The punitive damage they gave in the case was one day's worth of earnings from McDonald's coffee sales.

The manufactured talking point that legions of frivolous lawsuits are hurting those poor ol' megacorps is just another way that corporations are trying to manipulate people to work against their own interests. The fact that every smug douche who thinks they're too smart to be affected by advertising buys the narrative that liquid hot enough to fuse a woman's labia to her thigh served in a dinky Dixie cup is 100% just some greedy moron is depressing as fuck.

The frivolous lawsuit problem is a lot like the people getting rich off of welfare problem. People get hundreds of thousands of dollars for their draft horses, millions for growing crops that are actively harming the country but the only people that are abusing the system are the people getting money to feed their families.

Even with all the ways lawsuits are abused, particularly with the many outright extortion rackets going on right now, the only lawsuits that are frivolous are the ones involving serious and terrible injuries or grieving families. The RIAA suing people that are clearly innocent of P2P file sharing is never referred to as "frivolous".

Also, she only sued for something like 00 to cover some of her medical expenses, the judge added the rest at his(?) discretion because McDonalds was so grossly negligent.

OUCH! Sick burn!

That lady just got SERVED.

That was more of a riff on stupid Americans who need warning labels on everything.

Oh you're just oozing wit today.

Yeah! Like the average American!

You're an idiot.

You can say this or that about my intelligence, but at least I'm not on Internet defending people who put cups of coffee between their legs.

Neither are we. The cup of coffee was on the dash and spilled on her crotch.

And it just magically jumped on her crotch?

I don't know, man.

The whole thing reminds me of the joke of the first iMacs (with the tube monitors):

The iMac was designed to be big, so nobody would try to shove it up their ass; however, it was also designed with rounded corners, because somebody would do it anyway.

1 - And, you know, I've never heard a satisfactory explanation for why they do that. When asked, they usually just respond with "people like it that hot" and flee.

2 - But pizza Hut doesn't just plunk the iron pan on the table. It's nestled in a thick heat-resistant plate and the server warns everyone not to touch the metal.

3 - I tried explaining that to many people, but their responses were along the lines of, "Them people is stupid, also!"

4 - And she was really just asking for chickenfeed, compared to what McDonald's rakes in.

5 - Rush Limbaugh, that's who. Fuck that guy.

The reason they served it at that temperature was because McDonalds offered free refills on their coffee. However, by making it so hot you can't drink it immediately, people would typically be done with their food before finishing the cup and not be able to ask for another cup.

NancyDrewFan123's explanation makes sense. Prior to that, the only thing I could think of is that if benefits drive-through customers, who probably will not drink it right away. I dunno. I don't know anything.

Here's my take on this.

Most people like to drink coffee after their meal. if you eat dinner in a restaurant, the waiter serves you coffee after dinner. At Mc Donalds, you get the whole meal at the beginning, my best guess is that they want the coffee to stay hot through the meal to enjoy at the end. Whatever the reason is, they're trying to prevent people goign back through the line to get their coffee warmed up.

The basic problem is the difference between McDonald's coffee, and coffee you get at home or in a real restaurant. If I spill coffee I made at home on my junk, I'm not going to need a skin graft. This is what took people by surprise. And it kept happening. And they just factored it into the cost of doing business.

As a nonlawyer who's talking out his ass, i think it should have been a class action suit, and they should have taken them for millions.

Look up the pictures of the woman's injury (I won't post them because they're NSFW) and tell me with a straight face that that's a totally acceptable degree of injury for a spilled cup of coffee.

I saw, it's in the video. Yeah it's pretty disgusting. I sympathize for her but it's at the very least 70/30 her fault. If someone is texting and driving and gets in an accident and becomes a paraplegic then of course I feel bad for that person but that doesn't mean it was someone else's fault.

Genuine question tho: I never drink coffee so it's hard for me to judge; if she would've drank the coffee would it have done the same to her throat as it did to her legs? Now THAT would be one hell of a lawsuit.

She took the lid off to add sugar or creamer or both. The cup collapsed under its own weight because it was a cheap flimsy piece of plastic foam shit not made to hold liquid that hot.

Other people had been burned in a similar manner, though not as severely, and McDonald's paid them off quickly to hush it up but never took steps to correct a problem they knew existed.

That's the main reason they lost the lawsuit. And that's why today every place from McDonald's to Starbucks to the local convenience store provides good sturdy cups for hot beverages nowadays.

"Genuine question tho: I never drink coffee so it's hard for me to judge; if she would've drank the coffee would it have done the same to her throat as it did to her legs?"

Yes -- the coffee was served undrinkably hot. Not just "hotter than most people like it", but "hot enough to kill living tissue on contact".

