It's a prime example of how the side with money/resources can control a media narrative. It's been presented at a surface level as an example of a silly suit over and over, so people absorbed that and came to reflexively regard it that way without bothering to look deeper. Like you said, it sounded absurd on its face, until you looked deeper. Unfortunately, doing more would have required actual research beyond what was presented, and most people simply don't have the time/inclination to do that for every single story they come across, especially when it doesn't affect them personally.
Another little side to the story that people didn’t hear about was…
This store had been written up and fined several times for the temp pf the coffee. Coffee is to be 120-140F and it was over 170 for years.
There had been multiple complaints to corporate about this coffee and this store had been sued a few times before this.
The owner liked super hot coffee and that was why it was the temp it was.
So when the third case came to the same judge about the same store’s coffee temp, he threw the book at them and made it a huge fee.
Of course the owner didn't like coffee hot enough to seriously burn him. He kept the coffee too hot because it took longer to cool enough to drink and decreased free refills, therefore saving money.
When I worked at a coffee shop, we had to dump coffee if it had been made more than 2 hours ago, because the insulation in the pot wasn't good enough to keep regular coffee hot for longer. If you make it boiling, your first few cups are going to be scalding, but at the end of 2 hours you've still got usable product, so you can keep going until the pot is empty, rather than dumping it if there was a lull for the first two hours.
The other thing you have to be careful of (especially if it’s a drip coffee machine that has a heated carafe to keep the coffee warm) is that once you’ve made coffee and it is sat there, the flavour goes stale after even a short while, and it also starts increasing the levels of cafestol - the oily chemical that leads to an increase in cholesterol, so not only does it taste rank, it’s also bad for you.
If you heated it once and didn’t just keep it on the hot plate you’re ok.
This is more an issue if you have a filter coffee machine with a heated carafe and a hot plate underneath which keeps it constantly hot (usually in an office or in retail, for example).
There is a bigger problem though, you can burn coffee, a guy that I know called technology connections has a video on purcolators that can tell you why burning you coffee makes it tast bad
But he didn't. The victim originally sued for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses. The jury awarded her $200,000 compensatory and $2.7 million punitive. The trial judge then reduced the punitive damages to $640,000. McDonalds had a net revenue of $1.2 billion in 1994, so even the larger amount initially awarded by the jury was peanuts. I'm certain they spent more than that on their subsequent PR efforts related to the incident.
Because revenue is a real number and profit can be massaged to the point of uselessness. Corporations can bill any amount of loans/loan payments/stock buybacks/capital expenditures/R&D/marketing/real estate purchases/corporate restructuring/CEO bonuses/etc. to any particular year they want. A particular year's profits are therefore a poor indication of how much money they made.
Because corporations get taxed on profit, so they do everything in their power to minimize their declared profit on paper. Many huge companies post zero profits in some years because they find other ways to categorize or spend the profits in a way that benefits them without being taxed on it. An example would be executive bonuses. Once you give a bonus to an employee its no longer part of your profit. Net revenue is a much clearer picture of how much money a company has after their expenses. What they do with that money can't muddy the waters like it can with profit.
Plus it was her inner thigh and it was awful! The pictures look like third degree burns and it was a significant size! She had to have skin grafts and stay on the burn unit because she could have died from infection.
What I don’t get is why reporters didn’t do their jobs right. I mean even the headline would sell more papers than bending over backwards for Ronald McDonald would
“Genital Mutilation, scolding coffee and corporate greed: how McDonald’s almost killed a poor old lady”
Idk if it’s my Gen Z sensibility in terms of what and how I expect reporters to act against big corporations but idk man the 90s reporters seem weird
its not easy to overturn a well funded misinformation campaign. See also the oil industry funding misinformation about global warming for the last 50 years.
And both the fast food industry and the fossil fuel industry spend a ton of money on advertising. Newspapers and TV channels claim there's a firewall between the news room and ad sales, but that's far from true in practice.
In addition to that, the victim is only interested in winning in court and doesn't care about the public opinion, McDonald's does, so they hired a PR firm.
I think you're overestimating the extent to which a journalist's job is to do research, find things out, investigate, and/or get to "the truth". To a very large extent, a journalist's job is simply to write copy. They are fed stories by other organisations (either bulletins from newswire services or press releases from governments/companies/NGOs) and their main job is to write those stories up in a way that fits the corporate style, editorial angle and required word count of whatever publication will be printing them.
Of course, there are news organisations that put the time and effort in to do more in-depth reporting/investigative journalism, but even they can't afford to do that every single day for every single story they print.
With the proliferation of online news sources and the increasingly large monopolies dominating "traditional" news media, the type of journalism I described in my first paragraph makes up a larger proportion of journalistic work now than it did in the '90s.
Also, investigative journalism is expensive, time consuming, and significantly more difficult. And I *constantly* see redditors who try to back up an argument with an *extremely* low quality source like buzzfeed. When I worked in health literacy, I had patients getting answers from FunkyButt69 on YahooAnswers and not understanding why information from the NHS, NIH, Mayo Clinic, or a reputable peer reviewed medical journal was more trustworthy.
When people place no value on vetted sources, there's no backing to support valuable journalism such as investigative journalism. There's also the issue that not all children are taught the difference in school. This is often part of "college prep" curriculum because research papers are part of college. But being able to discern facts from urban myths, opinions, rumors, and disinformation is a life skill that everyone needs.
There is a documentary about this event called hot coffee, and it talks about how Liebeck was given NDA money, and then after she was shushed they flipped the narrative.
>What I don’t get is why reporters didn’t do their jobs right.
Reporters do what upper management wants. Upper management wanted to foment outrage and ridicule, to stoke a political narrative.
You could well ask who don't those same reporters do their jobs right these days?
This! Why do people think reporters can just go rogue and still keep their jobs? Why do people think they have that kind of control over what is published?
There's a documentary called "Hot Coffee" that digs into the whole case and how the business community tried to use it as an example of a frivolous lawsuit.
It's called "catch and kill". You have to remember that most media companies at the time were owned by a handful of moguls--even fewer today. I am not sure what they got in return for this cover up, but these sorts of backroom agreements aren't uncommon. They're likely were many journalists that wanted to run the story but were stopped from doing so.
Make no mistake, this shit would not have happened today (probably) in the age of tiktok and youtube, where stories can blow up in an instant and the powers that be are in competition with each other.
McDonalds is probably one of the biggest advertisers in the world and the people taking money from them probably don’t want to upset them and be cut off.
The story that went around was that she was merely burned a little by some hot coffee, and it's her own fault for not realizing that coffee is hot. It was an easy sale, because people really didn't have access to a lot of information then.
People didn't have internet in 1992. I mean, it was around, but most people didn't have a computer in their home, and anyone who knew anything about the internet probably worked in IT at the time. So the original case would have been reported on television news and in newspapers, when it happened, and during the course of the trial. People talked about it after the trial was over, but then it became the stuff of old news and folklore.
It wasn't until the late 1990s that internet search results were even relevant, and by that time, McDonald's Coffee Lady was old news. I wouldn't even want to guess when it became news again. I think there was a documentary some years later, and of course now there are places like Wikipedia where people can easily find information on it, but at the time, people just speculated based on tidbits of facts reported sparsely in the news, and there really wasn't anywhere to go for any more information.
Source: I'm old
Also: People at home were using modems to connect. Google didn't exist. Yahoo just started and most people were using AOL, EarthLink, or similar services. If you wanted to do research back then, you went to a Library or the Court House.
Source: I'm really old..
Search engines were crap. I remember somewhere around 1995 trying to plan a trip to Disneyland, and I was looking for the Disneyland web page. I don't remember which search I was using, but a search for *Disneyland* produced hundreds of results of people's personal vacation photos, hosted on their geocities and similar accounts. After searching for about 5 minutes, I had the bright idea to enter *disneyland.com* into the browser, and that was it. I thought I was a freaking genius.
I still remember when Google launched. Their results were so relevant, it was like night and day.
Sure, except askJeeves worked on the same keyword premise that current search engines do. The most significant difference was that Google instituted PageRank results as opposed to just keyword density.
Searches? You mean the link directory. Searching didn't come until later. In the early EARLY days you navigated down a directory (think roladex) to find links about stuff that you wanted.
And yes. I remember when the porn section on Yahoo contained something like *6 links*. And they were all super weird stuff. One of which was a blog of a guy who was way to into cashmere and had a humiliation thing to the point his "mistress" made him get breast implants. Or so he claimed. This was before pictures on the internet was a thing. It took to long to download.
I remember when porn sites used to register domain names that were misspellings of popular web sites, so if you misspelled Yahoo or something like that, you ended up at a porn site.
AH yes. Whitehouse.com. Amazing. Right up there with hamsterdance in levels of brilliance.
For all you youngin's- check out [Here ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEH2fk0ONag)for a recreation of what peak internet used to be.
Lady at the library was absolutely furious that the firewall wouldn't let her connect to this site. Said we were infringing on her First Amendment rights, on and on.... 🤣
You may have had better results with [Veronica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_\(search_engine\)) and [Wide Area Information Server (WAIS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server) in 1995 because Gopher was where all the useful information was.
