Entering the room without permission and wearing a 20lb weight training chain ... I look forward to my next visit where they ask me if I've got some weight training equipment on me.
McDonald's was negligent. The coffee was hot enough to cause immediate lasting damage, having it that hot didn't benefit any party involved, reducing the temperature would have fixed the problem, been as simple as turning a knob, and increased customer satisfaction, and they knew about the dangers and repeatedly chose to do literally nothing about it.
If you tweak elements of the case then you can imagine the restaurant winning. As it stands, it's not surprising McDonald's lost.
> knew about the dangers and repeatedly chose to do literally nothing about it
The dangers of... hot coffee? Yeah, everyone knows that. That's exactly why they shouldn't have lost to the extent that they did.
It's tragic for the person involved obviously; I get why emotionally the court would feel sympathy for the victim. But objectively speaking its pretty ridiculous for the legal system to be awarding punitive damages for companies exposing people to normal, reasonable risks that everyone encounters as part of everyday life. It creates a culture where businesses have to treat grown adults like children for fear of huge fines if something goes wrong.
At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible for the incident but they got treated like they were 100,000% responsible.
(The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible, it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court so all in all I think the system ultimately worked okay despite the judge's ridiculous initial decision.)
Edit: I misread, it was actually the jury that made the initial ridiculous punitive damages ruling, the judge was the one who reduced it later before it got settled out of court for an undisclosed (possibly still ridiculously high) amount.
> At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible
80%, according to the jury.
> The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible
Correct, which was factored into the award of actual damages, reducing the $200,000 in damages to a $160,000 award, since it was in a comparative negligence jurisdiction.
> it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court
No, it was the jury that returned the original $2.7 million punitive damage award, which the judge reduced to $480,000, for a total actual+punitive award of $640k in the trial judgement.
The parties did settle out of court while an appeal of the trial judgement was pending.
I see, so it was the jury that was responsible for the ridiculous ruling, not the judge. My mistake, I misread. Definitely seems like there were some systemic or possibly cultural issues at play here.
> I see, so it was the jury that was responsible for the ridiculous ruling, not the judge
No, a jury verdict that is not reflected in the trial judgement is not a ruling at all.
There was some rush-to-publish reporting of the jury verdict prior to the ruling which is the source of the whole popular perception of the case, because the misunderstanding of the case has deliberately magnified ao it can be weaponized by people wanting to limit perfectly warranted recovery from actually-at-fault corporatiojs by spinning false tales of out-of-control judgements.
That's a fair criticism of the media headlines, but the final ruling of $480,000 just in punitive damages ($1M inflation-adjusted) is still pretty ridiculous given, again, that handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink beverages is a normal, reasonable risk that almost everyone encounters as part of everyday life. We could quibble about about the compensatory damages (80% McDonald's fault seems too high to me, but it's also probably not 0%), but I feel that certainly there should be no punitive damages for such things.
> That's a fair criticism of the media headlines, but the final ruling of $480,000 just in punitive damages ($1M inflation-adjusted) is still pretty ridiculous
Given subsequent McDonald's incidents of the same type, it was clearly inadequate to serve the function of punitive damages, that is, to be sufficient to dissuade the willful tortfeasor from repeating the same willful tort. (It’s quite likely that the original $2.7 million award would also have been.)
> handling too-hot-to-immediately-drink beverages is a normal, reasonable risk that almost everyone encounters as part of everyday life.
That's not an argument that the punitive damage award was ridiculous, that's an argument that the jury assessment of comparative negligence that figured into the actual damage award was wrong. Punitive damages are not even in theory about the degree of care that the injured party should have applied, that's the comparative negligence part of actual damages.
My point is I don't think McDonalds needs to be legally dissuaded from serving hot coffee in the first place, certainly not by a court with no law making powers. The minutia of the legal statues aren't relevant to my argument.
I'm open to the idea of awarding damages for harms caused by inherently risky activities as a way of incentivizing companies to take extra steps beyond what is legally or morally necessary to mitigate those risks, but in such cases the damages should be compensatory, not punitive, and use a comparative negligence-like standard based on the degree to which the risks could have been realistically mitigated and the degree to which the plaintiffs are themselves personally responsible.
> My point is I don't think McDonalds needs to be legally dissuaded from serving hot coffee in the first place
"Willfully causing injury in this way should not be a wrong at all" is a very different argument than "the damage award was inappropriate for willfully causing injury in this way", so it would help if you would not disguise your argument for the former positions as one for the latter position if you want to have a productive exchange.
There was certainly no willfulness involved in this situation, unless you mean to say they willfully made the coffee hot.
My argument is that both of those things are true. Willfully serving hot coffee is not wrong at all, and a punitive damage award is highly inappropriate for unwillfully contributing to the harm caused by woman spilling it on herself.
It can and will if you spill enough of it in the wrong place, regardless of whether it was made by McDonald's or an electric kettle. This is true of any hot beverage or even soup.
If it's hot enough to burn your lips it's hot enough to burn your skin. Generally coffee is brewed at close to boiling temperature; it doesn't get much hotter than that. If it's freshly brewed, it's necessarily going to be hot enough to cause serious damage if you pour the entire cup somewhere sensitive. I guess it would be nice if they waited for it to cool before serving or something, but I don't think serving freshly brewed coffee ought to be illegal. (And even if you disagree, certainly that's a policy that should be enacted through the legislature, not arbitrarily and ex post facto by the courts.)
Even from afficionados the best temperature at extraction time isn't near boiling. The best drinking temperature is even lower. Typical temperatures at other chains are in the 140-180F range. McDonald's chooses to use much higher temperatures for ... reasons? Their customers don't want it, and their scalded patients don't want it.
Would you feel the same way if you had been the one to serve me a hot drink and the court ordered you to pay me $480,000 in punitive damages because I spilled it on myself?
The law is supposed to be blind (impartial), the fact that McDonald's is a big company isn't relevant here.
Maybe this time they won't go on a PR campaign against the victim (it's also the UK where you only get real damages, so they probably won't care enough, no million pound lawsuits here even if it was as serious as the original case, which it isn't).
There's definitely a balance between hot drink being hot and absolutely scalding, especially when you know you're going to be handing it into a vehicle from a window. And it's not an especially onerous thing to turn the temperature down, and as you say, no one likes getting 98 degree paper cup of lava that you can't even sip for 10 minutes. They say they did control the temperature, so maybe it's indeed all on the customers, but I do know I have been given some really hot hot drinks in paper cups that seem excessive.
They serve coffee, still hotter than most establishments, certainly hotter than most people prefer. You can't drink it at the previous temperatures, even after waiting 10 minutes. What are you trying to prove?
Not just negligent, chronically negligent to the point that a court hit the "fuck you fix it" button (punitive damages). They had all the chances in the world to turn down the heat, use better cups, etc, etc, after any one of the prior accidents. They didn't, they just kept paying the settlements and the lawsuits, until someone got hurt so badly that the court said enough is enough.
It's a textbook perfect example of how punitive damages are supposed to work.
