McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit

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The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

The Nanny State Conservative’s Myth of the Broken Legal System The nanny state conservatives illustrate the problem of the U.S. legal system with a collection of horror stories. Probably the most famous is the one about the elderly woman who won millions of dollars from McDonald’s after she burned herself by spilling hot McDonald’s coffee in her lap while driving. A close second is the story about the would-be burglar who broke his neck by falling through a skylight, and then won millions of dollars from the homeowner in damages. The lesson the nanny state conservatives would have us take from these stories is that the legal system is out of control.

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The damages awarded in these 1 An account of this case can be found in Burke (2002, pp. 28-29). 68 cases, and many others like them, are not intended merely to compensate the people who had brought the suits, they are also intended to punish the defendants for what the juries viewed as bad behavior. The jury felt that McDonald’s had been wrong to risk burning customers by making their coffee unusually hot so that the company could save a fraction of a penny on every cup. They were not simply thinking of how to compensate the woman who was burned, they wanted to teach McDonald’s a lesson that would get them to change their practices. 2 Similarly, the jury that awarded damages to the injured student wanted to send a message to this particular school and others like it.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

availability heuristic, behavioural economics, book value, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, equal pay for equal work, experimental economics, experimental subject, feminist movement, game design, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, index card, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, Linda problem, loss aversion, market bubble, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, no-fly zone, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Potemkin village, power law, price anchoring, price discrimination, psychological pricing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, social intelligence, starchitect, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-martini lunch, ultimatum game, working poor

Reed Morgan, had ridden in this rodeo before. In 1986 he sued McDonald’s on behalf of a Houston woman who also had third-degree burns from a coffee spill. In his most mesmerizing Deep South baritone, Morgan advanced the legally ingenious theory that McDonald’s coffee was “defective” because it was too hot. McDonald’s quality control people said the coffee should be served at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, and this was shown to be hotter than some other chains’ coffee. The Houston case was settled for $27,500. Morgan monitored subsequent coffee lawsuits closely. He knew that in 1990 a California woman had suffered third-degree burns from McDonald’s coffee and settled, with no great fanfare, for $230,000.

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Market 52 For the Love of God 53 Antidote for Anchoring 54 Buddy System 55 The Outrage Theory 56 Honesty Box 57 Money, Chocolate, Happiness Notes Sources Index Part One “The more you ask for, the more you get” One The $2.9 Million Cup of Coffee In 1994 an Albuquerque jury awarded Stella Liebeck $2.9 million in damages after she spilled a piping-hot cup of McDonald’s coffee on herself. This resulted in third-degree burns and precious little sympathy from the American public. Late-night comics and drive-time DJs turned Liebeck into a punch line. Talk radio pundits saw the lawsuit as Exhibit A to What’s Wrong with Our Legal System. A Seinfeld episode had Kramer suing over spilled coffee, and a website inaugurated the “Stella Awards”—booby prizes for the wackiest perversions of the justice system.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

For all practical purposes, “contracts are dead, at least insofar as they attempt to allocate responsibility for accidents, ahead of time.”14 Product safety standards have effectively been socialized, and lawyers now have incentives to spend their lives digging up cases and evidence against corporations because some consumers stupidly misused their products. An infamous example that was widely publicized is of an elderly woman who put a cup of piping-hot McDonald’s coffee between her legs while driving her car and scalded herself after making a sharp turn and spilling the coffee. She and her lawyers sued McDonald’s, accepting no responsibility at all for her own foolishness, and a jury originally awarded her a multimillion-dollar settlement. The award was eventually reduced to a mere $200,000 or so, and McDonald’s was apparently pleased to get off that cheaply.

In Stitches by Nick Edwards

deskilling, job satisfaction, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, old-boy network

She had a known allergy, but says she now ignores all disclaimers for ‘may contain nuts or nut extracts or made in a factory where nuts are used or once been within a 50-mile radius of a nut’ otherwise she would have nothing to eat. They are now put on everything for fear of being sued and it is completely uninformative, so she ignores them all. One thing I don’t object to, and others do, are stupid warnings. For example: KP nuts, WARNING. MAY CONTAIN NUTS. McDonalds coffee, WARNING. CONTENTS ARE HOT AND MAY SCALD. I think these signs save the lives of a particular subgroup of people who often attend A&E and I thank the companies for their corporate responsibility. 9. The new ethos of excessive risk management and risk avoidance–schools and clubs are scared to take their kids on trips for fear of the consequences of an accident.

