Doomed to Fail - Ep 165: Hot Coffee Comin' Up - Poor Stella Liebeck

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Ew. You've heard this story but not the details! Stella was in New Mexico on Feb 27, 1992 when she stopped for a coffee at McDonald's. She then spilled the coffee in her lap -- and OMG the injuries are horrific. She sued McDonald's (as she should have because, again, OMG) Then we spent the 90s making fun of her because, of course, coffee is hot. We were terribly terribly wrong. This coffee wasn't hot, the McDonald's coffee of the 90s was lava-level dangerous. Google at your own risk.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Boom, we are back. Hopefully the wildfires are out. And it is a lovely, sunny, who knows what day. Hopefully Wednesday, maybe a Thursday.

How are you, Taylor? Good. Yeah, hopefully, like, something good happened between now and Wednesday. day. It won't. You're being absolutely naively. Cool. On that note, would you like to introduce us?

Yes. I am, welcome, everyone, to Dume to Fail. I am Taylor joined by Fars. We bring you history's most notorious failures, disasters, interesting stories, twice a week, and I just thought for a second, actually, you know, what might happen between now and then is I think I'm really going to ban TikTok because our videos are doing really well on TikTok. I would not be upset if they banned TikTok,

despite that fact, Taylor, because I'm on the camp of, like, why are we giving our data to, like, a Chinese company? I mean, they already haven't. It's the way they can't hack or get it. I know, but you don't have to keep,

whatever. But there's, like, all this stuff happening, that's, like, so interesting. So, like, I am, um, I was on TikTok because I've been, like, trying to repost all of our episodes going to take me my whole life

because, have so many episodes which is awesome you know and but I'm trying to go through all of them I'm only on number 10 but I'm doing like a little TikTok for all of them and we're gaining a lot of followers the followers are like doubled we're not a ton but we have a bunch of them but then when I go to my explore I guess because I'm you know an older woman um all of the things like I'm not really following anybody but all of the things it's like all these live videos of people selling things and it's like people doing the home shopping network from their house and it's like you would like join my live thing and I'd be like oh hi Fars Farras just joined and Beth just joined and whatever this person just joined and then you like order jewelry and a person's like oh my gosh I'm so excited for you okay I'm going to give you jewelry number three they pull out this thing and they put it in like a pot of water and it fizzes and they open it up and they're like oh look this beautiful necklace you're so lucky and then they mail it to you is that weird is this in the U.S.? yes but there's like I've seen

dozens. So there's probably thousands of women who's, that's their job. Yeah, I think I've officially aged out of social media. It's just so fascinating. I'm like, I can't. It's brilliant. I think that like your kids, what their world is going to look like in terms of social media and like what they can do, how they can make money

and in side hustles and whatever else, I think it's going to look so different. than our world in like in a great way i mean it's going to look so different i think you don't i think you disagree on the great way part not in a great way no really yeah i mean things are getting worse every single day like what like cloud changing is worse every day and Elon Musk does something weird more every day

and there's no like light at the end of the tunnel it's just a tunnel of despair and then AI is going to be a thing quantum computer is going to be a thing you would and then it's going to use all of the water

that we've ever possibly had and then we're all going to die your your our parents would never have fathomed like wait you have jobs where you don't have to leave home and you can go like

grocery shopping in the middle the day or you know what I mean like it's just like our our totally living is dramatically better than their standard of living was I think not enough but like not for everyone like we're very privileged well you can't account for everyone there's always going to be like ends the bell curve we're also not billionaires so what are we I know I know but we're also fine um have we have we ever introduced the show yet I did I definitely did but then I was talking about TikTok remember And then you were like, social media, it's a thing. And then I'm in a pit of despair.

And I'm just like, is your topic funny? Yeah, you are. Hey, so it's not funny, but it's insightful, it's thoughtful. And it's different than what we usually do. So hopefully you'll like it because I sense that you are on the precipice of a spiral. I mean, I literally, like I said, I think I said it, I don't know, five minutes ago or an hour ago. I have nuclear war dreams every single night, you know. I'm not doing okay.

But yeah, keep going. I'm going to get your mind off it for like briefly. Thank you. That's what I'm hoping for him. Okay. So I went to dinner last night with Rachel and I went to a ramen place. Taylor, okay, so this is for you as my friend who, if you ever come to visit, we have to figure this out.