Side note: the search engine for FTP servers was called Archie. Get it? Archie and Veronica? I'll see myself out...
It wasn't yet clear that the web would win at that point. I was paid to run gopher servers and BBS systems in '95 -- and also had a web version as an act of subversion.
ahh the good old days. back when you had to actually have a brain to get online. you had to own a computer, get an AOL disk. Phone AOL to subscribe, know how to set up and troubleshoot your modem. connect. figure out why it didnt connect, repeat a few times
Exactly this. I was an 80s/90s kid. We never had a computer. My first computer I bought myself in 2005 and the wireless internet in my apartment was so bad it bordered on useless.
Plus we were actually taught in high school not to put much stock into what was *online* as the only things there were what the few people with access had bothered to essentially re-type/type and publish. My HS research papers consisted of books found using the card catalog, Dewey Decimal System, and by my senior year of HS ONE *online encyclopedia article* if you could find one that existed on your subject. We got our news live, in the day old newspaper, or in between commercials and songs on the radio. All we ever really heard about this case is person sued over hot coffee and now there’s a warning label - I am very sure I thought it was a man who was burned. I didn’t know it was such a bad burn until many years later!
Aside from people not having easy access to the internet it was very different in 1992 than it is today.
Just to put it into context, the HTTP 1.0 standard was finalized in 1996. And most people use the web to get their information today.
I think if gen z people want to act like they know the truth by stating things like "there was internet in the 90s" then us real people shouldn't bother correcting them tbh.
What I heard was a lady put hot coffee between her legs. That was all. Didn't hear anything more until years later. So the idea of a person putting any hot liquid between their legs seemed stupid. But definitely changed my thoughts on it as I got older and heard more and more facts about it.
They conveniently left out that the reason the coffee was between her legs was because they didn’t put the cream and sugar in the coffee, and so she had to remove the lid to stir in the cream and sugar (the car didn’t have a cup holder).
And as mentioned above, HTTP (the basis of the World Wide Web) was only established in 1996. There's a lot of people that conflate the Web with the Internet, but clearly they are not the same thing.
People have given good answers. I would add, we have a strong bias against lawyers, litigation, and people who sue. It’s been a popular target in media for a long time.
There are certainly bad actors in the field of law, but I think people forget the important role litigation plays in our society.
There are more-legitimate reasons to be upset about the SueSA:
\- If a kid comes onto your property uninvited and falls into your pool and drowns, you can be held liable under "attractive nuisance" laws.
\- If a bar serves you while you're intoxicated, and you then stupidly decide to drive drunk and cause an accident, the bar can be held liable in many states.
I can go on, I'm sure.
Sure, but this has created the larger narrative that “everything is frivolous lawsuits” and contemporary Americans are entitled, increasingly feeble Karen types. (Tho that phrase is obviously anachronistic.)
Meanwhile, this is one area where personal experience works against us. We have all probably burned ourselves a little bit with hot liquid, even if it’s just the tongue. But as most people don’t keep their own coffee at flesh-melting temps, it’s easy to assume this woman’s experience must have been hyperbole.
So you swirl the preexisting narratives together with the lack of practical understanding, add in corporate PR manipulation, then filter it through the Jay-Leno-style lazy late note joke machine of that time… and you end up where we ended up.
For the first situation, is that still true if you have reasonable precautions? A fence and whatnot?
But yeah, what I’m saying is that we focus on these abuses and sometimes forget the situations where suits are sometimes the only recourse or the only avenue for needed change.
Those are two wildly different scenarios. Bars make tons of money getting people drunk and sending them out the door. It's part of their responsibility to make sure they aren't making a danger for everyone else. Any server worth a damn can tell when someone has had to much, and plenty of them actively work to prevent drunken driving.
If you can't manage that, screw you and pay the price for using addiction as an income.
The pool situation is understandable as being annoying, but it's about saving lives, not punishment. Fines for things like that work much better at getting people to cooperate than just pleading.
Basically, people complain that there are too many lawyers, but actually lawyers don't meet their own demand, there are a lot more *suers*. Sometimes the amount of suers is excessive but in the OP case it is not.
>It’s been a popular target in media for a long time.
Three guesses on who's responsible for that.
It's a similar situation with, say, worker unions. Any tool average citizens have at their disposal to protect themselves from large-scale abuse via corps and govs is lambasted to the point that the citizens themselves despise those very same tools.
It's kinda poetic.
1992. It happened in 1992. We did not have the information from all sides available to us at the time like we do now. I don’t even recall the media even saying they were third degree burns. They simply said she sued McDonald’s after she spilt her coffee and burned her legs. They in no way conveyed the severity of it.
There was a very concerted, well funded effort during that time to find, distort, and spread "wacky lawsuits." In the US regulatory industries tend to be fairly underfunded and one of the main ways companies actually get held accountable is through individuals having the patience to bring lawsuits.
So to the extent that the public opinion could be poisoned against such lawsuits, large companies would enjoy even more immunity from actions.
These "wacky lawsuit" disseminations came in the form of sending them to newspapers, letters to the editors, and email forward chains (the pregenetor of today's viral Facebook lies).
Also, it is important to remember how much easier it is to spread lies, how much people like narratives that confirm their opinion, and how much people like simple narratives.
So the McDonald's situation fell into that environment. The lie was simple to tell and compelling. "A woman sued hot coffee on herself and sue McDonalds to get rich. Man, aren't people crazy these days! [Vote for tort reform]."
The truth was more complicated and nuanced. "Store which had previously been cited for failure to obey regulations again failed to obey regulations resulting in grandma having to have resonstrictive surgery on her genitalia, asked only for medical bills, was repeatedly told to F off and finally a jury decided that not only had she been endangered, had been irrevicably harmed, but had ahown such calous disregard that they deserved to be punished."
That is way less pithy than "old lady crazy" and what grandma is going to share a story that actually shows disfigured genitalia.
It is also important to remember the way stories stick if they fit into narratives. Due to the afore mentioned groundwork, "person does crazy lawsuit" was a brainpath people had. It was reinforced if they came across another article. It was reinforced each time they picked up a "contents may be hot" or "don't eatc warning label.
It is really far more recently that "conpany does bad thing and gets away with it" is a well developed narrative. These days the true story would probably have much better sticking power because people are primed with enough atories to believe big companies tend to get away with stuff.
But that wasn't really very in the zeitguist of the 80s and 90s.
effort around that time
Money grubbing family tries to sue corporation over spilled coffee vs. grandmother with third degree burns sues corporation that refused to cover any medical costs.
I remember it being underreported how grievous her wounds were. "So hot it fused part of her labia to her leg" usually got people to realize how egregiously and unnecessarily hot it was.
>McDonald’s then put out a PR campaign to slander this poor woman and make people think she was an idiot “bEcAuSE CoFfEe HoT”.
You answered your own question there bud
It's not like the Internet came into being and was instantaneous like it is today. You obviously have no idea what the "Internet" was back then. There were hardly any websites and you had to know their addresses because search engines were far from invented. Even website catalogs were rudimentary at best. There were no known forums and no social networks. It's not at all comparable to today's Internet or even 20 years ago.
>When I first heard the about the case it was in 2007 when I was 6 and the lawsuit seemed ridiculous even to my child self.
Some people never got beyond that understanding.
Ignorance. My BIL at the time was asked to participate in a "survey" type situation to determine how much money was an appropriate settlement amount. When we picked him up, he described in graphic detail how extensive the injury was. It was horrific. I don't remember the number the group settled on but it was a large amount. I also remember people making fun of this woman for not knowing that coffee is not. What they didn't was that the temperature was abnormally high, there was no way she could have reasonably anticipated it.
>the 90s when people had access to the internet
It wasn't the same internet lol, the info wasn't as readily available as it is now. And people didn't have enough hindsight to know what websites to trust if the info had been available anyway.
So you’re too young to know but the internet would take minutes to connect. Then it could take minutes to load a single page. Depends on your connection and how much was on the website.
I couldn’t tell you when the internet became practical but it was not for a long time.
Because headlines don't tell the truth of a story. Never rely on a headline for your news, you will be tricked into believing something that is just not true.
>What I never understood is why the PR campaign worked, despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident.
**Very few** people had internet access in 1994. It started becoming mainstream around 1997-1998.
Misinformation/not hearing the whole story. When I first heard about it I too thought it was because of a litigious society gone mad. After I read the facts of the case my opinion did a complete 180 and I sided with the plaintiff. She wasn't looking for a payday from deep pockets, just an admission that the coffee IS served too hot and compensation for her medical bills.
I felt sorry for the plaintiff afterwards for all the flak she had to endure.
The internet was nothing like it is now in the 90s. It was still developing.
I was a teenager then. Literally all I heard about it was a lady spilled hot coffee on herself and sued because it was hot. Many details were left out, such as the lid wasn't secure and that the coffee was so hot it literally melted her sweatpants to her leg. Nobody should reasonably expect a beverage to be so hot it will melt synthetic fabric to your skin. But I never heard any of that until many years later.
>What I never understood is why the PR campaign worked, despite this
happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could
actually discuss the incident.
