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.

  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This thing has been going around a long time. McDonald’s is bad and people will believe anything anyone makes up about the case. People on the internet tend to be contrarian, so they jump on the chance to say “well actually the women that sued McDonald’s was in the right, I know this because I’m much smarter than anyone that thinks otherwise!”

    The flaw with this meme is making coffee involves boiling water. You can’t actually heat water above 100C without it turning to steam. The coffee served to the woman was significantly less than the boiling point of water, because McDonald’s isn’t able to change physics. The injuries the woman were horrific, but anyone would suffer even worse injuries if the spilled water on themselves while making a pot of Mac & Cheese. Like anything that involves boiling water to make there’s an expectation that you need to be careful when handling it.

    The reality of the story is the lady that got burned admitted it was her fault. The reason she sued was to pay her medical bills. The real issue is lack of healthcare. Handling boiling water is a common thing, an accident can happen to anyone. Having a system that depends on either having a corporation associated with the accident you can sue or face bankruptcy whenever you have an accident is the real stupidity here.

    I mean who would you sue if you tripped while carrying a pot of Mac & Cheese and got burned because of it? The Kraft Corporation maybe? Dumb system that brainwashed people into trying to blame accidents on a nearby corporation instead of fixing the real problem.

        • Cabrio@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          No, I’m appealing to the reality of the situation because your willful ignorance has no bearing on it.

          • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I think you’re ignorant to some facts:

            • Boiling water is dangerous.
            • Boiling water is something we regularly encounter.
            • People understand the need to be careful to avoid horrific injuries.
            • Accidents happen.
            • Lack of healthcare puts people in a desperate situation where they have to sue someone to pay their medical bills when they have an accident.
            • The link above this discussion is to a personal injury law firm which is incentived to promote the idea that suing people to pay medical bills is good and proper. A little sus isn’t it?

            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!

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes yes, the emotion of it all. Let’s bring it back to logic. You would suffer more injury if you spilled a pot of Mac & Cheese over your groin. Injuries be nasty, boiling water be dangerous, these are just facts of science.

        Unless your mom cooks all your food for you, then you are at risk of similar injuries nearly every day. Most of us have learned the importance of being careful around the dangerous things we encounter every day to avoid these nasty injuries.