But it also is for anybody who is in either mostly in Austin, but if you're like in the areas, the surrounding areas, there's two ramen places that you have to check out in Austin. One is ramen del Barrio, which is phenomenal. It's inside of a grocery store. And that's not what the story's about. But I'm just like bringing it up. it is imagine if like Mexican food was like made like ramen and that's what it is it's just like this god it's so i can't even describe how amazing it is um the other is where i went to yesterday

which is mamafuko ramen and that was that was amazing as well and that's where rich made a joke there was something something about well why don't you just spill some ramen on yourself and then you can see the restaurant for millions and i was like hey i got a fact check you i'm going to throw some facts in your faces. I know a lot about this topic because I knew exactly what she was referring to when she said that. And I assume that Taylor, you might know what she's talking about too. Oh, God, that poor woman with the McDonald's coffee. Yes, the poor woman with the McDonald's coffee. So I am going to go into what I think our collective memory got wrong about that whole situation because a lot of people misremember that whole case and that whole story. So I'm going to go into it.

so generally speaking i think that the collective memory we have is that well she did it to herself she's crazy greedy and she asked for and got an insane sum of money and these days anyone can sue you for anything culture is what we have now that's that's what i generally think the collective wisdom was and i think late night television like jlin was to blame for most of this but oh god i like j lano but like this should blame him for this for sure We should blame him for this. I'm not sure if it was on a show, but it probably was. It almost certainly was.

So that's what I want to get into. It's like get into what actually happened, what we remembered and what we were misremembering about the events and what the outcomes of those events actually were. So this story takes place. It starts in, well, the story doesn't take place here. The story really just starts at 1971 because 1971 is the year McDonald's decided that, you know what? We're going to crush the competition of local diners by introducing, a breakfast menu. So that's the first time breakfast came to McDonald's

with the world infamous Egg Macbuffin and all the rest. I get it without the Canadian bacon because Canadian bacon's weird. I just like Canadian bacon. It's supposed to be really healthy. Is it? I think it's supposed to just pure protein and no fat. But then again, you don't know because like when we were kids, they were like, fat's bad for you. Now fat's good for you.

I know. Now there's like influencers. I was like, have you seen some people eat like a stick of butter and like a steak for breakfast so we know someone that does that i'm not going to say his name right now but we know someone who does that anyways we're going to move on so so in these days you know like now it's funny i make this joke to um to rachel anytime we go for coffee in austin because every coffee shop in austin is the exact same it's like someone wearing shirts that are probably 50 years old and cost $1,000 and have some obscure band. The person on the counter is 27, has, like, tiny little tattoos, the ones that you kind

of have. Like, it's just all the exact same vibe. Like, the vibe of every coffee shop at Austin is the exact same. They're all very hoity-toity, you know, type of a vibe. That is not what the vibe was back in the day. Back in the day, coffee was just like a thing you picked up at McDonald's or 7-Eleven. It was hot as shit. Nobody cared about flavor.

There weren't four different types of beans. with individual social security numbers that you could choose from. Like, they're all just beans. You just got a bean and just get them things roasted. So. You're totally right. That's so funny. Up till the events of this story, McDonald's kept its coffee at around 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit. For context of how hot that is, that's the internal temperature of like a very well-baked, freshly baked bread. Or the temperature that you would serve pork at.

Like a sauna, for example, is about 150 degrees. You can go up to like 150, 170, but like, that's the upper limits. Starbucks, by comparison, today, serves our coffee between 150 and 170, which coincidentally is also temperature where third degree burns also tend to happen depending on exposure, length, where it happens, all that stuff. Were you going to say something just now? It's stupid, but like, when I first had a baby, you buy a thing. stroller right and the strollers have a cup holder on the front and one of them they say like not for

hot liquids you know and I was like I'm an idiot you know and then the first thing I did was put a cup of coffee in it and like push a stroller two feet and there was coffee everywhere I was like I am an idiot and that is exactly why this warning was on here but we live in modern times with tiny single line tattoo baristas so that coffee could have been a nice coffee Taylor it's a It's true. That was when I switched to the ice coffee and followed the rules of the stroller. Very well done. I still only order ice coffee. If I'm at home, I have hot coffee because I don't want to make ice coffee. But if I ever go out, I'm ordering ice coffee. Really? I like, I like doing like a latte or something.

