During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
NSFL: https://www.google.com/search?q=stella+liebeck+burns&sca_esv=566856875&tbm=isch&sxsrf=AM9HkKmPBVZwzxW-bL6SS-UapPZ4BYy9aQ:1695197259357&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjigd_z3biBAxXQO3AKHd7ZAT8Q_AUIBigB&biw=360&bih=653
You want to appeal to shock and emotion because logic isn’t on your side.
No, I’m appealing to the reality of the situation because your willful ignorance has no bearing on it.
I think you’re ignorant to some facts:
You’re only at the level where you’re having an emotional reaction to the horrific nature of the injury due to an accident. You feel like it’s heartless to not have sympathy for someone who was injured in such a way.
I’m at the level where I’m sympathetic for people that have similar accidents without a big corporation nearby that they can sue to pay their medical bills. Just google random images of third degree burns (if that’s your thing) and understand that unlike the images you linked to, a lot of the people in the other images went bankrupt because of those injuries. So who deserves the most sympathy?
Why are you so heartless that you don’t care about people that suffered these injuries and didn’t have McDonald’s pay their medical bills? Emotion emotion emotion!
If self awareness was a disease you’d be the healthiest person alive.
Just developed the ability to do critical thinking. Many people suffer third degree burns in a variety of accidents. They are horrific. Why should only the people that these injuries in the vicinity of a corporation have their medical bills paid? Because it benefits law firms like the one that wrote the article above?
Consider the source of the information you get on the internet (personal injury law firm). Consider the motives (make suing others over accidents more socially acceptable). Consider the information they’re leaving out in constructing a narrative (people commonly handle boiling water and people do suffer from third degree burns because of it). Be wary of emotional appeals (the photos of the injury).
Set aside emotions and think. Where is the real problem? Lack of health care resulting in a society that’s overly litigious. Not something you’re going to hear from a personal injury law firm so there’s no money behind that kind of message is there?
That’s a lot of words to miss the point.
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I must say, these are the types of replies I’d like to see. It allows me to re-examine everything on the incident from another side and possibly form a better take.
I’ll give you another angle. I’m familiar with safety hazard analysis in industrial settings – HAZOPs and LOPAs, if you’ve heard of them. By our guidelines, this event would be a significant violation. This would be considered giving a disability to a member of the public, which ranks as either the highest severity or second highest severity incident possible (varies depending on the risk matrix in question).
Considering the liquid can cause severe burns in 2 seconds, was served without a lid, and was given to someone in a moving vehicle, the likelihood of this incident would be incredibly high. Taken together, an industrial analysis would call for at least 3 independent layers of protection to prevent the incident from occuring, where each layer reduces the likelihood of the event by a factor of 10. There are no protections or safeguards in this situation.
Mitigating this risk would be incredibly high priority. It’s at the point where you might shut down, i.e. stop serving coffee, until you have robust protections in place. I can’t stress enough that what McDonald’s was doing is riskier than you’ll see in industrial plants.
The best take you can arrive at by simply sticking a thermometer into a cup of coffee. I did that this morning… 88C! Then laugh at how ridiculous this meme about McDonald’s being evil supervillains for serving coffee at “insane” temperatures of 80C.
The reality is, that’s just the temperature of coffee. The lesson here is don’t trust what personal injury lawyers say and be careful with coffee… it’s hot!
A semi quantitative risk analysis (LOPA) for industrial safety would find this event to be absolutely unacceptable.
So there’s the logic you’re looking for. Industry safety standards would flag this and demand several additional protections.
My kitchen has a stove I can burn myself on, knives I can cut myself with. Oh and a kettle that sometimes contains boiling water.
Does my kitchen not meet your “semi quantitative risk analysis (LOPA) for industrial safety”?
It’s likely that you can injure yourself with those, yes, but the injuries that are most likely to occur are not high severity. The more significant injuries are less likely to happen, and there are things we do to make that the case. Kettles have a closed top, as do saucepans. There are procedures to use knives so that you don’t hurt yourself, and if you’re chopping something tricky, you typically pay heightened attention to it.
The risk assessment is all about likelihood and severity for scenarios, and the purpose of safeguards is to reduce that likelihood to meet an acceptable risk tolerance. With McDonald’s here, they not only had a very high severity incident, but they also didn’t really take steps to reduce the likelihood. They could have served it with a lid. They could have used a larger cup than necessary so the water level was low. They could have added the cream and sugar before giving it to the customer, so there was no need to do anything except hold it and drink it.
In other words, they were completely reckless. And if you behaved recklessly in your kitchen, it would also be a red flag in these safety analyses. Do you typically transfer boiling water when it’s in a container full to the brim? Do you watch TV while chopping tricky food with blunt knives? Do you leave your floor wet if there’s a spill? What about cranking your stove up to max your everything you do, or using your oven without oven mitts?
You’re being very purposely obtuse by suggesting third degree burns are comparable to burns from briefly touching the stove. Feel free to continue doing so however, it only highlights the difference between serious safety analysis and being a contrarian jackass.
I’m saying that when I carry my Mac & Cheese over to my sink to strain the water out of it I could spill the water on my groin and suffer similar injuries this woman suffered. You’re pretending that danger doesn’t exist because you want to pretend the 80C liquid at McDonald’s is somehow magically more dangerous than the 100C liquid in my pot of Mac & Cheese.
And BTW, I actually measured the temperature of a cup of instant coffee I made… it was 88C. Millions of people make instant coffee every day.
You want it to be true that people that say “coffee is supposed to be hot” are somehow dummies that don’t understand the real facts that you found by “doing your own research on the internet.” You want this so much you’re willing to ignore actual facts that you could easily verify by simply sticking a thermometer into a cup of coffee.
Oh the irony of a random person on the Internet saying this to a chemical engineer
LOL, a chemical engineer that’s not capable of sticking a thermometer into a cup of coffee to verify what the temperature of coffee is.