Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Squanto]

From what that article was saying you can get third degree burns in about 2 seconds.  If you're in the car I don't know how you're going to get the coffee off of you in time.  You (should) have a seat-belt on, so you can't exactly stand up, you're might be holding the coffee still, and a myriad other things.
And increasing random knowledge of others via Wikipedia is the most noble of goals, and should be something that we all aspire to do at least once in our lifetimes.

You can get 3rd degree burns in two seconds?  I accidentally put my hand on a cookie sheet that was right out of a 450 degree oven (making pizza), and I didn't get any permanent damage, just soreness for a day.  Granted, it wasnt for two whole seconds but I really had no idea why my hand felt hot till it started hurting.

[Lightningfalcon]

You can get "Deep tissue" burns in two seconds with 149F water according to the British courts.  According to the American ones you can get third degree burns that require skin grafts in 12-16 seconds.  All of this according to that wikipedia article.  So it may or may not be correct. 

[GlyphGryph]

It depends on the heat and material and time. A brief touch on a metal object is lightly to cause a superficial burn. Hold you hand in boiling water for 4 or 5 seconds and see if you can shake that off in a week.

But more honestly, McDonalds admitted that they new many customers drank their coffee immediately after purchasing it, and that it was unsafe to drink as served, and unsafe to transport in a moving vehicle, and that their competitors accounted for this and acted responsibly.

Because you know what? When I get a drink, to drink, I expect it to be drinkable. I don't expect it to be in a condition that it could conceivably send me to the hospital for a month involving surgery. Especially if it was actually significantly hotter than drinks I was used to purchasing.

So, combine that: McDonalds knowingly took actions they knew would result in serious but preventable injury to at least several hundred people a year, accepted those injuries as the cost of doing business, and then refused to settle and pay that cost. In addition, many of their competitors DID act responsibly, reducing the likely number of injuries and dealing a pretty big blow to any claims they had justifying their actions. I'm honestly not surprised they lost.

Personally, I never buy hot drinks at McDonalds at all, in large part because I don't want to wait a frickin' half hour, with the cover off, running the risk of a major spill thanks to traffic turbulence, before I can drink it. (Well that and the fact that their stuff is super watered down, way to big, and tastes terrible. But meh.)

[nenjin]

I always assumed McDonalds kept their coffee so hot to disguise how shitty it was.

[nenjin]

I think the assumption was: coffee too hot? Sip it but don't taste it.

Coffee cooled off after leaving it for 10 minutes? Chug it, it probably just tastes crap because it's been "sitting."

I don't recall how long after the Hot Coffee lawsuit that McDonalds started doing gourmet coffee. What I DO know, from working there, is that a single pot of coffee got about about 1/3rd the amount of grounds people generally accept makes a "Good" cup of coffee. My measure of a good pot of coffee is whether I can see light through when I hold it up to a bulb or the sun. At McDonalds back in the day, I could see PEOPLE through it, that's how watered down they made it.

[Tellemurius]

its thicker than that, my father still drinks it

[GlyphGryph]

It's a franchise, and quality is... variable.

Their tea, however, is terrible across the board. Both the hot and the cold. Blech blugh blech. How can you even screw up hot tea that much. It's not exactly brain surgery. Their hot tea is almost as bad as Starbucks hot tea.

[ChairmanPoo]

It puzzles me that people question whether it's possible to get third degree burns in two seconds. Of course it's possible. It's a matter of getting something hot enough. I mean, it seems kind of obvious to me, at least.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The popular perception of the McDonalds case is from it being inaccurately paraded by the media as evidence for a need for "tort reform", or what it actually is, "making it so you can't sue businesses for their wrongdoing".

[Something Evil]

How can you even screw up hot tea that much. It's not exactly brain surgery.

Replacing half the usual tea ground mass with dried, crushed random plants resulted from mowing the lawn in an effort to cut down costs might help.


As for the old lady suing McDonalds, yeah, I guess she was kinda justified in doing so after being condescendingly given an 800$ settlement offer, but hell, holding a flimsy cup of anything between your legs in a moving vehicle is grounds for being diagnosed with acute stupidity. And it's not like you can't feel it having the heat of the core of the sun through those nanometer-thin cups they use.

If they'd have given her a settlement covering half her hospital bills, that might have been reasonable imho, being an admission of shared guilt as to the accident: "You were stupid, we were stupid. We'll accept that we were stupid, but you ought to accept it too."
But 800$ is just insulting.

Also, yeah. Water is really amazing at transferring heat. So you're very likely to get a nasty burn from boiling water staying on your skin and transferring a ton heat really quickly. Also, it's easy to underestimate the seriousness of a third degree burn due to the heat simply nuking the heat receptors, so it actually hurts less. So you might not immediately go to a hospital to get it checked out, for instance.

[ChairmanPoo]

Yeah, I've seen that on (third degree) electrical burns, too.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

She wasn't stupid. You shouldn't be able to get instant third-degree burns from spilling goddamn coffee on yourself at all. This wasn't some heat rash, she had to have extensive skin grafts!

[Darvi]

Severe injuries caused by total disregard of safety are still injuries caused by total disregard of safety.

[The Darkling Wolf]

She wasn't stupid. You shouldn't be able to get instant third-degree burns from spilling goddamn coffee on yourself at all. This wasn't some heat rash, she had to have extensive skin grafts!

They weren't instant, they were caused by it soaking into her cotton pants, which when wet basically stick themselves to your skin.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Severe injuries caused by total disregard of safety are still injuries caused by total disregard of safety.

The perceived risk was unacceptably far from the actual risk of her actions. No one thinks that they're going to be that injured by coffee, because in all situations but McDonald's coffee none was that hot.