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Woman sues over 'misleading' trailer for "Drive"

While Coffee may have an "ideal serving temperature" which is considerably below boiling, tea does not----you pour the water over the teabags as close to boiling as you can get. Then you cool it either by waiting a few minutes for it to brew, or by adding milk. (Not cream. Not half&half. Milk.)

Thanks to the coffee lawsuit, McDonalds no longer brews tea at an appropriate temperature.
 
Which is ridiculous. There's a difference between brewing temperature and serving temperature. They can brew tea and coffee at whatever ridiculously high temperature they want, but when they serve it the drink should be "cool" enough to not cause third-degree burns within seconds, as the coffee did in that Liebeck case.

Not brewing their tea at a high temperature is foolish, it's like not frying their fries in 350* oil. What they cook stuff at is different than what they serve stuff at. They served this woman coffee that was nearly boiling and 40 or 50 degrees higher than standard serving temperature, they knew it was too hot, the dangers that posed and had already settled out of court before in similar cases.
 
Trekker4747 said:
There's a difference between brewing temperature and serving temperature.
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Not for tea, which is my point, unless McDs has abruptly gotten more classy. Brewing tea is essentially putting hot water in a cup and dropping in a tea bag. If you get someone who knows tea well, or you specifically request it, maybe they'll even pour the water over the bag. But there's little time between the water leaving the heating pot and the tea being handed over. Other than milk (only added if requested), there isn't any reasonable expectation for it to be much below boiling at that point.
 
Sorry if this example has already been brought up--but when it comes to deceptive movie trailers, the worst offender has to be Seven Pounds. It was billed as this lovely, inspirational movie and turned out to be a depressing waste of my time. You don't see me suing over it, but damn, I wanted my money back for that one and the two hours of my life that I wasted.

The Village was almost as bad, making it look like an action flick, though I'm not as bothered by that one because this is a movie by Mr. Transparent Twist Ending (I mean M. Night Shyamalan) and such things are to be expected. On the upside, I went with friends who joined me in MST3King it live in the theater, and I fell in love with the soundtrack. The violin work by Hilary Hahn became literally the only saving grace of the movie.
 
CarbonCopy said:
Team Broccoli said:
Greg Cox said:
Can we just agree that the coffee case was more complicated than it first appears and get back to discussing movie trailers?
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Apparently not. :shrug:
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I like how this hijacking parallels the advertised topic.

You may think it's going to be a thread about misleading movie trailers, but noooOOOOOoooo... it's really a thread about the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit.
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Ohmigod. You're right.

We should sue. :)
 
I'm suing PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3. I don't think a single scene from the trailer is actually in the movie. Also it was laughably bad--but I accept that as the chance I take going to the movies.
 
Wait wait wait wait.

Are you guys telling me that coffee can sometimes be really hot? And that it probably shouldn't be put in between your legs?

Holy. Shit.

I did not know that.
 
Yeah, third-degree burns, skin grafts, debridement treatments and a chance of dying is something we should all just expect when buying a cup of coffee at a chain restaurant. I mean who wouldn't expect to get very serious burns?

:rolleyes:
 
When I eat a boneless buffalo wing from Pizza Hut/Wing Street I should just expect that somewhere along the line someone screwed up and a stray piece of bone ended up in it.

Hell, when I get a Frostie at Wendy's it should just be natural inclination that somewhere in the process of it being made something went horribly, horribly, wrong and I'd get food poisoning from it and end up alternating between sitting on the toilet or throwing-up into it over the course of several hours.

That's just common sense, right?

So, yeah, it can make sense that when I get coffee from a place rather than expecting to be able to drink it right away without suffering much in the way of burns it should come natural to a person that spilling it on yourself will land you in the hospital for a week and necessitate the removal of dead flesh from your taint.
 
Lindley said:
Trekker4747 said:
There's a difference between brewing temperature and serving temperature.
Click to expand...

