Who was in the right?

>the coffee melted the nylon
This is a physical impossibility

Liberal law geeks have really gotten people to swallow some shit on this one.
Before the 90s, everyone drank pipping hot coffee. All places sold it this way because if you didnt, old people would raise hell.
People knew that hot coffee was a dangerous substance
Now the world is safer and i hate it.

Nigga if you sell a dangerous substance it's perfectly fine that you should shoulder the consequence if you hurt people with it.

stop lying. it was a scald.

the cup said fucking caution, didn't it? she knew it was hot.

Shouldn't you be furiously masturbating to the idea of free market capitalism somewhere?

Boohoo the billion dollar fast food giant has to have safety standards, how completely awful. How ever will you go on?

Yeah, let's make it easier for corporations to injure us without consequences. And while we're at it, let's repeal child labor laws. I'm sick of these 10 year old free loaders. They could be picking oakum and twining rope, goddamnit! What do they think this is, the damn commie USSR?

Sos lets say super hot coffee makes a comeback.
Should it be illegal for places to sell boiling hot coffee?
Lets say thats all they sold.
Big sign says this coffee will hurt you in neon right out front.
Not a legal business model?

>I'm gonna go buy a shitload of fireworks for the fourth of July!
>Oh, shit! I was being dumb and blew three fingers off my hand!
>Time to sue! The firework vendor should be held accountable! Better yet, the manufacturer! Better yet, the Chinese!

Your logic.

you realize it was a worker for mcdonalds that spilled the coffee?
If someone fires a rocket at me and it gives me severe burns, yes I'm going to give them shit.

If someone were to create such a stupid hypothetical business, they could begin every order with a liability waiver or they would probably be sued out of existence, or would otherwise have local sanctions placed on their business, such as age restrictions or a poor health grade.

If the fireworks were faulty and blew off your fingers you'd have every right to sue.

If the hot beverage you bought could literally take the skin off of you and the only indication of that was a vague "HOT", which could describe a range that goes from safe food temperatures to the actual Sun, it's another indicator of faultiness.

Just a quick comparison: selling a cup of boiling hot liquid that immediately goes into the hands of a consumer is like handing out uncased grenades. If the pin is loose and they jostle it, it's your ass for selling it in the stupidest way possible as much as it is theirs for buying it in the stupidest way possible. The big difference here is that people don't expect their hot beverages to be that dangerous, just mildly painful if they spill it.

>otherwise have local sanctions placed on their business, such as age restrictions or a poor health grade
So you want to love in a police state basically .
By the way ,many americans drank crazy hot coffee, an entire generation did this.
No one was sued, many were scalded.
Life is dangerous.

>just mildly painful if they spill it.
That is not how it used to be.

Just no. An employee did not spill it on her, she had the cup between her knees in the passenger seat of a car when she spilled it on herself.
If you're going to argue about something, at least know the facts about your argument.

>le life was dangerous maymay
life expectancy was shorter back then, and people lived miserable lives. if you like danger so much, shoot yourself in the fucking face, you tard

If a business is going around scalding locals, the people representing those locals have good reason to prevent that. "Life is dangerous" is what people with money want you to think excuses them flippantly ignoring safety standards. If a safety rail in a busy area would save people from falling, is a "don't fall" sign sufficient? What if someone trips or gets bumped?

Life's dangerous enough without a fast food restaurant selling drinks that'll mutilate your dick if the bus brakes too fast.

well they still serve hot ass coffee, so what did the lawsuit prove? better cups? better warning labels? da fuck

Well we just disagree i guess.
I would rather be more free and less safe.
Take guns, i dont own one but i like the fact that people can get one if they like.
Might be a bit less safe but a more free society .
It would be safer if we decreased the speed limit by 10 mph but once again, less free.

>well they still serve hot ass coffee
Not nearly as hot as it used to be.
Old people were mad as hell when the temps got lowered, but that generation is gone now.

I like how you're using the weapon analogy
It fits, because basically an old lady went in for an innocuous beverage and inadvertently walked out with a dangerous weapon

Now see, the trouble with your logic is that nobody expects to shoot themself in the crotch and not get hurt

The old lady, this court case is memed so hard with misinformation.

Its not that the coffee was hot and burned her, like all coffee would.

Its that the coffee was fucking insanely hot and gave her 3rd degree burns, it was WAY over the required amount.

