I read this article in today's Albuquerque Journal:
Suit hearkens to 1990s case in New Mexico that awarded plaintiff $2. 7M
BY MARÍA LUISA PAÚL THE WASHINGTON PO ST
A spilled 49-cent hot coffee from McDonald’s became a national punchline, a lyric in a Toby Keith song and endless fodder for talk shows after a 79-year-old woman successfully sued the company for the third-degree burns she got from a steaming cup of joe in 1992.
Now, three decades later, another woman says she was seriously injured by the same scalding liquid. Mable Childress, 85, allegedly suffered first- and second-degree burns from a McDonald’s coffee while leaving a San Francisco drive-through earlier this year.
According to a lawsuit filed last week in San Francisco Superior Court, Childress’s June 13 trip to McDonald’s ended with “severe burns” after she was handed a cup with a lid that hadn’t been properly secured. When she tried to take a sip, the lid came off, drenching her legs, groin and stomach with hot coffee, according to the lawsuit, which does not specify the temperature of the spilled drink.
Childress immediately attempted to report the incident and asked to speak to a manager, but three employees “refused to help her,” according to the lawsuit. After an hour spent without anyone coming to her aid, she went to the emergency room, said Dylan Hackett, Childress’s attorney. “What it comes down to is negligence on the part of McDonald’s,” Hackett told The Washington Post. He added that the incident left Childress with scarring, ongoing physical and emotional pain, and a slew of medical expenses.
McDonald’s did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment. Peter Ou, the owner and operator of the franchise location that Childress visited, told Today that his “restaurants have strict food safety protocols in place, including training crew to ensure lids on hot beverages are secure.”
“We take every customer complaint seriously — and when Ms. Childress reported her experience to us later that day, our employees and management team spoke to her within a few minutes and offered assistance,” Ou told the program in a statement. “We’re reviewing this new legal claim in detail.”
It’s not the first time McDonald’s has faced complaints from customers about its hot food items.
In July, a jury in Florida awarded $800,000 in damages to the family of a 7-year-old girl who got second-degree burns after a Chicken McNugget fell on her thigh in 2019. And in the well-known 1992 case, coffee as hot as 190 degrees soaked into Stella Liebeck’s cotton sweatpants, sending her to the hospital for eight days as she underwent skin grafting.
“The hot coffee temperature has already been litigated before. . . . So it’s an ongoing issue, it seems like, with McDonald’s,” Hackett said, adding that Childress hopes the case makes McDonald’s rethink its food items’ high temperatures.
In 1994, a jury in New Mexico unanimously decided to award Liebeck $2.7 million in punitive damages for the coffee spill that burned 16% of her body. Liebeck was widely villainized in the court of public opinion, said John Llewellyn, a communications professor at Wake Forest University.
