Today I Learned

It's pretty screwed up how the media made light of this lawsuit.

A lawsuit that ended in gross negligence, and the media shamed the lady involved for a decade.

The woman's scalds were almost enough to kill her. She spent weeks in hospital and needed skin grafts. To make it worse, McDonald's had received multiple complaints about the temperature of their coffee.

When you dive into that case, you definitely side with the lady. She had some pretty serious burns, like way beyond what most of us would get if we spilled coffee that we made at the house.

If my memory serves me well, she originally only asked them to cover the medical expenses. So their greed ended up costing them far more.

It was used as the definitive "Frivolous Lawsuit", but... in reality McDonalds just told Media Companies "Make us look like the victim here, or we're pulling our precious advertising dollars."

Must be one of the more successful smear campaigns in recent history. I'm not even from the us and we heard about that shit and used it as an example of greed and frivolous lawsuits. It was only like 5 years back I learned the truth. Believed that shit for 25 years..

Edit: oops should've responded to the media part of thread

but yet people will still dismiss it as a stupid lawsuit by some greedy woman. gotta protect those big corps

They had also been warned several times previously to stop doing it.

Oh man there is so much to this case. First, she asked for like $40k, enough to cover the cost of the medical bills. To be clear, she received extensive burns as the coffee was so hot that it would burn in seconds (the wiki had a breakdown of the times/temps and they were illuminating). Moreover, it wasn’t even the hottest coffee available. Starbucks was serving much hotter coffee at the time (the hottest I think recorded). In the end, she got paid, but McDs never cooled their coffee (nor did anyone else), all they did was make better lids lol.

No pictures? Disappointed, McDonalds spent millions trying to scrub them from the Internet.

NSFL: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnchainedMelancholy/comments/pqb7ym/in_1992_stella_liebeck_spilled_scalding_mcdonalds/

People love narratives that are simple and have an easy to understand moral to them even if they're absolutely wrong. In this case, the narrative is that she asked for hot coffee and got hot coffee, and the moral is that people are greedy and stupid and you have to protect yourself from them. I've often found that one well-constructed point can blow these narratives up though. I was talking with my dad about this particular case, he's a big "gotta do something about these frivolous lawsuits" guy because he used to own a business that was adjacent to real estate and real estate is probably the most litigated business in America. I'm a big "frivolous lawsuits is a term exploitative industries use to get people excited to give up their rights" guy, so we were at loggerheads about this one. Eventually I was like "Have you ever spilled coffee? When you did, who paid for your skin grafts?" Turns out that when crafting their narrative about how she was "suing them for giving her what she asked for", the industry lobby left out the part where she had to spend 8 days in the hospital and have multiple reconstructive surgeries.

Didn't realize the reason was this petty. I always thought it had something to do with how many beans it took, or the time or something like that. Not that it just took longer for a customer to drink Beca they'd be burning their mouth. I'm glad she got what was owed to her. Poor woman.

EVERY coffee shop overheats the drinks in the UK and it's infuriating. Every chain coffee just tastes like scorched milk and burnt beans and you can't drink it for 30 mins.

I'm unsure whether, unlike this case, they serve it hot enough that if you spill it, your labia fuses together from the heat of the burns. Horrifying.

Can someone explain this to Dunkin Donuts and their molten coffee?

Fun fact. The guy who served her the cup of coffee is related to the owner of a Panera franchise that I use to work for. Both him and his brother-in-law (I think that's how they were related) would talk about how that was their claim to fame back when they we're franchising with McDonalds