Pretty sure this is the court case that made those caution things mandatory.

The part you keep choosing to ignore , is that back then, near boiling hot coffee was more normal.
Old people lined up in the mornings for mcds famously hot coffee.
There was a market for this and they were serving it.
Everyone knew back then that hot coffee would fuck you up.
The world has changed.
Also, people did not eat and drink while driving back then.
There were no cup holders.
You just drove the car.
Much has changed, in my opinion, not for the better.

eater.com/2016/2/15/10996726/mcdonalds-hot-coffee-lawsuits-california-fresno
>Wagner claims that the company is putting profits ahead of people by knowingly serving its coffee much too hot; McDonald's has previously stated it holds its coffee at around 180 degrees to maintain optimum taste and freshness, compared to the 140 degrees or so that coffee brewed at home is typically served at.
>Wagner estimates that this practice saves McDonald's "more than $1 million a day at franchises across the country," which would almost certainly equate to much more than the chain could possibly pay out in annual hot coffee settlements.
Even with the accountability of lawsuits McDonalds still saves a buck by serving dangerous coffee. I assume you've seen Fight Club, so just think of the narrator explaining how his company won't recall a car that kills a ton of people if the lawsuits cost less than the recall.

Aside from government regulations, the bad press of a high profile case like "this coffee mutilated my vagina" mitigates this, which is why their current temperature of 180 is less than the temperature they served it when she was burnt.

>the bad press of a high profile case like "this coffee mutilated my vagina" mitigates this
Does it? Because nobody I know takes it seriously until I show them pictures of that old lady's thighs burnt down to the fucking bone. McD's wanted to smear her with "LOLOLOL OLD LADY SUED BECAUSE SHE SPILLED COFFEE" and it worked.

Pardon, that last bit is incorrect, 170-190 was the range then, too.

You're totally right, their misinformation campaign worked like a charm and they changed nothing.

>all she got for it was the cost of her medical bills.
All she ASKED for was the cost of her medical bills.

The jury decided that the evidence showed McDonald's was well aware of the problems, had been sued many times before, and refused to correct their behavior. The main reason they did it was to slow people down from drinking their coffee to prevent people from asking for "free" refills.

The jury decided to punish McDonald's, which is why she got $20,000,000 in PUNITIVE damages on top of her actual costs.

It was a third degree burn. "Scald" just means "burned with hot liquid", it doesn't say how bad it was or how much damage, pain, and suffering she had to go through.

>Before the 90s, everyone drank pipping hot coffee.
No they didn't. McDonald's temperature policy was to prevent people from drinking it -- they wanted to avoid giving out the free refills that they used as a selling point.

You realize they agreed to lower the temperature after the lawsuit, then raised it back a few years later? "LOLOLOL OUR CUSTOMERS WANT IT THAT HOT!"

>Who was in the right?

The actually correct answer is that we will never truly know. The common arguments that get tossed around are:

>THAT LADY GOT (((BRUTALLY))) BURNED!!! SHE DESERVES EVERY PENNY THAT (((CLOWN))) OWNS!!

She did get scalded, but that's because the best temperature for good coffee extraction is somewhere between 195-205F. Water boils at 212F. So, assuming McD's coffee was made right, it should have scalded anyone it dripped on. The severity of her injuries are actually immaterial to assigning blame. It doesn't matter how badly that old lady got hurt, what matters is whose fault was it that she got hurt?

>THAT McD's FAG BURNED HER!!! THEY SHOULD PAY!!

The real question here is: did the employee apply the lid incorrectly, or did the old lady take the lid off to add cream & sugar and then spill coffee on herself?

And that is the question we will never know the answer to. It will always be literally her word against the employee's word, so there is no way to actually know the truth. Anyone who says otherwise is either pro or anti McD's. Period.

Bonus: could this whole thing have been avoided if the car the old lady was in had proper cup holders? Why didn't she and McD's join forces and sue the car maker?

>No they didn't
Yes they did, look man, i dont know to prove this to you but i was there.
I was a waiter
Old people NOTORIOUSLY sent coffee back saying it was not hot enough.
This was the ww2 generation and shit had to be scalding hot.
If you just think i am lying to you, we will just have to leave it at that.

What difference does it actually make?
Wasn't she forced to sue them because her insurance wouldn't pay her medical bills? She should've sued them.