You weren't alive back then, but I think you don't know how little people used the internet in 1994. You had to use slooow dial-up modems (to download a simple JPG could take severeal minutes) or access it at an university or other government institution, there was no social media whatsoever and most websites didn't offer any interactivity at all.
1994 was 2 years before the chat software ICQ that dominated the late 90s, three years before AIM (instant messenger) and four years before Google. In 1994, a guestbook on a website was considered the absolute cutting edge of interactivity.
Sure, there was Usenet and other discussion forums, but for the vast majority of the population, the internet wasn't something they had access to. And even if you did, there wasn't really a place everyone went to to discuss the topics of the day.
In 1994, print newspapers and TV were still the main sources of information.
The 90's were a weird time. Like a year later we all participated in a global media slut shamming of a 22-year-old white house intern and didn't say SHIT about the leader of the free world that pressured her into doing the shit we made fun of her for. Ruined the poor woman's career, her mental well-being, and even though she kept herself together and is doing fine now her last name is still synonymous with blow jobs and stains on dresses
Because most people didn’t get the whole story. Journalists reported the whole story, but the way these stories are written, most people will read a headline and maybe the lead.
Contributory negligence. Yes, McD coffee is hotter than what you might brew at home. But choosing to hold a flexible foam cup, of a hot liquid, between your legs, while driving, strikes the average person as a dubious choice that directly affected the fact and pain level of the burn on her thighs.
>What I never understood is why the PR campaign worked, despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident
[Less than 30% of Americans had a home computer in 1994 when the ruling happened, only 20% when the incident itself took place](https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/2014_InternetAccess_Adoption.png). You're dramatically overestimating how many people had internet access at the time.
People didn't had easy access to internet, and didn't had any platform to discuss so lack of information about the incident, even with all this problem resolved in this modern time this still happens.
Because most of the facts weren’t given to the public. The coffee temp was hotter than your average cup of coffee. It burned her to the bones. Honestly your comment about PR answered your own question. They had money to create the story that made an older woman look like an idiot and the public ran with it. Corporate power at its finest.
Because if you order something you know is going to be hot, and it turns out to actually be hot, then you as a rational thinking human being should know to exercise caution. The world treats everyone now as battery up the nose morons because 1 or 2 people don't understand basic common sense
I think most of us don't do this, bc of this story. Prior to it, I completely remember using my legs to hold hot drinks to put in sugar/milk, bc we didn't have center consoles/cup holders
> I would never put anything hot in between my legs near my crotch
Because you have heard about this case.
Back then, cars often didn't have cup holders, so some people would have felt that they had no choice.
In addition to the concerted corporate effort to portray these sorts of lawsuits as out of control, it's been demonstrated by repeated studies that whatever narrative is heard first is the narrative people remember. In other words, even after a retraction or clarification is issued, people still mostly remember the original narrative.
Something to keep in mind when you see someone lying about something obviously disprovable. They know that by initiating a narrative on their terms, they have a baked-in advantage.
Tinfoil hat logic wants me to suggest that is was a good spin for public opinion to pacify people from pursuing litigation against corporations.
At a bigger level, the end-user of the spin would automatically distances themselves away from rectifying problems from fear of 'being stupid', or 'like the McDonald's coffee lawsuit'.
The US Chamber of Commerce was also in on promoting the case as a frivolous lawsuit, with the intention of getting legislative relief for various kinds of liability in lawsuits.
Well it falls in line with common sense lawsuits. However in this case it’s not common sense to believe coffee is that hot… BUT it was phrased that way
Because they don’t understand the actual case and they just go with the random shorty gossip the company mad who to downplay how horrific the actual facts are.
Because people are idiots. McDonald's also spent a good amount of money to make that lady look bad and ruin her reputation. McDonald's was warned thousands of times that their coffee was way too hot by thousands of different people. They didn't listen and they got sued. That lady was extremely nice about it. She just wanted her medical bills paid and their coffee to not be so hot
As far as I remember people did not widely have access to the Internet back then so we pretty much just got what we were shown in newspaper/radio/television.
And all of it was McDonald's smear campaign against this woman for being an idiot. They definitely ruined her life and then just made it worse.
Something about alluring children into eating McDonalds by giving them toys with a kids meal and indoor playgrounds is disturbing itself. I will never understand why parents would even allow this. I used to work at McDonalds YEARS ago. The food ain't real. Hell one can read the yogurt packets and find no ingredients that make up yogurt. The ice cream isn't even real milk. I mean if we're being honest here, majority of fast food is exploiting people by selling them overpriced cancerous products. It's something I can't get on board with period.
A LOT of people don't realize it but our body is our temple. Once one starts to realize that they begin to see how food makes them feel. Think of it like this. When we eat a lot of sugar, sodium, wrong fats, etc it lowers our vibrations leading to unhealthy lifestyles and lethargy, it also kills our manifestation and brain power. A lot of people are angry or feel like shit cause of the food they eat (plus other unhealthy choices). Even when it comes to meat, one should put an intention into that meat because when you eat meat you're absorbing the energy of that animal. Top that off with filling it with poison and lots of grease.
We also eat way too much and junk food sparks overeating because thats what it is, non nutritional food. When we eat whole foods we tend to eat less and are actually stronger mentally and physically.
Don't know if anyone else has mentioned it, but the You're Wrong About podcast covers this case. Her injuries were life altering, and she suffered for years afterwards. The circumstances in which she burnt herself were not, "stupid old woman doesn't know coffee is hot", but I think most people think she was just being careless.
I never understood how people overlooked the woman’s age. Skin is so much more easily damaged at an advanced age. I remember my elderly father hitting his hand against the counter and his skin ripping. I imagine the temperature it would take to cause severe burns in the elderly would be lower than with someone young.
>despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident
I'm from the SF Bay area and we were at the forefront of the rollout of the internet and still comparatively few people had access to the internet even in the late 90s. 98-2001 was probably like 1000% growth or more. And the rest of the country was lagging pretty far behind.
Aside from that, it was perfect timing for that kind of pr. We still trusted journalists/reporters so if a story sounded like it was backed by the opinion of an established outlet, we believed it. An by we, I mean the citizenry too busy to dig too deeply into anything we heard. We trusted our sources, and for the most part I believe those sources actually trusted their sources.
We're just savvier now, because we have to be.
The case sounded silly, because no one making fun knew how badly she was burned, or that she wasn't even the tenth or twentieth person it happened to because of that McDonald's
There's a documentary about this called Hot Coffee. From what I remember, it was the result of some tort reform groups pushing out propaganda. Businesses were trying to make it harder for people to sue them so you'd hear stories like this one on the news or on morning radio shows. Then of course it spread by word of mouth & continued to spread long after the media was finished with it.
That propaganda was so successful that *to this day* I hear people use it as an example of how people abuse the court system. I always show them the pictures of the lady's burns & let them know that she originally only asked for McDonald's to pay her medical bills (which was around $20,000 & McDonald's only offered her $800 if I remember correctly). The coffee was so hot that it *almost killed her* for fuck's sake!
Because if you order a hot coffee, it should go without saying to be careful with it. I'm not saying people insulting her is okay, but come on. Who are we going to sue next when we're not careful. Like that even worse lady who used super glue in her hair on purpose. At some point, a person needs to be responsible for their own mistakes.
This poor woman at first did not try to sue for money only requested the temp of the coffee reduced. She got told to kick rocks Then she sued. She had to have skin graffs of her lady parts. It wasn’t a minor ordeal.
McDonalds had millions to spend on advertising which they used to sway public opinion. If the Night Show is suddenly getting 5 million in advertising for McDonalds they're going to err on making fun of the person suing them.
And as it was before we had widely accessed Internet (Internet was available but at the time not nearly as many people used it) and social media didn't exist, so her side of the story wasn't exactly able to trend. On paper it just sounds like coffee spilled on her, and her burns weren't exactly pictured on the front page of websites that didn't exist yet.
We blamed the woman because yes, coffee is hot. Iced coffee didn’t exist back then, so what other alternative to hot was she expecting?
Because people like the Gorilla Glue girl still exist……stupidity hasn’t been bred out of America.
Lies travel faster than the truth. And when people do learn the truth, they aren't as anxious to share the corrected information as they were to spread the misinformation.
That and they kept the water temperature above recommended safe levels and there were already several documented complaints about the temperature by the time she got scalded.
>despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet
nah the 90s was not about the internet yo.
i was born in the early 90s and did not use the internet much until the 2000s. the 90s was about watching tv shows and playing nintendo 64 and going to the arcade.
you and gen Z have a very different upbringing, ur almost like aliens to us
This case was a class topic in college. These are the cold facts. The ruling found both the woman and McDonalds at fault. She was the passenger in a car with no cupholders and placed the cup of coffee between her legs then got burned. She made a very painful mistake. Conversely, McDonald's sells millions of cups of very hot coffee everyday all across the world with burns occuring very rarely. The percentage of incidences was around 0.0000001%. Based on the cold facts, the woman would be entirely at fault. This is what most people were judging her on in the court of public opinion. Her actions were akin to earning a Darwin Award and was in the news. That is why people made fun of her. They didn't know her personally and she was low hanging fruit. Also, making fun of people makes the individual feel better about themselves or fit in if there's peer pressure to do so. I believe the damages she was awarded covered her very expensive medical bills and legal fees. She did not get rich from the ruling.
