Sorry. They won the lawsuit because the coffee was hotter than normal. But you know what, even if the coffee was 160 instead of 180, I’m still gonna get burnt really badly. Don’t put coffee between your legs while you are driving and you won’t get burnt no matter what the temperature. The woman was stupid and she got money for her stupidity.
What? When?
Oooooh…help us, we are so weak-willed we can’t resist advertising!!
Please. Nintendo was advertised towards kids during the 80s, but I never got one. Same for so many other products. I was never allowed to eat fast food more than three or four times a month. See…my parents had common sense and cared about my health. These parents suing do not. They’re just stupid, stupid people who have a chance to get rich because they are stupid.
America…land of opportunity.
Do the children have independent income? Or do they require their parents to make a friggin’ decision for them about this?
It’s things like this that make me really irritated to have the sort of metabolism I do. I’d really have to work at becoming obese, and that just might sharply limit my income.
I’d sue my parents for not giving me the proper genes, but they don’t have enough to make it worthwhile. Dammit.
Some schools now have McDonalds (or other fast food restaurants in them) - where parents aren’t around to help their kids make healthy choices.
My kids eat McDonalds, just not often - certainly not every meal. We eat something featuring tofu or seitan about as often. Everything in moderation…
And on the cheap eating, the Big and Tasty for a buck really can’t be beat in terms of calories for the dollar. Nutrition may be less than ideal - but its better for you than a Snickers bar.
Anyone else think “what kind of place do we live in where there are obese homeless people!?!”
The McDonalds argument is weaker than the cigarette one, but as I’ve pointed out, McDonalds stated that their food is part of a healthy diet, which it is not.
Backstory:
A ridiculous suit in the UK – when McDonald’s was trying to suit a group for slander. The group was handing out pamplets that aid McD’s was bad for your health, bad for the environment etc. McD’s decided “hey, let’s sue 'em! That’ll make 'em go away.” It didn’t. Instead, this group that was handing out pamplets only in front of a few McD locations (no big deal) got prime spot on the front page of many European newspapers (now big deal) – McD’s unwittingly helped them spread there message all over the world. IIRC, McD’s lost the suit, because the allegations in the pamplets couldn’t be proven false (lies are slander, the truth can’t be).
To answer your question: During the trial, when the defense attorney asked a McD’s rep to address the issues they had with the pamphlet, specificaly that McD meals were unhealthy (the slander suit meant McD’s was claiming this was a lie). The lawyer asked the McD rep to explain exactly how a combo meal fit in with a healthy, balanced diet.
By the time the rep said that Coca-Cola provided water as an essential component of a balanced meal, even the judge was laughing.
So yes, during this time the McD’s spin doctors were trying to “debunk” the notion that McD’s is unhealthy and tried to suggest that you could fulfill your basic dietary requirements eating their food.
And Neurotik I totally agree with you about the “advertsing to children bit.” Vast ads were aimed at kids when I was growing up. No matter how much I stamped my feet and said “pleasepleasepleaseplease” there was just no way my parents were going cave in and get me anything that they thought wasn’t good for me or was inappropriate.
[sub]So I never did get that rocket launcher I wanted for Christmas. :mad: [/sub]
Ah. OK. But see, how many people ever heard of that suit in the US? Especially these people suing. I mean, I’ve never seen a McD’s commercial claiming nutritional benefits. Just cheap and tasty. Which is what I assumed the person meant - that McD’s was advertising that they had healthy food.
Just to add another personal example. I’m an adult male who has eaten at McDonald’s at least 5 times a week in the past three years - when I was serving in the military and had greater disposable income I was eating there at least 10 times a week. The result? I’m 130 and I don’t even exercise.
McDonald’s shouldn’t be blamed for some kid’s individual metabolism.
The McLibel suit? I have, for one. It’s pretty famous–the longest and most expensive trial in UK history.
Oh, and by the way, Neurotik:
The car was stopped at the time, and Ms. Liebeck was in the passenger’s seat. I think I remember you from the umpteen GD threads on this topic, so you should know better by now than to spread misinformation.
About once a year, one of our consumer groups does a comparison of the nutritional value of various fast food products (they do the same thing for breakfast cereals - the results for THAT one aren’t pretty). I’ll see if I can find one of the reports online.