She wanted to settle with McD's for just her medical costs. They refused, so she had to go all in after that.

>What difference does it actually make?

apparently none, if the cu/ck/s on this board are to be believed

>Wasn't she forced to sue them because her insurance wouldn't pay her medical bills?

maybe? idk, i never bothered to ask why she was suing them. I was just answering OP's question because it helps me earn GBPs.

>She should've sued them.

You should suck my dick and kill yourself. Litigiousness run amok is no way to run a society.

You listen to old people?
My grandmother slipped and broke her hip on the kitchen floor and laid there for hours until somebody got home, then insisted she was fine and told me not to call anybody.

People were not such pussies back then

The coffee is made at that temperature but it doesn't have to be kept at that temperature. A safe practice would be to make it in advance and allow it to cool enough that it won't harm the consumer in the event of an accidental spill, which could happen in any variety of circumstances, and maintain that temperature. If she'd gotten in a minor collision and came out of it with her only injuries being third degree burns from the spilled coffee it's as much McDonald's fault as her accidentally spilling it in a parked car.

People also regularly died and were maimed in factories usually with no recourse outside of co-workers feeling bad and getting a collection

>pay into insurance in case of injury
>get injured
>insurance doesn't pay back
>fuck the tools that society has given you to fight against injustices like this because corporations are people and you are hurting their feelings

Why don't you suck Ronald McDonalds dic... oh.. wait.. you already are.

Humans have too high a survival rate as it is.
Everyone gets to live?
That cant be healthy for a species.

Some of us have incorrect facts about this case. I just read the wikipedia article for the basics, and it does not make McDonald's sound good. The photos of Stella Liebeck's 3rd degree burns and subsequent skin grafts are horrifying. McDonald's initially offered $800 to the woman, then refused to settle 3 times for a much lesser amount than was awarded by the court. The jury found the injured woman to be 20% at fault and McDonalds to be 80% at fault for selling an unsafe product. The jury wanted to fine the corporation for 1-2 days worth of coffee sales revenue in punitive damages, but ultimately the judge lowered that to $600,000. After the trial, they settled for less than $600,000 but it is unknown for how much less. They knew damn well people got burned very badly, but kept mandating franchises keep holding coffee at 190ºF for reasons (whatever the hell those are).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

Wrong.

The truth is that she was wearing cotton pants. At the temperature they served the coffee at, you would get 3rd degree burns in a few seconds. Since she was sitting in a car, there was no way she could avoid the burns after she spilled the near-boiling coffee.

Join the voluntary human extinction project and steal your mother's heart medication, then.

Justifying human death and suffering with a sudden concern for population and the "health of the species" is edgy at best. You either have a death wish or you enjoy passing the literal judgment of life or death for a class you were lucky enough to not be born into.

The reason is it'll keep longer if you keep it hot so you don't need to keep making new batches for the sake of freshness.

That's also why mcdonalds coffee is so godawful bitter. If the cheap bastards just did a Tim Hortons and threw out their coffee if it's been sitting around for an hour at a reasonably hot temperature none of this would have happened.

No doubt McDonald's spent a hell of a lot more money on the torte reform media blitz and lobbying than they privately settled with her. She initially only asked McDonald's for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses. This still happens, but judges are afraid to hear these cases.

Telling user to commit suicide is even edgier no?
How about a little consistency

if you read the wiki article, the corporation's own research found a good percentage of customers didn't like that they couldn't immediately drink the coffee. It's pretty weird. Personally, I want to be able to drink coffee within a minute of buying it. The one guy above talking about their motivation being to slow down how many "free" refills they serve is starting to sound reasonable.

I wasn't using some clever turn of phrase. The voluntary human extinction movement is an actual movement that promotes celibacy and sterilization so that humans will eventually die out as a whole, they don't promote individual suicides. Obviously that's not going to work on a large enough scale to matter, so it's more of a population control movement. If the guy is serious about wanting more casual deaths in factory jobs, it sounds up his alley.

Unless if his issue was that the population is getting too old, in which case I covered that by suggesting that if he's serious about that he'd prevent elderly people (like his [if still alive] mother, if he's the same guy reminiscing about the good ol' days of idiots obsessed with literally undrinkable boiling coffee) from artificially extending their life any further through medical care.

>They knew damn well people got burned very badly, but kept mandating franchises keep holding coffee at 190ºF for reasons (whatever the hell those are).
Hold up nigga coffee is meant to be brewed between 195 and 205.