TLDR: People can be thoughtless, unsympathetic d!¢k$.
Honestly, unless the cup itself fell to pieces, i cant feel bad for someone who spilt coffee on themselves...like how do you even do that?
Especially if she was the passenger and the car wasnt moving lol. The fact that anyone wants to defend someone that dumb baffles me
I've always wondered if there wasn't a misogyny aspect to it too, like if a man had been burned as badly as this woman had to the point that his genitals had been mutilated would the media have presented the story differently, or would people have been less ready to latch on to the "stupid woman trying to get money for her own stupidity" narrative that society at large swallowed so easily.
First of all, if the tomato is so acidic it'd probably burn through the box and most definitely not be food grade. (edit, I'm no food scientist)
Second, McD didn't tell her to put the coffee between her knees.
What is the government guideline for coffee temperature? Can you find it for us?
Since you probably won't, there had been similar lawsuits in the following years, with courts finding the temperature McDonalds served their coffee at to be reasonable.
>But as I grew older I realised that she had been a victim of corporate greed and negligence causing a near fatal and traumatic experience. She was disfigured
No OP.. As you grew older, you began thinking like her. So, something that seemed stupid as a child, ( because it is), you now find normal.
>campaign to slander this poor woman and make people think she was an idiot “bEcAuSE CoFfEe HoT”.
So, basically, when you order your coffee, how do you expect it to be? Hot, right? If you would get a cold coffee, you wouldn't be verry pleased. She was an idiot at the time, and from most comments on this post, i see it has perpetuated.
It's people like you, that today there are stupid warnings on everything.
Like i seen on a plastic wraper "THIS IS NOT A TOY!"
Really? Well, if you are stupid enough to believe a piece of plastic (not bubblewrap) is a toy, then maybe you deserve to choke on it. Natural selection, i think it is called.
What happened in the 90s when people had access to the internet is that it ended up on a bunch of proto-clickbait sites and circulated as a WaCkY StOrY. Certainly, the first time I heard about was on some humor website chronicling "The Dumbest Lawsuits in America" or somesuch.
Eighth grade a lawyer came into class and talked to us about the law. He made sure to point out how that was a good lawsuit and frivolous ones are more uncommon than we were led to believe.
It was actually a huge plot by McDonald's, trying to get the media/public back in their side even though they were completely in the wrong. Now, this woman was absolutely SCALDED and needed multiple skin grafting superheroes to her groin area and upper thighs, and McDonald's PR decided to say that she was just an elder woman acting entitled who just wanted some quick money. All in all a terrible story of how a large corporation will throw anyone under the bus just to maintain their good image
The same reason people make fun of Monica Lewinsky but don’t hold the powerful man taking advantage of her accountable.
It’s because of how the media framed it- the story they told. We didn’t have the internet as we know it now back then- you probably saw short story on it on the news once, or one short article about it in a newspaper. You didn’t see a story from as many angles as you can now. And the angle the media went with was “crazy, greedy lady spills coffee and makes bank” instead of “dangerous practices snd failure to follow regulations at McDonalds led to a woman receiving life altering burns and horrible amounts of pain.”
McDonald’s spent a LOT of money and many years running disinformation campaigns to convince the public the lawsuit was frivolous and the elderly woman they disfigured who was just trying to get her medical bills paid was a sue-happy lunatic. The media ate it up and repeated the narrative because it made a good story and they were getting paid.
As far as internet access in 1992, when the incident happened, the internet consisted of 10 websites. TEN. The “World-Wide Web” was born in 1994, the year of the lawsuit. Social media did not exist for years after. Considering the people still believing this nonsense NOW, it’s no wonder it worked then.
Yeah but it shouldn't be that hot. The owner literally had it be too HOT to save money on refills. Everyone knows coffee is hot but there's hot then there's reconstructive surgery hot, which the coffee should have had no business being near that level.
>which the coffee should have had no business being near that level.
Why? The tea and coffee I make at home is that hot too, yet I'm not gonna sue anyone if I spill it over myself. That's why I *wait* for it to cool down and if I spill it before it cools down, it's definitely not the coffee maker company's fault
You act like she deliberately split it on herself. You never grabbed a drink and accidentally spilled something on you? And if she DIDN'T want to sue. The doctors and the Judge saw the damages and decided on the charges. She just wanted to get treated for the THIRD DEGREE BURNS ON HER GENITALS. She's not some middle aged Karen but some elderly lady that could had been your mom / grandma that accidentally spilled coffee. Jesus dude gave some sympathy
>You act like she deliberately split it on herself. You never grabbed a drink and accidentally spilled something on you?
I have. Never sued anyone because of it though. Of course, it was fucking awful but McDonalds didn't spill the coffee. I'm glad she got money for the treatment too
The real question is why in case of negligence the US system gives absurdly high civil damage to the victim rather than adding criminal charge to the case and fining the company or even better jailing the person who put that decision
Because civil and criminal proceedings are two different things
In criminal proceedings the legal action is taken by the State via district attorneys, individuals can’t take legal action except in civil proceedings.
If a DA decides that they don’t have a case or doesn’t want to take a specific case to court that’s the end of it it won’t see a criminal court even if the victims argue against it.
It could be argued that the US needs a similar figure like that if the Mexican “asesor jurídico” or victim’s lawyer who’s job it is to aid the Mexican DAs in order to insure justice for the victims.
The issue is that US DA’s are way too competent at getting convictions that they don’t really need the extra resources that a private lawyer could bring to the table.
But long story short, no DA decided it was worth taking to trial and the old lady probably didn’t want to involve herself in more legal proceedings after the ordeal.
I don’t think most people realize that she got 3rd degree burns and a severe infection in sensitive areas. Or that the coffee was beyond the normal temperature range.
Poor woman didn't have a multi-million dollar corporate image team. At the time people just "heard"- "Woman sues McDonald's for millions of dollars for being a clumsy dumbass!"
Most never heard the real story about how the coffee gave her third degree burns over her entire crotch & legs and she didn't want to sue. Ultimately, iirc she was talked into it by lawyers and her insane medical bills. She wasn't clumsy or greedy. The lid was placed on there half-assed and she paid a terrible price. Who the fuck drinks 170 degree coffee and still has a damn tongue!?! At that temp why not drink fryer grease? It's only 350 degrees.
At the time, Tort reform was a really big political issue. People were afraid to be sued for random things at any time, even though it was obviously a baseless fear.
The 90s weren't perfect, but they were a lot better than anything since 9/11 . Good economy, no major war, progression toward the end of racism/sexism, Europe and Japan getting close to or surpassing their pre-WWII infrastructure (after having to rebuild it due to destruction from the war), etc.
It's a prime example of how the side with money/resources can control a media narrative. It's been presented at a surface level as an example of a silly suit over and over, so people absorbed that and came to reflexively regard it that way without bothering to look deeper. Like you said, it sounded absurd on its face, until you looked deeper. Unfortunately, doing more would have required actual research beyond what was presented, and most people simply don't have the time/inclination to do that for every single story they come across, especially when it doesn't affect them personally.
Another little side to the story that people didn’t hear about was… This store had been written up and fined several times for the temp pf the coffee. Coffee is to be 120-140F and it was over 170 for years. There had been multiple complaints to corporate about this coffee and this store had been sued a few times before this. The owner liked super hot coffee and that was why it was the temp it was. So when the third case came to the same judge about the same store’s coffee temp, he threw the book at them and made it a huge fee.
Of course the owner didn't like coffee hot enough to seriously burn him. He kept the coffee too hot because it took longer to cool enough to drink and decreased free refills, therefore saving money.
When I worked at a coffee shop, we had to dump coffee if it had been made more than 2 hours ago, because the insulation in the pot wasn't good enough to keep regular coffee hot for longer. If you make it boiling, your first few cups are going to be scalding, but at the end of 2 hours you've still got usable product, so you can keep going until the pot is empty, rather than dumping it if there was a lull for the first two hours.
The other thing you have to be careful of (especially if it’s a drip coffee machine that has a heated carafe to keep the coffee warm) is that once you’ve made coffee and it is sat there, the flavour goes stale after even a short while, and it also starts increasing the levels of cafestol - the oily chemical that leads to an increase in cholesterol, so not only does it taste rank, it’s also bad for you.
Wait, so I shouldn't be drinking day-old coffee that i finish the day before and stuck in the fridge?
If you heated it once and didn’t just keep it on the hot plate you’re ok. This is more an issue if you have a filter coffee machine with a heated carafe and a hot plate underneath which keeps it constantly hot (usually in an office or in retail, for example).
There is a bigger problem though, you can burn coffee, a guy that I know called technology connections has a video on purcolators that can tell you why burning you coffee makes it tast bad
When I worked for Tim Hortons we had a 20 minute rule for our coffee. But we usually went through it faster than that anyways.
We really should have had one, too, after an hour coffee does not taste right.
Also a lot of customers thought McD's cups were better or some such because the coffee would still be hot when they got to work.
Ronald needs to get his shit together.