Lottes are nice. Lestays are nice. I just feel like I'm not going to get like an Americano. I got a bunch of Americanos in Puerto Rico because I don't know, if like everything was so sweet or fried, I was like, give me something not. So I like, a piece of broccoli and an Americano. So I'm not like dying. It's like pans you like a nice fried pork hawk next to it. Yeah, exactly. So the logic McDonald's used to justify why their coffee was so hot was there's three reasons. One, they said their customers wanted that hot because the hot of the coffee is the longer it stays hot. So if you buy a coffee in the drive-thru, then when you get to your office and sit down to your desk, the coffee is still hot.

So they did it for customer reasons. The second reason is they said that a hotter cup of coffee is fresher. It stays fresher longer and it preserves flavor longer. I can't be sure. I feel like it's burned. We're going to get into this. Okay, great. They're not doing it for good reasons.

Let's put it that way. Right, right. Okay, I was like, I don't believe that. But keep going. So my personal favorite was that they brewed coffee in huge, huge batches. Like, this was not, again, this was not an era when coffee. was artistry. They were just making tons of coffee and making tons of coffee over

and over again. It just reduced the profits. So you make one batch of coffee, you keep it scalding hot and the person getting that coffee thinks that their coffee's fresh because it's scalding hot. Who else would keep old coffee scalding hot?

So with that set out of the way, let's get to our main protagonist, which is a woman named Stella May Lebeck, a 79 year old grandmother in 1992 from Norwich, England, and she was

living with her daughter Judy Allen and her grandson, Chris Lebeck, in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the time. So we're in 1992, February 27th. Stella and her grandson, Chris, go through the drive through their local McDonald's, which, by the way, I street viewed it, it's still there.

Wow, that's interesting. Yeah. They go to this McDonald's and she ordered a cup of coffee. They get the coffee and Chris Parks to give her some times to open the lid and put cream and sugar inside of it. She does this by placing

the cup between her legs so she can peel the lid off of it. And in the process she was peeling the lid towards herself. So she's grabbing the lid the furthest side of the lid and like peel it. And so in the middle of doing this, she spilled the entire couple coffee in her laugh.

And who among us has not done this? I've not done this. You've not done this? I feel like you get a cup of coffee and like you want to put some stuff in it you put it between your legs so i i drink my coffee black unless i'm at home i do too but i feel like i have i do get black all the time but i feel like i would like my husband wants a splendor and his so we have to open it so i put it like between my knees open it if i'm sitting in the car and he like can't ditch me you know he just wants it black with a splendor no no no he has a lot to have two splendors it's oh oh i was going to say

No, but like, no, but... Monstering into a monster. No, that's gross. But, no, but how else would I do it? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how else would you do it? That would be the expectation. So, Stella's reaction was super, super intense, and some would argue over the top.

Her grandson actually thought she was overreacting until she literally went into shock and passed out in the car. He then raised... Huh? How old is the grandson again? oh i don't know i don't know she i mean he's probably like in his like

late 20s early 30s i'll assume um he would race her to the ER once this happened once he saw the outcome of this and it was discovered that she had third degree burns up her legs in in her like

crotch region i mean she poured the coffee in like the worst spot that you'd want to pour the coffee this would require ongoing skin grafts and full time care um

going on for like months after her discharge from the hospital so well the skin grafts lasting months after charge yeah the skin grafts would last for months after the discharge um but in total she spent eight days in the hospital then two years of ongoing treatments and then at the end of this she still ended up permanently disfigured and somewhat disabled like living in constant pain Oh, my God. So Stella's daughter, who would take on the duty of being her caregiver, she was not like salaried. So she was missing out on pay by taking care of her mom. And there was ongoing medical expenses, obviously, that Stella had to incur and her family had to incur.

Ultimately, Stella would reach out to McDonald's and ask for about $20,000 to cover her actual medical bills, expected medical bills, and her daughter's loss of income. That's what she wanted. She wanted $20,000. That's it. McDonald's counted with $800. So this pissed her off enough so that she retained a lawyer to sue McDonald's. And the main legal issues at trial were, was McDonald's negligent in serving coffee at such a high temperature, knowing that it posed a risk to customers? Did their failure to act on prior burn complaints constitute willful negligence?