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Nor were class action securities suits often mentioned in Washington during Reagan’s time in the White House, and never once by the president himself. What animated Reagan, and ultimately the Republican Party, were so-called “frivolous” lawsuits, whose causes of action seemed tortured in their logic, or civil cases in which the verdict sounded comically excessive: $3 million in damages to the New Mexico woman who put her hot McDonald’s coffee cup between her legs—and was scalded when she opened the lid by pulling it toward herself; $2.7 million to the West Virginia convenience store clerk who claims she hurt her back opening a pickle jar; another $2 million to a doctor from Alabama who sued when BMW touched up his new car with paint without telling him.

Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars?: A Believer Book of Advice by The Believer, Judd Apatow, Patton Oswalt

Albert Einstein, carbon tax, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Saturday Night Live, side project, telemarketer

To answer your question, this disturbing occurrence happened around the same time coffee got hoity-toity and phones became a hot topic of conversation. If I’m within earshot of you ordering a Venti Vanilla Soy Decaf Latte, prepare to have it spilled in your lap like that dumb cunt who burnt her cooch up with McDonald’s coffee ’cause she didn’t realize it was HOT! And if I’m at a party and you start telling me about the latest app you just downloaded for your brand-new Droid, pray you have an app for extracting the phone from your anus. So, Midge, have a good ol’ Hershey’s bar on me, and if you’d like to learn more about chocolate, buy my newest tome, Chocolate, Please: My Adventures in Food, Fat and Freaks.

You're a Horrible Person, but I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice by The Believer

blood diamond, Burning Man, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, nuclear winter, Saturday Night Live

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

• If you neglected to put that information into the system because the interface makes doing this a pain in the ass, apologize and ask the customer to tell you again. She will usually be happy to do so. 4. Get a wooden coffee stirrer and stir. 5. Toss the stirrer, grab the appropriate lid, and put it on, double-checking that it’s super secure—for reasons unclear to me, McDonald’s keeps its coffee undrinkably, scaldingly hot, and a spill can burn you in seconds. 6. Pick up the coffee, grab a tray in your other hand, and carry them over to the hot box—the centrally located window connecting kitchen and counter. 7. Put the tray down by the hot box, put the coffee on the tray, then continue over to the fry station on the far left wall. 8.

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Heck, good old butter has fewer calories than olive or coconut oil, so a sophisticated and “healthy” bruschetta isn’t far off from a less-reputable southern delicacy: deep-fried butter on a stick. The same goes for fast-food choices. The supposedly nutritious burrito from Chipotle easily packs four times as many calories as a greasy burger from McDonald’s, while a loaded coffee at Starbucks is about the same as two hot dogs with a heaping side of mashed potatoes to boot. All this probably helps explain the abysmal track record for most weight loss regimes; the self-reported long-term success rate for people who try to slim down appears to be around 20 percent.3 Establishing a “No Diet” Diet Perhaps the most sustainable approach to weight loss is to make sure that our diets don’t feel like diets.

The Lufthansa Heist: Behind the Six-Million-Dollar Cash Haul That Shook the World by Henry Hill, Daniel Simone

McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, rolodex

Frommer's San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert, Kristin Luna

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, off-the-grid, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-work, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In 2013, a school district in Maryland banned, among other things, pushing children on swings, bringing homemade food into school, and distributing birthday invitations on school grounds.8 It continues in college, where professors have provided their charges with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.” It extends to every aspect of daily life. McDonald’s prints warning signs on its cups of coffee pointing out that “this liquid may be hot.” Winston Churchill once said to his fellow countrymen, “We have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”9 Today, thanks to a malign combination of litigation, regulation, and pedagogical fashion, sugar-candy people are everywhere.

California by Sara Benson

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, dark matter, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, planetary scale, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, the new new thing, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional