During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not have to give out as many free refills of coffee. This policy by the fast food chain is the reason the jury awarded $2.7 million dollars in punitive damages in the McDonald’s hot coffee case. Punitive damages are meant to punish the defendant for their inappropriate business practice.
I mean fair. I’m not trying to side with mcds here, really because I do believe they deserve blame, but I also believe it’s not black and white. They don’t deserve all of the blame here.
If an employee had spilled on her then yes but she literally did it to herself.
Consider however that she wasn’t served this coffee in a store, but in a car. The possibility of spilling the drink is significantly more likely, especially since she wasn’t given a lid. This isn’t the woman’s fault at all, it was a horrible accident just waiting to happen. It’s like if a roller rink covered the floor in grease and periodically had spike pits.
I did a bunch of chemistry lab classes in college, I think I had one each year actually. We regularly heated liquids and worked with concentrated acids. If we had spilled a liquid this hot on ourselves in a similar volume, we would have seen similar burns. It would take longer than 2 seconds to rip off a glove (which is probably fused to your skin very quickly anyway) or disrobe our labcoats. The coffee being spilled on us like this would have given us incredibly severe burns too, and that’s with PPE and emergency safety equipment right there. It would take far, far longer to get to one one of the showers and activate it even.
And this is in a controlled lab environment! There was no heightened risk of spills because of being in a moving vehicle nor having an open cup.
And guess what, neither did the jury. They assigned 20% of fault to her.
But you seem to not know this, yet keep on victim blaming.
Sounds like she does deserve 20% as you just admitted. Oh noes there goes ur high horse.
You’re the one with the high horse from your hubris, mate.
So far you’ve strawmanned, goalpost moved, and ad-hom’d.
Got any more sophistry you’d like to trot out?