Was the severity of Stella Lebex injuries reasonably foreseeable? and lastly, to what extent was still responsible herself for the spill and the injuries. So on the first point, the coffee temperature, despite what they argued at trial, their own, through discovery,

it was discovered, that their own internal survey and polls uncovered that people didn't wait to drink their coffee when they got to the office. They would start drinking their coffee in the car, like any sane human being. Like, oh my God. It's such a, like,

it's such a deliberate attempt to be like, I don't, I don't, I have no idea how this works. So, so, so the whole, they have to serve at this hot. So it's the right temperature when you get to your desk argument just falls apart immediately on its face. Also, it was discovered that coffee served elsewhere was between the 150 and 170 range, which it currently is at a place like Starbucks, for example. That's what they currently do. And that's what they did back then as well.

And if you were to spill at the higher end of that spectrum, yeah, what is, what is boiling? Boiling is 132. That's almost boiling? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So at 170 degrees, it would take 20 seconds. Sorry, sorry. At 170 degrees, like if you were to serve the coffee at a reasonable temperature, I'm sure that's considered reasonable today,

it would take 20 seconds longer to, for you, didn't incurred and develop third degree burns if you were to spill that coffee on yourself then you would at the 190 degree temperature what's actually worse here is that she was also wearing

thick cotton like pants or whatever and so when the coffee spilled she couldn't peel it away from her skin it just like soaked into the into the cotton and just pressed itself against her body and then there's a question

of prior complaint so in the years prior to Stella's lawsuit McDonald's had received over 700 complaints about its coffee and settled over $500,000 against those complaints. So they knew, without a shadow of a doubt, their coffee was injuring people. So as to Stella's culpability, she's obviously somewhat responsible for this, and she is the one who did it. In all, the jury decided that McDonald's was 80% at fault. It still was 20% of fault. In total, she was awarded $200,000 in compensatory damage. That means, like, they're just trying to compensate you.

They're trying to make you whole for money that you're out of pocket or will be out of pocket. So she got $200,000 worth of those, but that was reduced 20% because of her own culpability. So she received $160,000 of that. Then there's the part that, again, the late night comics had a field day with. They added the punitive damages to the award of $2.7 million. So the part I think people overlook is the point of a punitive damage is to punish the wrongful entity for their actions in such a way that they would correct their actions and not repeat them. Let me ask this. How many days worth of coffee sale do you think the punitive damages were for McDonald's?

Oh my God, like nothing. Two days. So the $2.7 million award. that everybody made fun of them was like we're spinning out of control as a country that's two days of coffee sales for McDonald's yeah so in 1992 yeah yeah yeah it's like way more now exactly exactly yeah so the other part that gets overlooked is she didn't collect that so the judge ended up reducing the damages to reducing the punitive damages to $480,000 so she still got the 160 plus the 480 and then still is a attorneys appealed and that's when them and McDonald's settled out of court for some that we actually didn't even know what it totally is ultimately several things would come out of this McDonald's absolutely shockingly did not reduce the temperature of their coffee what they did was a printed more prominent labels of warning on the cups because again like I go back to like

this was a profit center they had machines they had probably had built you know like what are you going to do like remove those and now you got to hire someone full time they're not going to do that it wasn't until yeah they don't care yeah they don't care it wasn't until 2013 when they started going through their whole mic cafe conversion and it's like we're going to deal with Starbucks that's when they started investing in brewing and that's when they got rid of the industrial machines that would keep the damn thing at 190 degrees again like it's like it's it's going to taste like burning right it's like good coffee so I was way too young to be into coffee back then, but I never had it, but I could only assume it was horrible, horrible coffee. I think the reason Starbucks exists today is because the most successful coffee people had access to was McDonald's and nobody liked it. So Starbucks shows up and they look like superheroes. And then they charge three times of much money. But part of that is to pay for that person to make you an individual cup of coffee and not scoop it out of a boiling cauldron.

