On Thursday 16 December 2004 12:13 pm, Russ Kepler wrote: | On Thursday 16 December 2004 12:03 pm, Amy wrote: | > Granted a lot of court cases turn into a three ring circus here in the | > states, but the McDonalds coffee case isn't nearly so much of one as | > the media has made it out to be. | | Yeah, it was. It also happened to be at a McDonalds about 1 city block | away so I'm quite aware of the facts in the case. | | > The reason the lady won the case? It wasn't just normally hot coffee, | > she got ~third degree burns~ from the frellin' stuff. McDonalds used | > to serve their coffee extremely hot, so much so that it was way above | > whatever temperature they were legally allowed to. No one ever said | > anything about it before then, because most people don't touch their | > coffee right away, so they'd let it cool down a little bit, and get to | > it later, and it'd be just about perfect. | | Sorry, but I have to call you on this one. Coffee makers make coffee by | boiling water and putting the boiling water through the coffee grounds. | The boiling point of water is pretty much fixed by the altitude (around | here it boils at 202 degF) so the temperature of the coffee is going to be | the same no matter what percolater it comes out of.
This is actually not the way it is. Measure the temperature of your coffee makers coffee sometime--mine is 160-165 degrees. That is set by a thermostat inside the maker--and yes, I used to be a repairman for commercial cooking equipment, including coffee makers--the type that restaraunts use. The therm is not normally set at 180 degrees, much less at boiling. The way I remember the case (from a Slashdot discussion, I think), is that local McDonald's managers had complained to upper management, in writing, that the coffee was being brewed so hot that it was softening the take-out cups. Upper management decreed (in writing, to their later sorrow) that the machines would continue to be set at 180 degrees because more cups could be brewed from a pound of ground with the hotter water. This correspondence was submitted as evidence. | | I think that McDonalds was being 'burned' by the bad publicity and didn't | much defend the case, nor went with an appeal. The original judgement was | reduced considerably in any event, but the final terms are private so we'll | likely never know what they were. No, they got burned with their own correspondence. The amount of the punitive damages award was a calculation of how much money they made from brewing the coffee at a higher temperature.
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