Look, it's all about what is, and what is not, reasonable. It's reasonable to assume that a certain percentage of your customers are going to spill some amount coffee on themselves. It's also reasonable to assume that some people will spill a large amount of coffee on themselves, as the cup is somewhat flimsy and the lid is removable. Additionally, it's reasonable to say that the actual spilling of the coffee is, in fact, the fault of the customer. This is not disputed by anyone, including this woman and her family. They don't claim that the spill wasn't her fault.

The coffee, however, was definitely unreasonably hot. There is no good reason for it to be hot enough to melt human flesh. It isn't reasonable to serve drinks that are not only undrinkable, but which have a history of injuring your own customers.

All of those things can be (and are) true, but you still really should not put it between your legs. For any reason.

You also should not purchase anything from McDonald's for any reason, yet millions of people do!

My pet peeve is people who order their pizza "Extra hot--to stay, please." Are these people's mouths made of tungsten? I hate them.

Also Pete, don't forget it was a parked car. The vehicle wasn't moving.

Sorry, but there's no way I'm looking at that.

Their lawyer near the beginning says something about the temperature being an industry standard to extract the most flavor from the amount of grounds, IE getting the most coffee possible out of it.

It's also interesting to note that the "HUGE" settlement that she didn't actually get was just the equivalent of two days of coffee sales for McDonalds. I get that coffee sales are big for them, but they sell a lot of other stuff. All of the related discussion related to flimsiness of the cup and what people prefer kind of relates to another big issue- McDonalds isn't a mom and pop store.

As a multinational conglomerate that does it's best to saturate all markets, small problems become big ones. If one in 25 million people who drink their coffee get burned, which is what they already claim, then that means there's quite a few people getting burned each year. The court punished them for not looking into it, which is really what should have happened.

I came to the party late. You watched the video, and put "she's a moron" in the description? Bravo sir. You win the abject twat award of the week.

Some other things. In an earlier post you said someone texting while driving would be responsible for it if they became crippled in a wreck. I'm having difficulty coming up with a response to tell you why you're wrong and I just figured out why. You're comparison is so completely off base you might as well have said "I sympathize for her but it's at the very least 70/30 her fault. Purple is a color." What you're saying is factually true (people injuring themselves while texting are at fault for their own injury). But this woman didn't heat up the coffee. She didn't sue because she spilled her coffee. She sued because her coffee was served unreasonably hot. Yes we all fucking know coffee is hot, but not a single person here (this site, the internet, or the planet earth) imagines that something we bought to ingest would be served at such a mind boggling dangerous temperature. Well most of us. Your follow up question asking what would happen if she had drank it seems to imply you're unaware of temperatures, what causes burns, or cognitive reasoning skills of the barest degree. I'd be willing to bet five dollars that during the viewing of this video (http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=127814) you would have been heard exclaiming "NO WAY! There is totally more water in that other glass now!"

You and others have said "I generally don't put scalding hot liquid between my legs". FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK! NOBODY PUTS SCALDING HOT LIQUID BETWEEN THEIR LEGS! and this is the bit you need to understand to see why you're wrong, NOBODY EXPECTS TO BE SERVED SCALDING HOT FUCKING LIQUID TO PUT INTO THEIR FUCKING BODIES.
Does that make sense?

I would also like to add that there is no conceivable reason why anything should be served that hot. There is no argument that makes any sense that this is even 1% her fault. The coffee was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns on contact, and the cup collapsed when she opened the lid.

Generally speaking, when someone hands you a sandwich full of razor blades and poison... and then your dog steals it from you and dies from eating it... you don't go "Oh man that sandwich wasn't meant for dogs, it's not OUR fault your dog died."

It is what the general public typically uses as the go to reference for a supposed ridiculous lawsuit and judgement, but the facts of the case show that it was actually a good example of a mishandled claim and suit. McDonald's defense came off as smug and condescending towards an old woman who had actual significant injuries and medical expenses due to their product that they were aware posed a potential hazard. They rightfully lost. The part that people consider questionable is the amount of the punitive damages that were awarded, but as another poster stated above, they got that figure by looking at what McDonald's (nationally) earned from 1 day of coffee sales, so they were hardly putting poor little McDonald's out of business.

Plus the actual settlement paid was negotiated out-of-court so Stella Liebeck didn't get anywhere near the amount initially awarded.

But all in all, more than money, I think she would have been happier with a crotch that hadn't been melted off.

"Oh man that sandwich wasn't meant for dogs, it's not OUR fault your dog died."

Back in the 90s, I tried to argue politics on RIMEnet and elsewhere, and one time the issue came up of anti-freeze and how its sweet odor results in dogs lapping it up and dying. "A nickel's worth of bitter additive", I argued, "would solve the problem". "How is that the manufacturers' problem?" conservatives shot back, because conservatives were shitty shitty people even 20 years ago. They weren't even amenable to raising the price of the antifreeze a nickel because that would make them less competitive.