Yeah. So you can look at a guy with a handlebar mustache and a beanie wearing a flannel shirt. Like that's where you pay for. That's where you're there for. Exactly. Stella would die 10 years after her court case of 91 years old. She,

according to her daughter, basically just died in agony. Her settlement for McDonald's paid for the live-in nurse she needed for 24-hour support until her death. And last but not least, this had an impact on automakers can guess why cup holders you are brilliant so stella's grandson was driving and they really just thought oh i should have put the coffee in the

cup holder and take the top off yeah yeah you know it didn't occur to me like my whole rant about how i like very much would have put it in my legs like i didn't even think about i should have put it in the cup of there so none of these changes the automakers would have made an impact in your case. Now that I thought it through, but you guys. When you first said the thing about the baby carriage, I was like, oh, wow, she's kind of stuff up on my story here. So Stella's grandson, the car he was driving when they went to that drive-thru was a 1989 Ford probe. And the 1980s and early 1990s, cup holders were like a luxury car thing. A Ford probe would not have cup holders. Still, yeah, like,

sell Levex case has been cited as a leading influence for automakers to standardize cup holders in cars and the Ford probe actually the first time it ever got a cup holder was right after this burn injury situation in 1993 so so several things here when I started this conversation at the ramen restaurant the first thing I did was like hey if you think that that ladies injuries were like such a joke Google it Google Google Stella Lebeck injuries and it looks like

like radiation like it looks horrible like anybody wants to Google it it is not a pretty sight she got super super messed up so everybody was like well it was frivolous it was BS like take a look at those pictures like you will totally disagree with that sentiment

that it was frivolous I'm looking at them now oh my God yeah you would not expect that right I knew that they were like wow she got messed up bad wow so this thing

people look at as being the birth of the frivolous lawsuit and basically bearing a time period where corporations were getting sued left right that the public didn't like and the underlying reason why the public didn't like it was because they thought that dumb people or incompetent people were getting stupid rich off of being stupid and corporations having to make payouts like this made them poor because they would have to front the bill in higher costs essentially and as with anything

there's two arguments that could be that could be had here right on the one hand this practice by McDonald's should have been stopped after like the third complaint about someone burning the shit out of themselves with the hot coffee like that's insane the hurt injuries to herself are absolutely unbelievable um did you hear that no okay good on the other hand um some of the damages were actually kind of obscene generally speaking what happened to these situations when lawyers are trying to file these crazy lawsuits. They look at a case that is just so beyond the pale that it has absolutely no merit being awarded the judgment against awarded. Steles wasn't that case because nobody looked for a situation was like, we all think it was the case, but it wasn't. The actual case was a case called Gore v. BMW. It was this doctor named Dr. Ira Gore who bought a five series BMW for $40,000 in 1990. And then later on when he was getting the car detailed, he found out the car had been repainted before he bought it.

So it was sold a brand new car, but it had been repainted. And then through discovery and through lawsuits, because this doctor had more time than anyone on earth, it was discovered that BMW had a policy that if a new car is damaged, but the damage costs less than 3% to repair than the value of the car, they would fix it and not tell the new buyer that it was damaged. So in that case, the courts awarded IRA $4,000 for the loss value of the car, but $4 million for punitive damages. And then that's what they actually filed up to the Supreme Court saying, hey, frivolous lawsuits are getting out of hand.

We got to get a grip on this thing. And that was the case where they started putting multipliers on punitive damages can't be more than certain X more than the compensatory damages. And so, but, like, that was kind of like the, the answer to frivolous lawsuits that really sell Lebeck's case spawned, which, again, I don't think she did. I think she was horribly, horribly injured. And I think that the damages she was awarded and the grand scheme of how much that would have cost McDonald's and days of coffee sales, like, who cares? Like, yeah, like, yeah, it wasn't, I don't know.

I don't know. I don't think she was in the wrong. No, absolutely not. absolutely not she was horribly injured yeah yeah like it is honestly don't maybe don't google it it's pretty bad it's pretty bad so so that is my story um hopefully it took your mind off of things briefly it did it did a little bit yeah feeling better a little bit a little bit a lot going on yeah there you go there you go yeah so anytime somebody makes a joke about

spilling something and getting millions of bucks you show them that picture yeah for real oh god poor thing that's awful so um sweet that's my story for the day do we have anything we want to report out to the um no nothing has changed really oh i'm gonna keep i'm gonna do some more TikToks before I'm not allowed to anymore and yeah I think that's it let us know um if you have any questions or thoughts we're at doomed to fill a pot at gmail.com and doomed to fill a pod on all of the social medias please write to us we like hearing from you we'd love to hear from you um sweet we'll go ahead and cut things off then taylor cool thanks Thank you.