Ms. Liebeck, who was 79 years old at the time, suffered from second- and third-degree burns. These burns were severe, and covered her labia, buttocks, and inner thighs.
Ms. Liebeck was hospitalized for seven days and spent another three weeks recuperating at home.
gravierhouse.com/…/the-mcdonalds-hot-coffee-case/
They deliberately served the coffee at a temperature far above safe levels, and knew it was dangerous. That’s what got them kicked in the ass in court.
This response doesn’t reflect well on you at all.
yozul@beehaw.org 1 month ago
Coffee isn’t supposed to be served hot enough to give third degree burns causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills. That’s actually illegal. When the health department gives several warnings and a senior corporate executive orders employees to disobey the law, that makes judges very, very grumpy. Lawsuits are a stupid system, but they literally the only system we have for legally fighting back against corporations. There is nothing else you can do if they wrong you. Spreading the idea that you shouldn’t sue is only taking away your only method of defending yourself within the law. You are being a corporate shill right now.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
If I spill a pot of boiling water onto my crotch while making Mac & Cheese I’d suffer the same injuries it’s not the Kraft corporation’s fault. Making coffee involves boiling water and McDonald’s is not actually able to change chemistry and make water boil at a higher temperature in their restaurants.
You can easily just make a cup of instant coffee according to the directions and use a thermometer to verify the whether the temperatures cited in the lawsuit are “too hot”. They actually were lower than the temperature of coffee people commonly make at home. Sorry, you got played by personal injury lawfirms and internet meme culture.
yozul@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
You have to boil water to make coffee. You don’t have to serve it still boiling. That is, again, actually against the law to do the way they did it. They were already in trouble for it before they gave that lady third degree burns. They had to go out of their way to set their warmer to boiling, because it’s McDonald’s. They don’t actually make every cup of coffee custom for you. It just comes out of warmer that they get to set the temperature of, and setting that to be too hot to drink would be stupid even if it didn’t burn the crap out of the coffee and leave it tasting like charcoal. They had to knowingly and intentionally break the law to serve coffee that hot. You just got played by your corporate overlords trying to pretend they’re the victims.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Another reply linked to an article (by a personal injury lawfirm, naturally) and the temperature cited was 185F. I drink coffee that’s hotter than that every morning. Note that I take my coffee with lots of cream and sugar. It’s above 185F after adding cream and sugar. I drink it when it’s that temperature.
When people say “coffee is supposed to be hot” you may be assuming that it’s out of ignorance of something you saw on the internet. But it’s not exactly difficult to dip the meat thermometer by my stove into a cup of coffee. It’s possible you may be the one being ignorant of the facts because you’re trusting articles from biased sources without any verification… which is very easy for anyone to do. Yup, coffee is hot.
I interact with boiling water everyday. It’s dangerous and I know to be careful. Coffee, while not as hot as boiling water, is still dangerous enough to burn me (>185F) if I dump a full cup of it on my crotch. So I try not to do that. It’s actually not that hard, I do it every morning when half asleep.