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.
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.
But, butt… if she spilled the coffee, then it’s on her for being clumsy… right? /s
they gave it to her without a lid when she ordered in the drive thru
Ouch… that’s an asshole move, they deserve the punitive damages.
The fact that someone actually was dumb enough to sue over coffee being hot was a punchline in the 90s and 2000s. It’s amazing what kind of misinformation can run amok in a world where you don’t have easy access to the internet and whatever corporate wants the spin to be, that’s what every Outlet is going to tell you.
Thankfully proper research has revealed that news groups were strong armed by McDonald’s into leaving important details out to save their stock prices… and this version of the story is the one that’s catching on.
I certainly hope that a better research clears up other misunderstandings ( the amount of people who actually believe Mother Teresa was a sadistic serial killer thanks to Christopher Hitchens riding the New Atheist wave of the early 2000’s with his easily debunked Hell’s Angel book is… way too high. The book claims among other things that she ran sham hospitals when in fact she ran hospices long before the concept was a thing in mainstream medicine and is credited for pioneering the concept of palliative care.)
Are you a ChatGPT bot comment?
You /s but someone in this very same conversation posted a comment above basically saying the same thing.