Not for tea, which is my point, unless McDs has abruptly gotten more classy. Brewing tea is essentially putting hot water in a cup and dropping in a tea bag. If you get someone who knows tea well, or you specifically request it, maybe they'll even pour the water over the bag. But there's little time between the water leaving the heating pot and the tea being handed over. Other than milk (only added if requested), there isn't any reasonable expectation for it to be much below boiling at that point.
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When I order tea it's generally full of ice and well below room temperature.
 
With good amounts of sugar, unless it's something I have to add myself then it has to be an artificial sweetener. (Sugar sort of sucks at dissolving in cold liquid.)
 
Vampire Chicken said:
Photoman15 said:
hyzmarca said:
Why yes, third degree burns and and skin graft surgery are fun fun fun. Everyone should try it. It's hard to imagine why anyone would be upset by that.

At the temperature McDonalds served coffee, they might as well just set up a machine that randomly dips people's genitals in boiling water.
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She put a hot cup of coffee between her legs and proceeded to drive. That's not where hot coffee belongs. If she didn't have a cup holder, she shouldn't have bought hot coffee or at least held it in ONE hand.
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She wasn't even the one driving. She was a passenger in her grandson's car and he stopped his car so she could add cream and sugar in her coffee. Because she put the cup between her legs she was found to be 20% responsible for her injuries and that was taken into account when a payout figure was determined by the court. McDonalds was considered to be 80% responsible because they served their coffee at a temperature that was far too hot.
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You know my car has a miracalous device in it called the glove compartment, which when opened forms a tray on which to put cups.

Of course that doesn't mean the car in which she was a passanger had one, or that the tempature it was served out.

However to put it in context the boiling point of water is 100C (212F) and in this case it was ~88C(190F). So in theroy it was around the same tempaure as water poured straight from a boiling kettle.

If the situation occured because of water you boiled would the kettle manufacture be liable for your injury?
 
I've not seen a car with glove compartment cup-holders that was built after 1986, further that doesn't undo the fact the coffee was really, really, hot. And her manner of opening the coffee up didn't go un-noticed by the court which is why the damages portion of the lawsuit was split between her and McDonald's, with McDonald's getting the larger portion of the split.

If the situation occured because of water you boiled would the kettle manufacture be liable for your injury?
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.... Noooooo... Because if you boiled the water you know that it is boiling! When someone serves you a food or drink it's natural for you to assume that consuming that item won't cause you serious injury.

Is it reasonable to expect that when a restaurant serves you coffee that that coffee is just slightly below boiling and that spilling it on yourself will cause third-degree burns and land you in a hospital for a week and require numerous surgeries?
 
Well if all depends on how you define a cup holder, the glove compartment door generally folds down to a horizontal position with usually a circular indent to place a cup. Of course that could just be cars manufactured for the European market and not the American market.
 
Possibly, but I've not seen a car with one of those that was made in the 90s or 00s, and usually that "cup holder" is pretty useless as one since it does very little to actually hold the cup. It's just a glorified table which granted may have served some purpose here the coffee still could have spilled on her and still would've caused the severe burns.

How she opened the cup, why she opened the cup or where she opened the cup is irrelevant. What's relevant is that the liquid inside the cup caused third-degree burns on her body as it was 50-degrees above a safe handling temperature.
 
Anybody remember the Ron Howard film The Missing? The trailers for that movie seemed to go out of their way to hide the fact that it was, in fact, a Western set in 1865. The trailer just made it look like a crime thriller about a kidnapped child.

I can't recall if there was any hot coffee in the movie.
 
Trekker4747 said:
.... Noooooo... Because if you boiled the water you know that it is boiling! When someone serves you a food or drink it's natural for you to assume that consuming that item won't cause you serious injury.
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When you order coffee, it's natural to assume it will arrive hot. The degree of hotness should not have to be assumed. In fact, it's reasonable to assume it might be too hot at first. That's why people take the first sip carefully rather than just going straight for the gulp.
 
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