Here we go again …
Once more the American legal system is punishing businesses for underestimating the creative stupidity of their customers. Remember the famous 1994 McDonald’s coffee case where McDonald’s was sued successfully for selling “defectively manufactured” (i.e. hot) coffee that was “unreasonably dangerous” because an older lady managed to spill an entire cup of it on her lap in a car?
Well, as reported by CNN, Round 2 of the bonehead court of the day took place in Florida yesterday …
The culprit? Another McDonald’s. The scene of the crime? Another McDrive. (Drivebys were never so dangerous …) The weapon? An “unreasonably hot” 2019 Chicken McNugget that burned the thigh of a four-year old girl when it fell out of her hands and got wedged in the seat beside her. The verdict? Liability on the part of both McDonald’s and the franchise owner Upchurch Foods in addition to negligence on the part of the latter. (The jurors, however, agreed that there was “no inherent defect in putting McNuggets on the market and no breach of implied warranty.” Phew …)
Really? C’mon …
I’m not necessarily trying to assign any blame here. Lawyers are well known as mouthpieces paid to win cases, regardless of what relationship the latter have to either common sense or reality, neither of which are really legal concepts. And we’ve all been there as parents, where a split-second, industrial-strength brain fart can result in serious harm.
Just suck up some personal responsibility and don’t try to blame Ronald McDonald for not looking after your child when you didn’t. We’ve all done it, but that still doesn’t mean that feeding your toddler in the backseat of the car is necessarily safe nor that the backseat is a licensed restaurant. And even though the reality is that fast food is often unreasonably tepid, there’s still the reasonable expectation that it could be hot, especially when it comes out of a deep fryer somewhere north of 160 ºC and we are unreasonably demanding that it be served to us now because we’re at the drive through.
Ok, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that those Chicken McNuggets were indeed unreasonably hot and that the parents were not unreasonably inept. At least two questions come immediately to my mind.
First, what is the definition of “reasonably hot”? (Or, in the case of the 1994 coffee, “reasonably dangerous”?) It seems like a lot of literal pain could be avoided here if this one simple quantity could somehow be spelled out explicitly. However, part of the problem might be that “reasonably hot” is not a simple quantity and seems to be context-dependent. For instance, when talking about the weather, it being reasonably hot outside is usually a warning that it’s too hot. By contrast, someone who is pointed out to you at the singles’ bar as being reasonably hot usually isn’t and definitely isn’t the morning after.
Second, even if we do manage to figure out what a “reasonably hot” Chicken McNugget is, how do McDonald’s & Co. even begin to implement this? Has anyone ever investigated the thermodynamics of a Chicken McNugget so that McDonald’s knows how long they have to wait after it comes out of the deep fryer before they can sell it? Or would each and every McDonald’s have to hire someone to fire one of those forehead thermometers at each and every McNugget every 30 seconds or so?
Hmm. Actually not a bad idea. There’s probably more than a few million thermometers going spare now that the corona pandemic is over …
The Blog About Fog 