So McDonalds could brew up some coffee real fast and you could end up receiving very hot coffee. So I totally disagree with you that 190 is too hot.

>Liebeck placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap.

Dumb bitch was irresponsible. What's next sue Restaurants because of your beta Shellfish Allergy?

Fireworks come with an expected and understood danger.

No one expects their coffee to be hot enough to burn your flesh down to your bone. That's not even drinkable temperature.

Brewed between 195 and 205. Not served. Brewed.

You cook a chicken at 400 degrees in the oven, you don't eat a chicken at 400 degrees.

Or maybe you do and you're like a molten lava man, I don't know your circumstances

You are retarded. Go back and re-read the court case you fuckwit.

I never said it was too hot. Although I will say 190ºF is too hot to drink without burning your mouth. Fact is, they hold a large quantity of brewed coffee in an urn or something similar and can keep it at whatever temperature they want. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say most people want to start drinking their coffee within a couple minutes of receiving it. This is not an unreasonable expectation since when you order a coffee at a non-fast food restaurant or when you brew it at home it cools down to a drinkable temperature within a minute or two. Why 190? Why not 175? This is an internal question none of us really know. They did know people burned themselves often. And yeah, the jury did find the woman partially at fault for spilling it on herself. All the weirdness about previous burning issues and the way they chose to deal with those and treat this particular woman made the jury turn on them. If I was on that jury I would have sided with McD's if not for all of that. In this case, no. They were fucking nasty about it. After the fact, the whole smear campaign of a little old lady is over the top. I don't like that.

No one has said this yet....
I think the point of very hot coffee, and horrible environmental Styrofoam cups both, is that they are primarily a To Go business. The nastiness of subpar coffee and it being too cold by the time it is consumed is the point of the temperature needed for beverages that take 15 to 20 mins before someone gets to their work, destination or house and starts drinking it. It is from customer feedback as well. In a restaurant you take off the lid and it cools nicely. They knew that.
I also can't believe no one has brought up Seinfeld episode Procrastination whereby Kramer sneaks CafeLatte fast food coffee into a movie theatre by stuffing it down his pants in the crotch area. You can guess the lid wasn't secured but the comic genius was great incl the lawsuit portion.

youtube.com/watch?v=KNWh6Kw3ejQ

Coffee sold clearly too fucking hot.

How the hell does really hot coffee manage to make McDonald's a million a day vs regularly temperature coffee?

As someone else mentioned, McDonalds has a core clientele of old folks who are too set in their ways to go anywhere else. These people are locked in and the slightest change is calculated to cause some of them to freak out and start looking for alternatives (even if there are none, this would be very bad for McDonalds since they can't attract new customers)

Some statisticians at McDonalds figured out that if they dropped the serving temperature to industry standard the minor change would be enough to set off what essentially amounts to an autistic tantrum by their elderly manchild customers, and that it would be worth X amount of losses.

Hot? Yes
On the verge of boiling? Nope. I've never gotten coffee that hot, be it from an actual coffee place or restaurant. If someone served that shit to me I'd be fucking annoyed. I don't want to wait 30 minutes to be able to drink my God damn coffee. That's not fast food.

>more people should die to satisfy my edgelord beliefs
You first

Holding coffee at the brewing temp is not good for the coffee and not a natural consequence of the brewing process. Depending on how the coffee is made the temp will generally drop substantially even as it is served. V different when you're holding it in a big temp controlled reservoir

Lol this is hilariously speculative

Wdhmbt?

>pic unrelated

>The real question here is: did the employee apply the lid incorrectly, or did the old lady take the lid off to add cream & sugar and then spill coffee on herself?

It could be a policy put in place because of this case, but whenever I get coffee at McDonald's they ask how much cream and sugar I want and add it before they give it to me.

according to the picture, Donald apparently.

You know maybe her vagina came out looking better? I mean an old lady vagina looks pretty terrible but it's possible the 3rd degree burns smoothed it out and gave it a shine

I had no idea boiling water could cause such a wound. I would expect there to be deep burns and perhaps permanent scarring, but was this woman's skin made of paper?

>She did get scalded, but that's because the best temperature for good coffee extraction is somewhere between 195-205F

Irrelevant, coffee does not need to be stored at near boiling and can't be consumed at near boiling.

