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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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The whole McDonald's coffee debacle is constantly misreported, but I think it's becoming more known that McDonald's are in fact the bad guys in that one.
You Americans get so obsessed with picking sides, and finding someone to blame. You miss the point.
In every other first world country, this wouldn’t have been a court case, or even news.
When freak accidents happen we don’t look for someone to blame, we treat any victim’s wounds free of charge.
We have public health departments that study accident trends and make precautionary policies to prevent them from happening again.
Stella wouldn’t have had medical bills to sue over.
This is such a weird "america bad" take; having universal healthcare has nothing to do with wanting to hold corporations accountable for their shitty behavior.
Instead we now have 'warning, hot' on cups with coffe in them. (It should be hot when I order a hot drink)
That's the problem with trying to make it fool proof or add foll proof warnings, there will always eb a better fool. Educate the ones that want to be educated and let nature run it's course. Problems like thise solve themselves. (Although it could get messy)
Her labia fused together. It was just a little ouchie hot, the coffee was being served near boiling.
There are also temperature limits on hot drinks so the drinks aren't hot enough to literally melt and fuse skin together.
You might want to google that “fact”
There’s no legal maximum temperature in the US.
Coffee and tea are routinely served at temperatures that can cause severe burns in seconds. Starbucks, today, normally serves their steeped teas at around 200°F. That 10°F hotter than the 180-190°F that was McDonald’s policy at the time of the Stella Liebeck case.
To prevent scalding and burns, the WHO recommends water be no hotter than 60°C (140°F). Most customers would complain if coffee and tea was mandated to be served at a ‘safe’ temperature.
This wasn't a freak accident and McDonald's had been warned repeatedly about the temperature of their coffee being dangerous. This is why the victim was awarded so much, McDonald's was being intentionally negligent with their coffee to save a few pennies per customer. You act like you can just hit someone with a car in a place with universal healthcare and it's ok because no hospital bill.
Oh, FFS... Have you ever read what actually happened?
Yes, she politely asked get medical costs covered. McDonald's told her to go pound sand. The ensuing lawsuit uncovered the fact that McDonald's was intentionally serving coffee way above a safe temperature for consumption, and that they'd been warned about the potential for injury. The judgement--most of which was overturned on appeal--was because McDonald's was engaging in bad behavior intentionally that cause injury. Most of the award wasn't to cover medical expenses, but to send a "fuck you" to McDonald's so that they would stop doing something incredibly dangerous.
What he is saying is that her initial lawsuit was over medical expenses. Which would have been covered so she would never have even initiated a suit for McDonald's to say no to.
At least you’ve made it abundantly clear that your smug little own here is being argued from easily the worst possible position. This was not a freak accident. The event itself was not caused by a lack of government subsidized healthcare.
This event was made an inevitability by a corporation that sees people as barely human. They knew what they were doing, they did not care. Beyond that, expecting the United States government to reign in a multibillion dollar company is entirely unrealistic. Money talks extremely loudly.
And to cap it off - can we talk about how fucked up it is that you read the OP comment, thought about it for a bit, and put that out into the world? Dude. Her fucking vulva more or less completely fused together, and you saw it as a prime opportunity to brag about how great your healthcare is?
If any other first world country had a megacorporation that directly caused traumatic injury to someone? Yeah. It would be news.
I curious what makes you say that?
Yes, McDonald’s did have 700 reports of people receiving burns from their coffee…
The part most people don’t pay attention to is that was nationwide over a 10 year period.
That’s about 1 burn a week, yes some were serious 3rd degree burns, but most were not.
When they were serving literally 10s of millions of cups of coffee a week they we’re getting about 1 report a week.
1 in 10 million meets my definition of a freak accident. There could have been 100x that many reports of coffee burn injuries and I would still call it a freak accident.
I’m not supporting McDonald’s in this case. And I’m definitely not blaming Stella. Her wounds were very very severe.
Part of the reason they were so severe is because the highly absorbent sweatpants she was wearing kept the coffee trapped against her skin for at least 30 seconds. Should we blame the manufacturer of the pants too? I don’t think anyone studied it. But I’m willing to bet that at least 1 in 10 million pairs of sweatpants have contributed to severe burn scalding injuries.
She burned herself by pulling the cup over when she was pulling on a tab to open the lid of the cup, (a cup which BTW did actually have a warning about the coffee being hot printed on it). Should whoever designed the lid be blamed? Cup design has been at the centre of other burn lawsuits.
A younger more able person probably would have been able to remove their pants quickly but Stella was 79 at the time. She wasn’t driving, the car was parked. Most people could have gotten out of the car and gotten their pants off quick, but not in Stella’s case she wasn’t capable of mitigating her injuries. Should we argue that old or mobility limited individuals should only be allowed to drink luke warm beverages?
McDonald’s policy at the time was to hold coffee at 180-190°F. We don’t know the temperature of her cup specifically, but let’s assume it’s in that area. If that’s so dangerous, as her lawyer argued, why isn’t that illegal today? Starbucks holds coffee at that temperature today, they normally serve it a bit cooler, at about 170°F, but you can ask for it extra hot and they’ll serve it at that temperature. Starbucks also serves their tea at 200+°F today. If this wasn’t a freak accident and companies should know better, why is it common practice for franchises today to still serve coffee and tea at these hot temperatures?
The fact is, injuries from overly hot beverages are rare, and severe injuries like the kind Stella had are even more rare. You can’t prevent those sorts of 1 in a million+ accidents. Any precautions you might take to prevent them, tend to create a new extremely unlikely risks of some other injury. Sometimes bad things happen, it doesn’t need to be someone’s fault. If we focus less on who’s fault it is and ensure care for those who suffer from them, regardless of circumstances. You can look at what will actually make a meaningful impact.
Her whole story became national news because Stella needed to sue someone to pay her medical bills. If she didn’t need to do that, no one would even know her name.
If you want to make the argument that McDonald’s should have offered to cover her 20k$ medical bills from the first meeting,instead of making the tiny settlement offer they did make go right ahead. I’m not defending McDonald’s handling of the case.
I’m only arguing that not everything needs to be someone’s fault. This perpetual need to always blame someone when something bad happens makes it more difficult to look at prevention.
American healthcare is bad and yet you are still completely wrong
That's a long way to say I don't really know the details of this case and will just follow the narrative McDonald's wants me to...
If you believe there are details about the case that I don’t understand, feel free to enlighten me.
McDonald's had multiple incidents where they were ORDERED by courts to stop holding the coffee at an unsafe temperature, and they chose intentionally to disregard that.
So McDonald's chose to disregard human safety and legal orders. Hence the massive punitive fine.
I am aware that McDonald’s did have 700 claims nationwide from burns from coffee in the 10 years between 1984 and 1994.
But I can’t find anywhere where they were ordered by courts to lower the temperature. Can you provided a link to one of these cases where they were ordered to lower the temperature and they disregard that?
You seem quite interested in this topic, and I'm sure you'll enjoy the process of continuing your research :-)
Sounds to me like you are just a shill for Burgerking…no..wait…Wendy’s. Yeah, your a fucking Wendy’s hand. I knew it.
I work at Sealion burger apparently
Huh. We really are screwed on so many levels. Thanks for that realization.