We dont know the final amount, as they settled out of court, but in 1992 a woman was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars by the judge after receiving third degree burns from a coffee at a McDonalds.

She had originally asked for $20,000 to cover medical expenses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

If instead this happened in another part of the world instead of the USA, I doubt that McDonalds would have had to pay much if anything in a similar situation.

And the point is that it seems that especially in the USA the companies are very avoidant of ever admitting fault for anything happening to their customers, for fear of lawsuits where they have to pay a lot of money to individual people.

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pjc50 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is such a litmus test, this case. Yes, America does weird things with punitive damages. But the injuries were really severe and the negligence significant. More often you get class action lawsuits where everyone involved gets mailed a cheque for $3.

It's not just America. McDonald's UK got involved in the UK's biggest ever libel case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case ; leaflets distributed in 1985 ended up resulting in a human rights judgement in 2005, after a lifetime of litigation and millions spent.

	▲	QuantumNomad_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLibel_case Seems kind of an opposite situation. There it was McDonalds suing a pair of people, not the other way around. And the human rights violation was by the UK government and not McD.

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Exoristos 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

McDonald's revenue in 1992 was almost $5,000,000,000.[0]

0. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/24/business/mcdonald-s-net-u...

	▲	QuantumNomad_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And yet even the $20,000 she initially asked for to cover health expenses was apparently too much according to McD execs.

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2ndorderthought 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When healthcare is free the amount of damages is harder to claim maybe?