>The real question here is: did the employee apply the lid incorrectly, or did the old lady take the lid off to add cream & sugar and then spill coffee on herself?

Again, irrelevant as the lid is completely insufficient protection anyway.

She was in the passenger seat of the car when it happened, dingus. She set it between her legs for maybe a few seconds.

for once im with mick dicks. they put on the cups "caution contents may be hot" she failed to see that not mick dicks prob brah

caution: may be hot doesn't excuse 180 degree coffee dude. it's undrinkable and is literally scalding. safety laws were changed, and it's good that they were.

You're all missing the point. In times of high demand, there won't be sufficient time to let the coffee cool to a "safe" temperature. The fact is, if people are handed a hot beverage, common sense dictates that they should be aware that:

1) the beverage is hot
2) spilling it on themselves could result in injuries, up to and including scalding

therefore, once a person accepts a hot beverage (or any hot food item), they accept responsibility for protecting themselves from that hot item. McD's put the coffee into a styrofoam cup with a lid in order to protect customers from themselves. Hot coffee had been sold to literally hundreds of millions of people, without injury, at the time when the old bags case happened. Statistically speaking, she is the outlier, the lone imbecile that didn't act carefully enough with her hot beverage, and she tried to blame someone else for her own stupidity.

What she should've got from this case was a Darwin Award Honorable Mention(TM) and a free voucher for a session with Dr. Kevorkian.

Saw the thumbnail and thought it was Gordon Ramsay.

The extent or severity of self-inflicted injury is irrelevant to establishing cause or fault. This dumb bitch poured the coffee on herself by her own lack of caution (and testimony).

Whether she got a simple case of the old pink thigh, or full-on amputations due to burns is irrelevant. The proximate cause of her injuries was her own lack of caution. Case closed.

You're driving in your car. It's early in the morning. You're still kind of tired and you're handed a cup of coffee with a shitty lid. Your cup holder is too small for the coffee cup, so you put it between your legs while you put your car back into drive. It spills, and coffee that was at over 180 degrees is now pooling at the bottom of your thighs. Your skin is getting destroyed. They kept it that hot for no discernible reason. Serving temperatures are much cooler. 120 degrees would have been better. Safer. Now you have to go to the hospital, and you have no health insurance. Thousands of dollars of skin grafts and permanent damage to your legs.

But it's your fault. You should have known it was hot. It said it was hot on the cup. It's not their fault. Damn you and your slippery legs.

>the lid is completely insufficient protection anyway

explanation needed. The lid is completely sufficient, and actually not even necessary. Once you accept that cup into your hands, it's your responsibility to handle it with care. Even if it were an ice-cold beverage, once it's in your hands, whether or not it spills is entirely under your control, not the person (or entity) that gave it to you.

It is fundamentally wrong to believe that someone can control an inanimate, ordinary object that they no longer possess. Once you possess that cup of coffee, it is literally completely under your control, and anything that happens to it is your fault.

>n times of high demand, there won't be sufficient time to let the coffee cool to a "safe" temperature.

it is entirely possible to take steps to ensure coffee is served at a safe temperature in the face of high demand. the question is whether they're liable for not taking those steps.

>therefore, once a person accepts a hot beverage (or any hot food item), they accept responsibility for protecting themselves from that hot item.

what sort of responsibility?

>McD's put the coffee into a styrofoam cup with a lid in order to protect customers from themselves.

can you prove that the insulated packaging is to protect the customers rather than to prevent the coffee from cooling down?

>Hot coffee had been sold to literally hundreds of millions of people, without injury, at the time when the old bags case happened.

is that relevant? what is it supposed to prove? if she was the first person to ever buy coffee from them, what would the material difference be?

>Statistically speaking, she is the outlier

again, why does this matter? should you be able to avoid liability in failing to protect a small group of people on the grounds that they are few?

>she tried to blame someone else for her own stupidity.

and it was found that their blame outweighed hers in a ratio of 4 to 1. that's what the whole case came down to.

make an argument for why they *shouldn't* be found liable. their business practices were found to be the factual cause for her injury - so what defences could you raise in their favour?

Why haven't you set off a dirty bomb in manhattan then you fucking pussy?

So if you ordered a burger that a piece of broken glass in it its your fault for slicing the fuck out of your mouth because McDonald's is no longer in control of it? Your fucked bud.