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This thing has been going around a long time. McDonald's is bad and people will believe anything anyone makes up about the case. People on the internet tend to be contrarian, so they jump on the chance to say "well actually the women that sued McDonald's was in the right, I know this because I'm much smarter than anyone that thinks otherwise!"
The flaw with this meme is making coffee involves boiling water. You can't actually heat water above 100C without it turning to steam. The coffee served to the woman was significantly less than the boiling point of water, because McDonald's isn't able to change physics. The injuries the woman were horrific, but anyone would suffer even worse injuries if the spilled water on themselves while making a pot of Mac & Cheese. Like anything that involves boiling water to make there's an expectation that you need to be careful when handling it.
The reality of the story is the lady that got burned admitted it was her fault. The reason she sued was to pay her medical bills. The real issue is lack of healthcare. Handling boiling water is a common thing, an accident can happen to anyone. Having a system that depends on either having a corporation associated with the accident you can sue or face bankruptcy whenever you have an accident is the real stupidity here.
I mean who would you sue if you tripped while carrying a pot of Mac & Cheese and got burned because of it? The Kraft Corporation maybe? Dumb system that brainwashed people into trying to blame accidents on a nearby corporation instead of fixing the real problem.
Dude her labia fused to her leg. I think that coffee might have been just a bit too hot.
Yes yes, the emotion of it all. Let's bring it back to logic. You would suffer more injury if you spilled a pot of Mac & Cheese over your groin. Injuries be nasty, boiling water be dangerous, these are just facts of science.
Unless your mom cooks all your food for you, then you are at risk of similar injuries nearly every day. Most of us have learned the importance of being careful around the dangerous things we encounter every day to avoid these nasty injuries.
It wasn't a pot of boiling water, it was a cup of coffee. Which is expected to be at a temperature that is drinkable when you get it and if spilling it on yourself is dangerous then that's a problem.
Cool! So if you go to a restaurant, order mac and cheese, get it in a cardboard container and when it spills you get hospitalized for a week, do you say "mac and cheese is meant to be served very hot! Of course I'll cover the medical bill myself!". What about when a few dozen people run into the same issue, because the restaurant has figured out that the occasional lawsuit from people being badly injured is cheaper than the cost of keeping the mac and cheese at an edible temperature? I mean, consider the comparison you're going for here. "If she'd heated a substance to that temperature herself, then spilled it on herself, it would be entirely her own fault! Why is it when someone else heats a substance to an unsafe temperature, then someone gets injured by it, it's not entirely on the injured party? They should know that the substance was heated far beyond what anyone would reasonably expect it to be provided at!"
The coffee was spilled on the lady by a McDonald's employee, she spilled it on herself.
And yeah that's how it works. If I sell you a knife and you accidentally cut your finger off then that's on you. If when you buy a knife I throw it at you and you get injured as a result, that's on me. This is very basic logic of how responsibility works.
Except the temp they were serving at was above regulations. They had been warned multiple times and got multiple complaints. Those regulations exist for a reason, this case demonstrates why. Because people don't deserve to have their labia fused together because a coffee spilled in the drive thru.
I just did a test (for science!) I measured the temperature of instant coffee that I made. Black (just coffee and water) 88C. With sugar, 80C. After I added cream it was 68C.
All of these temperatures are about what you claim to be "above regulation" (please cite this regulation, I suspect you're just making things up). Millions of people drink instant coffee every day. The temperature being between 80C and 88C is considered normal because it is. When people say "it's coffee, it's supposed to hot!" this is what they mean, because people drink coffee at these kinds of temperature everyday.
Now you can go ahead and peer review my experiment, you just need instant coffee, a kettle and a thermometer. Please report back the temperatures you find.
They literally haven't changed the temp they serve it at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants#Coffee_temperature
How likely are you to spill a high volume of Mac n Cheese on yourself in the kitchen, to the point that it soaks through your clothes, versus spilling an open cup of coffee in a car?
We do encounter dangerous things everyday, and this scenario is more dangerous than what's acceptable at industrial plants. You would be required to put in several safeguards which each reduced the chance of the event occuring by a factor of 10.
As a process engineer it's absolutely insane to me how risky this was. I believe something causing permanent injury/disability to a member of the public would actually be our highest or second highest severity category. With how likely this is to happen, if a company had inadequate safeguards in place, they would be heavily fined and I don't even know what else. This is a flagrant safety violation from a process engineering perspective.
As someone who made coffee that was 88C (I measured it) this morning and every other morning. It's ridiculous to me that people are shocked that coffee is hot.
Stick a thermometer into a cup of coffee, see what temperature it is. Now work on some insane safeguards for it. Or just do what everyone else on the planet does and accept that it's hot, so be careful with it.