Intersting though that it wasn’t nearly the media circus in North America as it was in Europe. At one time it was as big in Europe as… oh, say the Condit/Levy scandal was in the U.S. news. It was gleefully huge overseas.
I always kind of wondered why it was so overlooked here… Fast food conspiracy, perhaps! :eek:
So has this actually made it into court now? I was coming home on the train today and the gentleman sitting opposite me was reading the Financial Times, which had an article on the subject. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bend my head far enough to the side without attracting attention, so I didn’t quite get the gist of it.
Someone remembers me? I’m both shocked and delighted.
I only participated lightly, and this is the first I’ve heard about her being a passenger and car being stopped at the time. But it still doesn’t change my point. Don’t put hot things between your legs if you don’t want to get burnt. The only way I can see that McDonald’s should be liable is if they were using faulty cups with a tendency to spill.
Obiously, however, McDonald’s was liable so what I think doesn’t really count.
And I had heard of the McLibel trial vaguely myself, but only because of my time in the UK. But I never got the specifics, only that a group was passing out flyers and McDonald’s was suing. It’s all very silly, IMHO, and McDonald’s was stupid for filing the lawsuit.
[hijack]People living in homeless shelters often don’t have control over their diet, at least not as much as we think they do. They don’t have the storage for fresh foods, and often aren’t allowed to have canned or boxed food. And they sure as hell aren’t allowed to have heating devices like hotplates or Sterno. Most of the food served in homeless shelters consists of donated, second-hand food. You can either eat what they serve (which is not that great, nutritionally) or you can eat out. Most people have a very limited income to work with, so they go for what fills them up most with the least money.[/hijack]
I’ve always wondered whether one of the attractions of places like McD’s for the homeless isn’t the fact that it’s a relatively safe place to sit down while you eat, it has a clean toilet (so you can at least wash your face as well as attending to other ablutions), and you get a bottomless cup of coffee.
Many refuges here are closed to their inhabitants during the day (opening only about the time the evening meal is served).
Well, as stupid as it is, I can remember when the little paper “placemats” that were inserted between the plastic tray and the plastic food made precisely that claim. I clearly remember going to McDonald’s and reading the (defensively toned) claims that a McDonald’s meal was “balanced,” represented “each of the four food groups”, and listed the vitamins that could be found in each component of a typical McDonald’s meal. No mention of the RDA of anything, just “a source of…”
This was in the early eighties. Of course, my adolescent reaction was “Yeah, right… McDonald’s is healthy. Sure.” I agree, anyone who would swallow such pitiful claims is an idiot, but we all know that there are some astonishingly credulous people out there, who’ll believe anything if it’s something they want to believe. Hell, in a society where enough people watch John Edward’s show to keep it on the air, what’s so surprising about the fact that there are people who think a steady diet of mostly grease and sugar is a good thing?
As I mentioned before, in response to a French McDonalds advertisement, McDonalds headquarters recently again claimed the food was healthy, and was part of a good diet and could be eaten more than once a week. The ad said “There is no reason to eat excessive amounts of junk food, nor go more than once a week to McDonald’s.”
This is from a little while ago, but I want to address something pointed out here:
The warning label has been on cigarettes since the early '60s. There was a thread about this a while back (I should probably look it up). Publications like “Reader’s Digest” were warning of the dangers of smoking in the '50s so it isn’t as if this information came from out of the blue.
Anyone who started smoking within the last 40 years has made an informed choice about its health risks.
Wellll…yes and no. I honestly believe that given human cognitive biases and heuristics, we’re not very capable of making informed choices about matters in which the consequences (positive or negative) occur far in the future. As much as we may understand that cigarettes a) are addictive and b) cause cancer, we make our decisions based on the immediate costs and benefits of an action, and not on the likelihood of dying a gruesome, painful death forty years from now. Only if there were some way of viscerally demonstrating to people the tangible long-term consequences of smoking would I call someone’s choice to smoke truly “informed.”
If it were up to me, liability regarding nicotine addiction would be based not on the initial choice of the twenty-year-old smoker, but on whether (and how much) the sixty-year smoker with emphysema regrets her choice to start smoking forty years before.
Not sure I follow you here, are you saying that if the smoker regrets the choice, then the company is liable, but if they don’t regret it then there would be no liability? I also disagree with you about the informed consent issue, but since this isn’t GD I wonder if you could just clarify the above. Thanks.
