplace safety has been designed as even a baseline expectation and how difficult it is to transport that across cultures because it requires decades of dedicated work. Arguably fire safety is another area where strict liability has evolved an incredibly professional (although possible too conservative culture) US fire safety is also something of a wonder compared to many, many places. NTSB style airline investigations are another blameless, continuous improvement culture.
I suspect you are right, but that’s not what the hyper woman claimed in her YouTube.
And yes, OSHA is a marvel of the modern world, and has been responsible for a massive decrease in human suffering.
I remember back when the original formulation of Four Loko was being sold. A combination of alcohol and caffeine. I’d heard some talk about it and was curious. One day I was going out for a solo kayak paddle and I stopped and bought 3 cans.
Next thing I knew I was out in the backwaters of a lake, far from my car, drunk off my ass but wide awake.
I think the family potentially has a case.
If it were true that the signage was just “charged lemonade” (I haven’t read all the posts of this thread, but that’s what the first 20 posts were saying), I wouldn’t infer high caffeine just from that. Restaurants seem to like to name fruit, vegetable and soda blends with names like “energy boost” or whatever and often it simply means it has some ginger or something, or just a small amount of caffeine or taurine.
So, to me, it’s kind of like buying “spicy chips” and finding that they contain grated ghost pepper.
It’s a shame with these things that it is basically all or nothing…it was an unfortunate accident where it’s partly PB’s fault for bad labelling and partly the customer’s fault for not being careful enough.
That would prevent any inadvertent confusion - but it’s not at all certain that that’s what happened here. That extra step wouldn’t have prevented the girl from adding “charge shots” because she’s been OK with that amount of caffeine before. Requiring that affirmative step should have prevented Panera from being sued - but I am not at all sure it would have.
Overall I fully support your point about the problem with blame culture versus just culture.
But I’ll take exception to the snip. Panera’s overall goal is not total safety. It is promoting sales by promoting addiction without routinely overtly harming ordinary people. Given that goal, surreptitious dosing is the best (perhaps only) way to achieve that goal.
Now perhaps we could create a social and regulatory climate where all forms of marketing skullduggery were utterly illegal and utterly ineffective because the public would rise up in outrage and promptly burn down any company that dared to be sneaky or engage in puffery. But we are so far from that world that talking about how nicely things could be done in that world has no practical value.
IOW, Absolute safety is not our first goal. In fact it’s not anywhere in the goal priority scheme.
I’d also argue that as you suggest, there are diminishing returns to ever-increasing safety. We in airline aviation are well past the point where the incremental cost of improvements exceeds the cost of accidents foregone. We’re still going farther because the public mindset demands it, not because it is economically efficient.
It is not evident to me that the “charged lemonade” is a problem needing to be solved at all. Even if it was directly causal in this woman’s death, which is not yet established fact. Some mishaps are simply random noise, and spending effort to prevent their recurrence is wasted since they won’t recur. Or at least not a frequency necessary to justify designing and implementing remediations.
Again, we’re focusing too much on this one girl. People had been complaining for months that there was a real issue with this lemonade, the right time to act would have been to notice the complaints, taken a critical design eye look at the problem and fixed the problem. If you’re in a grocery store and you see water dripping from the ceiling into one of the aisles, you go ahead and you fix the leak when you notice it. You don’t wait until someone slips and falls, you especially don’t wait when you watch a number of people have near misses and you’re like, well, nobody has fallen yet. That’s an insane perspective, you notice the near misses and you fix the problem so the near misses never become tragedies.
People asserting that this was some secret skullduggery move by Panera simply do not have a good understanding of how this looks from someone who has had a training in design and has also spent time inside of any decently sized organization. There was no secret meeting at Panera where they articulated a plan that involved a goal regarding this product, companies simply aren’t that competent. This was a bunch of bumbling people failing to co-ordinate with other bumbling people in other departments and an overall lack of standard of care where anyone in the system could notice the problem and say, “hey, guys, let’s just fix this”. They’re bumbling people because we’re all bumbling people and these are the predictable outcomes.
Again, no blame, no me trying to prove anyone wrong. All I’m trying to do is to get people to notice when there are design problems in the world because the actual answer to them is design solutions and that requires a discipline and a culture and a standard which certain fields are slowly grasping towards and a huge part of our culture that just sits back and let people get predictably hurt.
And it’s especially difficult to be aware and wary when “puffery” in advertising is recognized in law as a legit sales maneuver and millions are spent on researching and implementing ways to manipulate consumers.
A series of excellent posts by @Shalmanese.
This is a misunderstanding of design thinking. Taking a design view of the world is simply that we aim to fix problems before they become issues rather than after. There is still cost benefit analysis because we only have the resources to fix a fraction of the problems in the world but the CBA is done based on an actual problem solving framework rather than just a responsibility shifting framework. Often the CBA is trivial because the “cost” is something as trivial as redesigning the cardboard cutout so a hand can no longer be stuck in it. It’s not difficult to do, it’s just nobody is in the mindset to have noticed that it can be done.
Water drips down from the ceiling into an aisle, a statistical number of people will walk down that aisle, a statistical percentage of them not notice the puddle and step into it, a statistical percentage of those will nearly slip and be a near miss, a statistical percentage of those will actually slip and injure or kill themselves. Every minute the water drips, you are injuring and killing some statistical percentage of a person. We know this, we can do the cause-effect analysis and we would be total psychopaths to be standing there watching person after person near miss and go going “well, nobody has actually fallen yet so what’s the problem?”
It’s about having that mindset shift that we are able to predict with a decently large degree of accuracy a statistical relationship between how a product or service is designed and how people will predictably use it. Bad design simply cannot be papered over with instructions and warnings, if the bad design is bad enough to kill people, we should just redesign it before it does.
There are many, many ways that Panera could have had whatever goals it so chose and built the design in a way that this poor woman is not dead. That they didn’t is simply a lack of thoughtfulness.
I may have missed it but I haven’t seen any reporting that there had been any problems with the lemonade prior to the death. People in this thread have said that the signage was clear previously. They have since made it more clear.
I don’t think this could have been reasonably anticipated. The fact that the product has been around for a while and there had never been a problem after millions and millions of doses were consumed supports this. We also don’t know for certain that she died because of the lemonade or how much she drank that day or if she has consumed the same amount on other occasions.
That YouTube video was certainly a complaint. (The one with the totally wired women saying she had no idea how much caffeine she’d been consuming.)
I don’t know to say more clearly that that there was signage in the first place was the issue. We have known since approximately forever that no possible amount of signage can ever fix a bad enough design problem. Adding more signage does not fix the problem.
If you scroll up in the thread, there’s some famous youtuber who covered the overall state of people worrying about this. I also saw on twitter that tons of people on the Panera subreddit have been complaining about the problem.
It could have been trivially reasonably anticipated, which is why so many people did anticipate it.
Regardless of these 4 and doubtlessly many more I could think of if I knew more of the details, there’s also the fact that people kept on constantly posting their near misses on tiktok. It was a genre of video of people discovering they accidentally drank way too much caffeine at Panera. Again, if you’re at a grocery store and watching people constantly almost fall over in an aisle, you go and investigate and fix the problem before someone actually falls over. Claiming ignorance is a straightforward dereliction of duty.