According to the facts presented at the trial, it is, at least for the fast food industry. All other fast food chains were found to serve coffee at about 140 F.
aka compression machine. optimized to trigger brains' reward circuitry for accomplishment by 'tidying up' unmanageable landscapes of disjointed data into easily stored and recalled bimodal silhouettes of same.
Typical coffee serving temperature is 155-175F. I'm considered unusual among my friends for being able to sip 170-180F coffee. 190F is just way too hot.
Again, if you buy a coffee at McDonalds today, or at Starbucks, or virtually anywhere else, you'll get a coffee that can be as hot or hotter. It's a hot beverage.
Now, yes. Not 25 years ago.
FWIW I think the temperature of coffee is way too hot at most places. It drives me crazy. If I can't drink it immediately after them handing it to me? Too hot!
But recently brewed coffee is dangerous anyway, it's quite stupid to hold it with one's legs. Still, I don't know about the details, and even the defamation she suffered might be enough for the punishment.
Of course if they do brew that, they won’t give it to you before either adding a bit of cool water (most places prefer to brew strong and then dilute) or letting it cool down (if they just insist on a strong-taste brand).
Coffee nuts are a fan of really high temperature in my experience. They just know that you can’t taste the difference if your first sip burns off your taste buds.
IIRC at the time the McDonald's stated rationale was that by serving at that temperature it would be at a good drinking temperature when people arrived at their offices. These days that seems ludicrous to me.
Citation needed. Anecdotally, every person I ever talked to about that case either had a profound eye roll or a shrug about how people will sue over anything.
If I bought a hammer and smashed my finger with it, should I sue Home Depot for selling me a hammer that was too hard and not warning me about it? That’s pretty much the basis of the McDonald’s case: they sold a hot beverage, some lady sticks it between her legs and it spills. A reasonable person could have foreseen that a hot beverage, stored in an insecure manner, could pose a spilling hazard and that hot liquids have the potential to scald. A woman in her 70s has been around enough hot liquids in her life that she should have known the risk of scalding. None of that is McDonald’s fault. It was just easy to manipulate the jury into the award by using emotion and painting McDonalds as some uncaring villain. That case was frivolous— but since it made it to the jury, the old lady won and now we all get to pay more when we buy coffee from restaurants to cover the higher insurance costs restaurants must now pass on to the customer.
The Internet extreme position machine. Everything has to be clear cut.
How McDonalds no longer engages in "corporate negligence": they put pronounced warnings on the cup that it's a dangerously hot substance. That's it. They did not lower the temperature (as is frequently claimed, nor is the temperature at all outside of normal industry standards, yet this is being repeatedly stated throughout this thread -- coffee, brewing with boiling water, is hot). You can get a searingly hot cup of coffee from most quick-serve restaurants today depending upon how freshly it was brewed. This is a case where the solution is more warnings on things.
This case was, however, an example of bad brand management, and perhaps throwing good money after bad for something they could have privately settled early on.
This is certainly not a hill I want to die on, and generally arguing against the prevalent opinion (which is overwhelming the one that you and the GP have expressed, albeit almost always positioning it like it's contrarian) is self-defeating, however this whole case is fascinating in how public perception shifts.