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.
A semi quantitative risk analysis (LOPA) for industrial safety would find this event to be absolutely unacceptable.
So there’s the logic you’re looking for. Industry safety standards would flag this and demand several additional protections.
My kitchen has a stove I can burn myself on, knives I can cut myself with. Oh and a kettle that sometimes contains boiling water.
Does my kitchen not meet your “semi quantitative risk analysis (LOPA) for industrial safety”?
It’s likely that you can injure yourself with those, yes, but the injuries that are most likely to occur are not high severity. The more significant injuries are less likely to happen, and there are things we do to make that the case. Kettles have a closed top, as do saucepans. There are procedures to use knives so that you don’t hurt yourself, and if you’re chopping something tricky, you typically pay heightened attention to it.
The risk assessment is all about likelihood and severity for scenarios, and the purpose of safeguards is to reduce that likelihood to meet an acceptable risk tolerance. With McDonald’s here, they not only had a very high severity incident, but they also didn’t really take steps to reduce the likelihood. They could have served it with a lid. They could have used a larger cup than necessary so the water level was low. They could have added the cream and sugar before giving it to the customer, so there was no need to do anything except hold it and drink it.
In other words, they were completely reckless. And if you behaved recklessly in your kitchen, it would also be a red flag in these safety analyses. Do you typically transfer boiling water when it’s in a container full to the brim? Do you watch TV while chopping tricky food with blunt knives? Do you leave your floor wet if there’s a spill? What about cranking your stove up to max your everything you do, or using your oven without oven mitts?
You’re being very purposely obtuse by suggesting third degree burns are comparable to burns from briefly touching the stove. Feel free to continue doing so however, it only highlights the difference between serious safety analysis and being a contrarian jackass.
I’m saying that when I carry my Mac & Cheese over to my sink to strain the water out of it I could spill the water on my groin and suffer similar injuries this woman suffered. You’re pretending that danger doesn’t exist because you want to pretend the 80C liquid at McDonald’s is somehow magically more dangerous than the 100C liquid in my pot of Mac & Cheese.
And BTW, I actually measured the temperature of a cup of instant coffee I made… it was 88C. Millions of people make instant coffee every day.
You want it to be true that people that say “coffee is supposed to be hot” are somehow dummies that don’t understand the real facts that you found by “doing your own research on the internet.” You want this so much you’re willing to ignore actual facts that you could easily verify by simply sticking a thermometer into a cup of coffee.
Oh the irony of a random person on the Internet saying this to a chemical engineer
LOL, a chemical engineer that’s not capable of sticking a thermometer into a cup of coffee to verify what the temperature of coffee is.