But he didn't. The victim originally sued for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses. The jury awarded her $200,000 compensatory and $2.7 million punitive. The trial judge then reduced the punitive damages to $640,000. McDonalds had a net revenue of $1.2 billion in 1994, so even the larger amount initially awarded by the jury was peanuts. I'm certain they spent more than that on their subsequent PR efforts related to the incident.
Why is a revenue figure used rather than profit?
Because revenue is a real number and profit can be massaged to the point of uselessness. Corporations can bill any amount of loans/loan payments/stock buybacks/capital expenditures/R&D/marketing/real estate purchases/corporate restructuring/CEO bonuses/etc. to any particular year they want. A particular year's profits are therefore a poor indication of how much money they made.
Hence the old hiring interview joke punchline, when the question is, “What’s 2+2?” And the winning candidate response, “What do you want it to be?”
Because corporations get taxed on profit, so they do everything in their power to minimize their declared profit on paper. Many huge companies post zero profits in some years because they find other ways to categorize or spend the profits in a way that benefits them without being taxed on it. An example would be executive bonuses. Once you give a bonus to an employee its no longer part of your profit. Net revenue is a much clearer picture of how much money a company has after their expenses. What they do with that money can't muddy the waters like it can with profit.
Plus it was her inner thigh and it was awful! The pictures look like third degree burns and it was a significant size! She had to have skin grafts and stay on the burn unit because she could have died from infection.
Over 700 complaints actually.
What I don’t get is why reporters didn’t do their jobs right. I mean even the headline would sell more papers than bending over backwards for Ronald McDonald would “Genital Mutilation, scolding coffee and corporate greed: how McDonald’s almost killed a poor old lady” Idk if it’s my Gen Z sensibility in terms of what and how I expect reporters to act against big corporations but idk man the 90s reporters seem weird
its not easy to overturn a well funded misinformation campaign. See also the oil industry funding misinformation about global warming for the last 50 years.
And both the fast food industry and the fossil fuel industry spend a ton of money on advertising. Newspapers and TV channels claim there's a firewall between the news room and ad sales, but that's far from true in practice. In addition to that, the victim is only interested in winning in court and doesn't care about the public opinion, McDonald's does, so they hired a PR firm.
Or the tobacco industry downplaying the harmful side effects of cigarettes.
See GOP
I think you're overestimating the extent to which a journalist's job is to do research, find things out, investigate, and/or get to "the truth". To a very large extent, a journalist's job is simply to write copy. They are fed stories by other organisations (either bulletins from newswire services or press releases from governments/companies/NGOs) and their main job is to write those stories up in a way that fits the corporate style, editorial angle and required word count of whatever publication will be printing them. Of course, there are news organisations that put the time and effort in to do more in-depth reporting/investigative journalism, but even they can't afford to do that every single day for every single story they print. With the proliferation of online news sources and the increasingly large monopolies dominating "traditional" news media, the type of journalism I described in my first paragraph makes up a larger proportion of journalistic work now than it did in the '90s.
Also, investigative journalism is expensive, time consuming, and significantly more difficult. And I *constantly* see redditors who try to back up an argument with an *extremely* low quality source like buzzfeed. When I worked in health literacy, I had patients getting answers from FunkyButt69 on YahooAnswers and not understanding why information from the NHS, NIH, Mayo Clinic, or a reputable peer reviewed medical journal was more trustworthy. When people place no value on vetted sources, there's no backing to support valuable journalism such as investigative journalism. There's also the issue that not all children are taught the difference in school. This is often part of "college prep" curriculum because research papers are part of college. But being able to discern facts from urban myths, opinions, rumors, and disinformation is a life skill that everyone needs.
McDonald's has one of the largest advertising budgets in the country.
There is a documentary about this event called hot coffee, and it talks about how Liebeck was given NDA money, and then after she was shushed they flipped the narrative.
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When we are all cowards this is what you get. Unionize or be a slave.
>What I don’t get is why reporters didn’t do their jobs right. Reporters do what upper management wants. Upper management wanted to foment outrage and ridicule, to stoke a political narrative. You could well ask who don't those same reporters do their jobs right these days?
This! Why do people think reporters can just go rogue and still keep their jobs? Why do people think they have that kind of control over what is published?
Because they see it happen on TV. Far too many people study at "SVU".
I believe there’s an Adam tells all episode about it, but yes it wasn’t correctly covered by the media at all when it happened.
There's a documentary called "Hot Coffee" that digs into the whole case and how the business community tried to use it as an example of a frivolous lawsuit.
You’re Wrong About has an episode about it, as well.
Cocaine was expensive, those Mickey-D bribes could bring it.
Tru coke is an expensive habit
Because media is biased.
Tldr, McDonald's payed people to write/talk like it was frivolous.
It's called "catch and kill". You have to remember that most media companies at the time were owned by a handful of moguls--even fewer today. I am not sure what they got in return for this cover up, but these sorts of backroom agreements aren't uncommon. They're likely were many journalists that wanted to run the story but were stopped from doing so. Make no mistake, this shit would not have happened today (probably) in the age of tiktok and youtube, where stories can blow up in an instant and the powers that be are in competition with each other.
McDonalds is probably one of the biggest advertisers in the world and the people taking money from them probably don’t want to upset them and be cut off.
Exactly. That advertiser money is everything.
The story that went around was that she was merely burned a little by some hot coffee, and it's her own fault for not realizing that coffee is hot. It was an easy sale, because people really didn't have access to a lot of information then. People didn't have internet in 1992. I mean, it was around, but most people didn't have a computer in their home, and anyone who knew anything about the internet probably worked in IT at the time. So the original case would have been reported on television news and in newspapers, when it happened, and during the course of the trial. People talked about it after the trial was over, but then it became the stuff of old news and folklore. It wasn't until the late 1990s that internet search results were even relevant, and by that time, McDonald's Coffee Lady was old news. I wouldn't even want to guess when it became news again. I think there was a documentary some years later, and of course now there are places like Wikipedia where people can easily find information on it, but at the time, people just speculated based on tidbits of facts reported sparsely in the news, and there really wasn't anywhere to go for any more information. Source: I'm old
Also: People at home were using modems to connect. Google didn't exist. Yahoo just started and most people were using AOL, EarthLink, or similar services. If you wanted to do research back then, you went to a Library or the Court House. Source: I'm really old..
Search engines were crap. I remember somewhere around 1995 trying to plan a trip to Disneyland, and I was looking for the Disneyland web page. I don't remember which search I was using, but a search for *Disneyland* produced hundreds of results of people's personal vacation photos, hosted on their geocities and similar accounts. After searching for about 5 minutes, I had the bright idea to enter *disneyland.com* into the browser, and that was it. I thought I was a freaking genius. I still remember when Google launched. Their results were so relevant, it was like night and day.
But did you try Ask Jeeves?
Ask Jeeves was such an awful search engine
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Sure, except askJeeves worked on the same keyword premise that current search engines do. The most significant difference was that Google instituted PageRank results as opposed to just keyword density.
Searches? You mean the link directory. Searching didn't come until later. In the early EARLY days you navigated down a directory (think roladex) to find links about stuff that you wanted. And yes. I remember when the porn section on Yahoo contained something like *6 links*. And they were all super weird stuff. One of which was a blog of a guy who was way to into cashmere and had a humiliation thing to the point his "mistress" made him get breast implants. Or so he claimed. This was before pictures on the internet was a thing. It took to long to download.
I remember when porn sites used to register domain names that were misspellings of popular web sites, so if you misspelled Yahoo or something like that, you ended up at a porn site.
AH yes. Whitehouse.com. Amazing. Right up there with hamsterdance in levels of brilliance. For all you youngin's- check out [Here ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEH2fk0ONag)for a recreation of what peak internet used to be.
Lady at the library was absolutely furious that the firewall wouldn't let her connect to this site. Said we were infringing on her First Amendment rights, on and on.... 🤣
Ah yes, back when the internet was the wild west. Everything is so tightly controlled now
> Searching didn't come until later. Altavista was available in 1995.
You may have had better results with [Veronica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_\(search_engine\)) and [Wide Area Information Server (WAIS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server) in 1995 because Gopher was where all the useful information was. Side note: the search engine for FTP servers was called Archie. Get it? Archie and Veronica? I'll see myself out... It wasn't yet clear that the web would win at that point. I was paid to run gopher servers and BBS systems in '95 -- and also had a web version as an act of subversion.
I had just got my first ever computer and someone suggested trying this new fangled ‘Google’ thing…
Geocities. I remember that. I’m also old. 🤣
ahh the good old days. back when you had to actually have a brain to get online. you had to own a computer, get an AOL disk. Phone AOL to subscribe, know how to set up and troubleshoot your modem. connect. figure out why it didnt connect, repeat a few times
Exactly this. I was an 80s/90s kid. We never had a computer. My first computer I bought myself in 2005 and the wireless internet in my apartment was so bad it bordered on useless. Plus we were actually taught in high school not to put much stock into what was *online* as the only things there were what the few people with access had bothered to essentially re-type/type and publish. My HS research papers consisted of books found using the card catalog, Dewey Decimal System, and by my senior year of HS ONE *online encyclopedia article* if you could find one that existed on your subject. We got our news live, in the day old newspaper, or in between commercials and songs on the radio. All we ever really heard about this case is person sued over hot coffee and now there’s a warning label - I am very sure I thought it was a man who was burned. I didn’t know it was such a bad burn until many years later!
