Summary
A California jury awarded Michael Garcia $50 million after he suffered severe burns from a spilled Starbucks hot tea, requiring skin grafts and causing permanent disfigurement.
Garcia’s lawsuit alleged a Starbucks employee failed to secure the drink in a tray, leading to the spill. Starbucks offered a $30 million settlement with confidentiality, which Garcia rejected.
The company plans to appeal, calling the damages excessive.
The case echoes past lawsuits over hot beverage burns, including the famous McDonald’s coffee case from the 1990s.
That McDonald’s case is going to fuck them up. It’s clear precedent for a largely similar case. The extreme publicity around it also means Starbucks can’t claim ignorance of the danger of hot coffee via the drive thru as any sort of defense.
Black tea needs to be brewed pretty close to boiling, and even green tea is brewed at 185, the same temp as the McDonald’s coffee incident. I don’t know how you can brew tea to order and hand it to someone a moment later without it still being at almost the exact same temperature. Tea also needs 3-5 minutes to steep, and you can’t hold up a drive through just to hand it over.
I’m not much for Starbucks, so don’t take this as me defending them, but I think most honest people would have trouble articulating why this merits a $50mm lawsuit. Imagine a similar ruling coming down on your local cafe.
A reminder that for the McDonald’s claim, she only wanted her medical bills covered, it was McDonald’s that refused a much smaller claim of some tens of thousands and instead insisted on taking it to court. Plus they had been advised numerous times previously from customers about burns due to their decision to maintain the temp of their brewed coffee so high for so long after it was made, solely to minimize profit loss. They were scraping pennies and ignoring customer warnings.
Starbucks offered the guy $30M with a confidentiality agreement. They were already clearly thinking it warranted an amount in that region, which would only be if they thought they could be liable for even more.
Not just all of that, but her injuries were grotesquely horrific, including permanent damage to her genitalia. For those claiming these are ridiculous awards, ask yourself what it would cost to make you accept having your genitals melted by hot liquids.
How much I gotta pay?
What the f- oh, American units
I was wondering what the heck kind of green tea needed that kind of treatment, lol
You can’t physically get water to go over 100c in atmosphere without it being pressurized. What impossible feats where you thinking was going on when you saw the 185?
I dunno, some tea drinkers can have pretty involved rituals! Haha