"Jerry Foster" wrote in message
m...

"Pete C." wrote in message
...
"F. George McDuffee" wrote:

snip
Frivolous tort lawsuits, like the McDonald's hot coffee fiasco,
don't
fly in the UK.

We get a few. I can't bring one as frivolous as the hot coffee affair
to
mind, though.
snip
By itself it appears this was a frivolous suit. However taken in
total as the latest in a series of accidents involving [too] hot
coffee, the verdict was justified, i.e. you are only allowed to
injure only so many people with your "safe" product before it
costs you. You also need to remember the number of people who
were injured by coffee sold in the cup and implicitly "ready to
drink," which was in fact scalding. This may have lead to
traffic accidents when the driver took a big swig.

Wasn't said coffee heated to the temperature required by the local
health dept.?

rest of message snipped

As I recall reading, the local health inspector had, on more than one
occasion, warned McDonalds to turn down the temperature of the coffee
before
someone got hurt. In any case, friends in the food business have told me
that the health codes generally require that hot foods be held at, as I
recall, at least 135 degrees. The McDonalds coffee was at something like
190 degrees. But, since this complied with the health code (exceeded it
by
55 degrees...), the inspector couldn't, and didn't, cite them for it.

Jerry

In the MacDonalds case many people had been burned by their coffee and they
had been sued repeatedly for damages. It wasn't until this case where the
woman was severely burned by their coffee that it made the headlines. This
woman was burned so badly that she spent weeks in the hospital being
treated. MacDonalds had been warned repeatedly that their coffee was too hot
and presented a hazard but they disregarded the warnings. The award to the
woman burned was the amount of money MacDonalds made from the sale of coffee
for just one day. Needless to say it was millions of dollars. Had MacDonalds
simply stopped selling scalding hot coffee they wouldn't have been out a
penny and no one would have been hurt. It seems so simple it's a wonder why
they had to do it the hard way.

Hawke