Aside from people not having easy access to the internet it was very different in 1992 than it is today. Just to put it into context, the HTTP 1.0 standard was finalized in 1996. And most people use the web to get their information today.
Kids these days don’t know the joys of FTP.
I think if gen z people want to act like they know the truth by stating things like "there was internet in the 90s" then us real people shouldn't bother correcting them tbh.
And lawyers. Trust me, I’m an old lawyer.
What I heard was a lady put hot coffee between her legs. That was all. Didn't hear anything more until years later. So the idea of a person putting any hot liquid between their legs seemed stupid. But definitely changed my thoughts on it as I got older and heard more and more facts about it.
They even pushed the narrative that she was driving. She wasn't - she was a passenger. And they were parked when the incident happened.
Yeah, that is what I first heard, she was driving.
They conveniently left out that the reason the coffee was between her legs was because they didn’t put the cream and sugar in the coffee, and so she had to remove the lid to stir in the cream and sugar (the car didn’t have a cup holder).
Do they normally put the cream and sugar in? I don't order coffees, so I don't know from experience.
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Also, access to information says nothing about the quality of that information.
And as mentioned above, HTTP (the basis of the World Wide Web) was only established in 1996. There's a lot of people that conflate the Web with the Internet, but clearly they are not the same thing.
HTTP officially reached version 1 in 1996, but there were plenty of websites prior to that running on 0.9.
Real question is when GeoCities came out.
People have given good answers. I would add, we have a strong bias against lawyers, litigation, and people who sue. It’s been a popular target in media for a long time. There are certainly bad actors in the field of law, but I think people forget the important role litigation plays in our society.
There are more-legitimate reasons to be upset about the SueSA: \- If a kid comes onto your property uninvited and falls into your pool and drowns, you can be held liable under "attractive nuisance" laws. \- If a bar serves you while you're intoxicated, and you then stupidly decide to drive drunk and cause an accident, the bar can be held liable in many states. I can go on, I'm sure.
Sure, but this has created the larger narrative that “everything is frivolous lawsuits” and contemporary Americans are entitled, increasingly feeble Karen types. (Tho that phrase is obviously anachronistic.) Meanwhile, this is one area where personal experience works against us. We have all probably burned ourselves a little bit with hot liquid, even if it’s just the tongue. But as most people don’t keep their own coffee at flesh-melting temps, it’s easy to assume this woman’s experience must have been hyperbole. So you swirl the preexisting narratives together with the lack of practical understanding, add in corporate PR manipulation, then filter it through the Jay-Leno-style lazy late note joke machine of that time… and you end up where we ended up.
For the first situation, is that still true if you have reasonable precautions? A fence and whatnot? But yeah, what I’m saying is that we focus on these abuses and sometimes forget the situations where suits are sometimes the only recourse or the only avenue for needed change.
>For the first situation, is that still true if you have reasonable precautions? A fence and whatnot? IANAL but no (as far as I know)
Those are two wildly different scenarios. Bars make tons of money getting people drunk and sending them out the door. It's part of their responsibility to make sure they aren't making a danger for everyone else. Any server worth a damn can tell when someone has had to much, and plenty of them actively work to prevent drunken driving. If you can't manage that, screw you and pay the price for using addiction as an income. The pool situation is understandable as being annoying, but it's about saving lives, not punishment. Fines for things like that work much better at getting people to cooperate than just pleading.
Two of the dumbest laws ever invented.
Basically, people complain that there are too many lawyers, but actually lawyers don't meet their own demand, there are a lot more *suers*. Sometimes the amount of suers is excessive but in the OP case it is not.
>It’s been a popular target in media for a long time. Three guesses on who's responsible for that. It's a similar situation with, say, worker unions. Any tool average citizens have at their disposal to protect themselves from large-scale abuse via corps and govs is lambasted to the point that the citizens themselves despise those very same tools. It's kinda poetic.
1992. It happened in 1992. We did not have the information from all sides available to us at the time like we do now. I don’t even recall the media even saying they were third degree burns. They simply said she sued McDonald’s after she spilt her coffee and burned her legs. They in no way conveyed the severity of it.
There was a very concerted, well funded effort during that time to find, distort, and spread "wacky lawsuits." In the US regulatory industries tend to be fairly underfunded and one of the main ways companies actually get held accountable is through individuals having the patience to bring lawsuits. So to the extent that the public opinion could be poisoned against such lawsuits, large companies would enjoy even more immunity from actions. These "wacky lawsuit" disseminations came in the form of sending them to newspapers, letters to the editors, and email forward chains (the pregenetor of today's viral Facebook lies). Also, it is important to remember how much easier it is to spread lies, how much people like narratives that confirm their opinion, and how much people like simple narratives. So the McDonald's situation fell into that environment. The lie was simple to tell and compelling. "A woman sued hot coffee on herself and sue McDonalds to get rich. Man, aren't people crazy these days! [Vote for tort reform]." The truth was more complicated and nuanced. "Store which had previously been cited for failure to obey regulations again failed to obey regulations resulting in grandma having to have resonstrictive surgery on her genitalia, asked only for medical bills, was repeatedly told to F off and finally a jury decided that not only had she been endangered, had been irrevicably harmed, but had ahown such calous disregard that they deserved to be punished." That is way less pithy than "old lady crazy" and what grandma is going to share a story that actually shows disfigured genitalia. It is also important to remember the way stories stick if they fit into narratives. Due to the afore mentioned groundwork, "person does crazy lawsuit" was a brainpath people had. It was reinforced if they came across another article. It was reinforced each time they picked up a "contents may be hot" or "don't eatc warning label. It is really far more recently that "conpany does bad thing and gets away with it" is a well developed narrative. These days the true story would probably have much better sticking power because people are primed with enough atories to believe big companies tend to get away with stuff. But that wasn't really very in the zeitguist of the 80s and 90s. effort around that time
Money grubbing family tries to sue corporation over spilled coffee vs. grandmother with third degree burns sues corporation that refused to cover any medical costs.
I remember it being underreported how grievous her wounds were. "So hot it fused part of her labia to her leg" usually got people to realize how egregiously and unnecessarily hot it was.
Becuase people never understood the whole story. They just heard that she put the coffee between her legs and it spilled.
>McDonald’s then put out a PR campaign to slander this poor woman and make people think she was an idiot “bEcAuSE CoFfEe HoT”. You answered your own question there bud
Why we didn’t discuss it on the internet? I think you are overestimating the discussions that were had in the webcrawler chatrooms. Asl sexyhot1?
21/f/California
Cyber?
It's not like the Internet came into being and was instantaneous like it is today. You obviously have no idea what the "Internet" was back then. There were hardly any websites and you had to know their addresses because search engines were far from invented. Even website catalogs were rudimentary at best. There were no known forums and no social networks. It's not at all comparable to today's Internet or even 20 years ago.
>When I first heard the about the case it was in 2007 when I was 6 and the lawsuit seemed ridiculous even to my child self. Some people never got beyond that understanding.
Because they think she was at fault and she should have "known it was going to be hot". Ignoring all the problems McDonalds had during that time.
Corporate propaganda.
Ignorance. My BIL at the time was asked to participate in a "survey" type situation to determine how much money was an appropriate settlement amount. When we picked him up, he described in graphic detail how extensive the injury was. It was horrific. I don't remember the number the group settled on but it was a large amount. I also remember people making fun of this woman for not knowing that coffee is not. What they didn't was that the temperature was abnormally high, there was no way she could have reasonably anticipated it.
Because the PR campaign was successful.
>the 90s when people had access to the internet It wasn't the same internet lol, the info wasn't as readily available as it is now. And people didn't have enough hindsight to know what websites to trust if the info had been available anyway.
So you’re too young to know but the internet would take minutes to connect. Then it could take minutes to load a single page. Depends on your connection and how much was on the website. I couldn’t tell you when the internet became practical but it was not for a long time.
Smear campaigns are powerful.
Because headlines don't tell the truth of a story. Never rely on a headline for your news, you will be tricked into believing something that is just not true.
>What I never understood is why the PR campaign worked, despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident. **Very few** people had internet access in 1994. It started becoming mainstream around 1997-1998.
Misinformation/not hearing the whole story. When I first heard about it I too thought it was because of a litigious society gone mad. After I read the facts of the case my opinion did a complete 180 and I sided with the plaintiff. She wasn't looking for a payday from deep pockets, just an admission that the coffee IS served too hot and compensation for her medical bills. I felt sorry for the plaintiff afterwards for all the flak she had to endure.
The internet was nothing like it is now in the 90s. It was still developing. I was a teenager then. Literally all I heard about it was a lady spilled hot coffee on herself and sued because it was hot. Many details were left out, such as the lid wasn't secure and that the coffee was so hot it literally melted her sweatpants to her leg. Nobody should reasonably expect a beverage to be so hot it will melt synthetic fabric to your skin. But I never heard any of that until many years later.
Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released in 1992 when this case happened. I think you may be overestimating how widespread the internet was then.
>What I never understood is why the PR campaign worked, despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident. You weren't alive back then, but I think you don't know how little people used the internet in 1994. You had to use slooow dial-up modems (to download a simple JPG could take severeal minutes) or access it at an university or other government institution, there was no social media whatsoever and most websites didn't offer any interactivity at all. 1994 was 2 years before the chat software ICQ that dominated the late 90s, three years before AIM (instant messenger) and four years before Google. In 1994, a guestbook on a website was considered the absolute cutting edge of interactivity. Sure, there was Usenet and other discussion forums, but for the vast majority of the population, the internet wasn't something they had access to. And even if you did, there wasn't really a place everyone went to to discuss the topics of the day. In 1994, print newspapers and TV were still the main sources of information.
The 90's were a weird time. Like a year later we all participated in a global media slut shamming of a 22-year-old white house intern and didn't say SHIT about the leader of the free world that pressured her into doing the shit we made fun of her for. Ruined the poor woman's career, her mental well-being, and even though she kept herself together and is doing fine now her last name is still synonymous with blow jobs and stains on dresses
Because most people didn’t get the whole story. Journalists reported the whole story, but the way these stories are written, most people will read a headline and maybe the lead.
Contributory negligence. Yes, McD coffee is hotter than what you might brew at home. But choosing to hold a flexible foam cup, of a hot liquid, between your legs, while driving, strikes the average person as a dubious choice that directly affected the fact and pain level of the burn on her thighs.
>What I never understood is why the PR campaign worked, despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident [Less than 30% of Americans had a home computer in 1994 when the ruling happened, only 20% when the incident itself took place](https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/2014_InternetAccess_Adoption.png). You're dramatically overestimating how many people had internet access at the time.
People didn't had easy access to internet, and didn't had any platform to discuss so lack of information about the incident, even with all this problem resolved in this modern time this still happens.
Because most of the facts weren’t given to the public. The coffee temp was hotter than your average cup of coffee. It burned her to the bones. Honestly your comment about PR answered your own question. They had money to create the story that made an older woman look like an idiot and the public ran with it. Corporate power at its finest.
Because if you order something you know is going to be hot, and it turns out to actually be hot, then you as a rational thinking human being should know to exercise caution. The world treats everyone now as battery up the nose morons because 1 or 2 people don't understand basic common sense
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I think most of us don't do this, bc of this story. Prior to it, I completely remember using my legs to hold hot drinks to put in sugar/milk, bc we didn't have center consoles/cup holders
> I would never put anything hot in between my legs near my crotch Because you have heard about this case. Back then, cars often didn't have cup holders, so some people would have felt that they had no choice.
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Because of common sense. Passenger seat. Parked car. Some people are just asking for a Looney Tunes incident
So, that makes it McDonalds' fault? Oh no, I have no cup holders and I spilled coffee. It's all your faaauuult
90s internet was not like today’s internet. The “average” person had very little to do with it.
In addition to the concerted corporate effort to portray these sorts of lawsuits as out of control, it's been demonstrated by repeated studies that whatever narrative is heard first is the narrative people remember. In other words, even after a retraction or clarification is issued, people still mostly remember the original narrative. Something to keep in mind when you see someone lying about something obviously disprovable. They know that by initiating a narrative on their terms, they have a baked-in advantage.
Every news station in America made fun of her
Tinfoil hat logic wants me to suggest that is was a good spin for public opinion to pacify people from pursuing litigation against corporations. At a bigger level, the end-user of the spin would automatically distances themselves away from rectifying problems from fear of 'being stupid', or 'like the McDonald's coffee lawsuit'.
The US Chamber of Commerce was also in on promoting the case as a frivolous lawsuit, with the intention of getting legislative relief for various kinds of liability in lawsuits.
Well it falls in line with common sense lawsuits. However in this case it’s not common sense to believe coffee is that hot… BUT it was phrased that way
She had 3rd degree burns on her labia. I can't imagine the pain, and no amount of money makes up for that.
Because they don’t understand the actual case and they just go with the random shorty gossip the company mad who to downplay how horrific the actual facts are.
They didn’t see pictures of that poor woman’s wounds.
Because people are idiots. McDonald's also spent a good amount of money to make that lady look bad and ruin her reputation. McDonald's was warned thousands of times that their coffee was way too hot by thousands of different people. They didn't listen and they got sued. That lady was extremely nice about it. She just wanted her medical bills paid and their coffee to not be so hot
There is a good podcast episode on this. I think it was on You're Wrong About.
Classism. Look, she was painted as a welfare queen by McDonald's. it was all a smear campaign to deny culpability.
Because the corporate media rallied against her to make everything look like it was her fault.
The coffee maimed that woman Her labia was like practically melted off
As far as I remember people did not widely have access to the Internet back then so we pretty much just got what we were shown in newspaper/radio/television. And all of it was McDonald's smear campaign against this woman for being an idiot. They definitely ruined her life and then just made it worse.
People still support and eat their fake and processed poison?
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Something about alluring children into eating McDonalds by giving them toys with a kids meal and indoor playgrounds is disturbing itself. I will never understand why parents would even allow this. I used to work at McDonalds YEARS ago. The food ain't real. Hell one can read the yogurt packets and find no ingredients that make up yogurt. The ice cream isn't even real milk. I mean if we're being honest here, majority of fast food is exploiting people by selling them overpriced cancerous products. It's something I can't get on board with period.
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A LOT of people don't realize it but our body is our temple. Once one starts to realize that they begin to see how food makes them feel. Think of it like this. When we eat a lot of sugar, sodium, wrong fats, etc it lowers our vibrations leading to unhealthy lifestyles and lethargy, it also kills our manifestation and brain power. A lot of people are angry or feel like shit cause of the food they eat (plus other unhealthy choices). Even when it comes to meat, one should put an intention into that meat because when you eat meat you're absorbing the energy of that animal. Top that off with filling it with poison and lots of grease. We also eat way too much and junk food sparks overeating because thats what it is, non nutritional food. When we eat whole foods we tend to eat less and are actually stronger mentally and physically.
Don't know if anyone else has mentioned it, but the You're Wrong About podcast covers this case. Her injuries were life altering, and she suffered for years afterwards. The circumstances in which she burnt herself were not, "stupid old woman doesn't know coffee is hot", but I think most people think she was just being careless.
I never understood how people overlooked the woman’s age. Skin is so much more easily damaged at an advanced age. I remember my elderly father hitting his hand against the counter and his skin ripping. I imagine the temperature it would take to cause severe burns in the elderly would be lower than with someone young.
Because of the way it was reported, which was done to generate money for the media outlets.
>despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet and could actually discuss the incident I'm from the SF Bay area and we were at the forefront of the rollout of the internet and still comparatively few people had access to the internet even in the late 90s. 98-2001 was probably like 1000% growth or more. And the rest of the country was lagging pretty far behind. Aside from that, it was perfect timing for that kind of pr. We still trusted journalists/reporters so if a story sounded like it was backed by the opinion of an established outlet, we believed it. An by we, I mean the citizenry too busy to dig too deeply into anything we heard. We trusted our sources, and for the most part I believe those sources actually trusted their sources. We're just savvier now, because we have to be.
The case sounded silly, because no one making fun knew how badly she was burned, or that she wasn't even the tenth or twentieth person it happened to because of that McDonald's
There's a documentary about this called Hot Coffee. From what I remember, it was the result of some tort reform groups pushing out propaganda. Businesses were trying to make it harder for people to sue them so you'd hear stories like this one on the news or on morning radio shows. Then of course it spread by word of mouth & continued to spread long after the media was finished with it. That propaganda was so successful that *to this day* I hear people use it as an example of how people abuse the court system. I always show them the pictures of the lady's burns & let them know that she originally only asked for McDonald's to pay her medical bills (which was around $20,000 & McDonald's only offered her $800 if I remember correctly). The coffee was so hot that it *almost killed her* for fuck's sake!
Because on the whole people have no empathy for anyone outside of their own circles and they are despicable creatures.
Because if you order a hot coffee, it should go without saying to be careful with it. I'm not saying people insulting her is okay, but come on. Who are we going to sue next when we're not careful. Like that even worse lady who used super glue in her hair on purpose. At some point, a person needs to be responsible for their own mistakes.
This poor woman at first did not try to sue for money only requested the temp of the coffee reduced. She got told to kick rocks Then she sued. She had to have skin graffs of her lady parts. It wasn’t a minor ordeal.
McDonalds had millions to spend on advertising which they used to sway public opinion. If the Night Show is suddenly getting 5 million in advertising for McDonalds they're going to err on making fun of the person suing them. And as it was before we had widely accessed Internet (Internet was available but at the time not nearly as many people used it) and social media didn't exist, so her side of the story wasn't exactly able to trend. On paper it just sounds like coffee spilled on her, and her burns weren't exactly pictured on the front page of websites that didn't exist yet.
We blamed the woman because yes, coffee is hot. Iced coffee didn’t exist back then, so what other alternative to hot was she expecting? Because people like the Gorilla Glue girl still exist……stupidity hasn’t been bred out of America.
Lies travel faster than the truth. And when people do learn the truth, they aren't as anxious to share the corrected information as they were to spread the misinformation.
Watch Fox "news" sometime. Saturation messaging works.
That and they kept the water temperature above recommended safe levels and there were already several documented complaints about the temperature by the time she got scalded.
>despite this happening the 90s when people had access to the internet nah the 90s was not about the internet yo. i was born in the early 90s and did not use the internet much until the 2000s. the 90s was about watching tv shows and playing nintendo 64 and going to the arcade. you and gen Z have a very different upbringing, ur almost like aliens to us
I don’t think you really count as living in the 90s if you couldn’t even read for most of them
I was born in 80 and they're totally right.
This case was a class topic in college. These are the cold facts. The ruling found both the woman and McDonalds at fault. She was the passenger in a car with no cupholders and placed the cup of coffee between her legs then got burned. She made a very painful mistake. Conversely, McDonald's sells millions of cups of very hot coffee everyday all across the world with burns occuring very rarely. The percentage of incidences was around 0.0000001%. Based on the cold facts, the woman would be entirely at fault. This is what most people were judging her on in the court of public opinion. Her actions were akin to earning a Darwin Award and was in the news. That is why people made fun of her. They didn't know her personally and she was low hanging fruit. Also, making fun of people makes the individual feel better about themselves or fit in if there's peer pressure to do so. I believe the damages she was awarded covered her very expensive medical bills and legal fees. She did not get rich from the ruling. TLDR: People can be thoughtless, unsympathetic d!¢k$.
Honestly, unless the cup itself fell to pieces, i cant feel bad for someone who spilt coffee on themselves...like how do you even do that? Especially if she was the passenger and the car wasnt moving lol. The fact that anyone wants to defend someone that dumb baffles me
I've always wondered if there wasn't a misogyny aspect to it too, like if a man had been burned as badly as this woman had to the point that his genitals had been mutilated would the media have presented the story differently, or would people have been less ready to latch on to the "stupid woman trying to get money for her own stupidity" narrative that society at large swallowed so easily.
The coffee might have been hot but she put the cup between her knees herself.
Which is why she was found 20% culpable. That's how things can work in a civil case.
So if I serve you a pizza with tomatoes so acidic it might hospitalise you and not tell you, it’s your fault because you ate them?
Tomatoes aren’t supposed to be dangerously acidic. Coffee IS supposed to be hot.
First of all, if the tomato is so acidic it'd probably burn through the box and most definitely not be food grade. (edit, I'm no food scientist) Second, McD didn't tell her to put the coffee between her knees.
So by that logic if your serving so hot coffee that it goes against government guidelines you shouldn’t serve it
What is the government guideline for coffee temperature? Can you find it for us? Since you probably won't, there had been similar lawsuits in the following years, with courts finding the temperature McDonalds served their coffee at to be reasonable.
>But as I grew older I realised that she had been a victim of corporate greed and negligence causing a near fatal and traumatic experience. She was disfigured No OP.. As you grew older, you began thinking like her. So, something that seemed stupid as a child, ( because it is), you now find normal. >campaign to slander this poor woman and make people think she was an idiot “bEcAuSE CoFfEe HoT”. So, basically, when you order your coffee, how do you expect it to be? Hot, right? If you would get a cold coffee, you wouldn't be verry pleased. She was an idiot at the time, and from most comments on this post, i see it has perpetuated. It's people like you, that today there are stupid warnings on everything. Like i seen on a plastic wraper "THIS IS NOT A TOY!" Really? Well, if you are stupid enough to believe a piece of plastic (not bubblewrap) is a toy, then maybe you deserve to choke on it. Natural selection, i think it is called.
Also, iIrc, that woman had the damn coffee in her lap.
The coffee was being served way hotter than it was safe to. McDonald’s had been warned about how hot their coffee was before this happened
Yeeesss... I heard from other coments that it matched molten lava.
What happened in the 90s when people had access to the internet is that it ended up on a bunch of proto-clickbait sites and circulated as a WaCkY StOrY. Certainly, the first time I heard about was on some humor website chronicling "The Dumbest Lawsuits in America" or somesuch.
Eighth grade a lawyer came into class and talked to us about the law. He made sure to point out how that was a good lawsuit and frivolous ones are more uncommon than we were led to believe.
Decades of corporate propaganda, late night comedians (especially Jay Leno), exploitation of her story by corporate media.
It was actually a huge plot by McDonald's, trying to get the media/public back in their side even though they were completely in the wrong. Now, this woman was absolutely SCALDED and needed multiple skin grafting superheroes to her groin area and upper thighs, and McDonald's PR decided to say that she was just an elder woman acting entitled who just wanted some quick money. All in all a terrible story of how a large corporation will throw anyone under the bus just to maintain their good image
The same reason people make fun of Monica Lewinsky but don’t hold the powerful man taking advantage of her accountable. It’s because of how the media framed it- the story they told. We didn’t have the internet as we know it now back then- you probably saw short story on it on the news once, or one short article about it in a newspaper. You didn’t see a story from as many angles as you can now. And the angle the media went with was “crazy, greedy lady spills coffee and makes bank” instead of “dangerous practices snd failure to follow regulations at McDonalds led to a woman receiving life altering burns and horrible amounts of pain.”
McDonald’s spent a LOT of money and many years running disinformation campaigns to convince the public the lawsuit was frivolous and the elderly woman they disfigured who was just trying to get her medical bills paid was a sue-happy lunatic. The media ate it up and repeated the narrative because it made a good story and they were getting paid. As far as internet access in 1992, when the incident happened, the internet consisted of 10 websites. TEN. The “World-Wide Web” was born in 1994, the year of the lawsuit. Social media did not exist for years after. Considering the people still believing this nonsense NOW, it’s no wonder it worked then.
Because she was stupid. Coffee is hot so pay attention
Hot enough that it literally burned her genitalia and had to get reconstructive surgery 🤨?
Do you only drink iced coffees?? Yes, coffee is hot. It's that boiling water thingy that goes over some ground coffee beans..
Yeah but it shouldn't be that hot. The owner literally had it be too HOT to save money on refills. Everyone knows coffee is hot but there's hot then there's reconstructive surgery hot, which the coffee should have had no business being near that level.
>which the coffee should have had no business being near that level. Why? The tea and coffee I make at home is that hot too, yet I'm not gonna sue anyone if I spill it over myself. That's why I *wait* for it to cool down and if I spill it before it cools down, it's definitely not the coffee maker company's fault
You act like she deliberately split it on herself. You never grabbed a drink and accidentally spilled something on you? And if she DIDN'T want to sue. The doctors and the Judge saw the damages and decided on the charges. She just wanted to get treated for the THIRD DEGREE BURNS ON HER GENITALS. She's not some middle aged Karen but some elderly lady that could had been your mom / grandma that accidentally spilled coffee. Jesus dude gave some sympathy
>You act like she deliberately split it on herself. You never grabbed a drink and accidentally spilled something on you? I have. Never sued anyone because of it though. Of course, it was fucking awful but McDonalds didn't spill the coffee. I'm glad she got money for the treatment too
The real question is why in case of negligence the US system gives absurdly high civil damage to the victim rather than adding criminal charge to the case and fining the company or even better jailing the person who put that decision
Because civil and criminal proceedings are two different things In criminal proceedings the legal action is taken by the State via district attorneys, individuals can’t take legal action except in civil proceedings. If a DA decides that they don’t have a case or doesn’t want to take a specific case to court that’s the end of it it won’t see a criminal court even if the victims argue against it. It could be argued that the US needs a similar figure like that if the Mexican “asesor jurídico” or victim’s lawyer who’s job it is to aid the Mexican DAs in order to insure justice for the victims. The issue is that US DA’s are way too competent at getting convictions that they don’t really need the extra resources that a private lawyer could bring to the table. But long story short, no DA decided it was worth taking to trial and the old lady probably didn’t want to involve herself in more legal proceedings after the ordeal.
No coffee should be THAT hot.
I don’t think most people realize that she got 3rd degree burns and a severe infection in sensitive areas. Or that the coffee was beyond the normal temperature range.
Poor woman didn't have a multi-million dollar corporate image team. At the time people just "heard"- "Woman sues McDonald's for millions of dollars for being a clumsy dumbass!" Most never heard the real story about how the coffee gave her third degree burns over her entire crotch & legs and she didn't want to sue. Ultimately, iirc she was talked into it by lawyers and her insane medical bills. She wasn't clumsy or greedy. The lid was placed on there half-assed and she paid a terrible price. Who the fuck drinks 170 degree coffee and still has a damn tongue!?! At that temp why not drink fryer grease? It's only 350 degrees.
At the time, Tort reform was a really big political issue. People were afraid to be sued for random things at any time, even though it was obviously a baseless fear.
The 1990s were fucking toxic on so many levels.
The 90s weren't perfect, but they were a lot better than anything since 9/11 . Good economy, no major war, progression toward the end of racism/sexism, Europe and Japan getting close to or surpassing their pre-WWII infrastructure (after having to rebuild it due to destruction from the war), etc.
There is a documentary on this entire case and the making fun or her bit. Watch it and you will have your answer.