Not Just a Hot Cup Anymore
By
HILARY STOUT
Published: October 21, 2013
More than 20 years ago, 79-year-old Stella Liebeck ordered coffee at
a McDonald’s drive-through in Albuquerque, N.M. She spilled the coffee,
was burned, and one year later, sued McDonald’s. The jury awarded her
$2.9 million. Her story became a media sensation and fodder for
talk-show hosts, late-night comedians, sitcom writers and even political
pundits. But cleverness may have come at the expense of context, as
this Retro Report video illustrates. And below, a consumer affairs
reporter for The Times reflects on how the world has changed since the
lawsuit.
It was pretty much a pre-Starbucks world.
Back in February 1992, when Stella Liebeck ordered the 8-ounce cup of
McDonald’s coffee that would famously spill and turn her, briefly, into a
court-made millionaire — until the amount, the video reports, was
lowered to about $500,000 — we were not the coffee culture we would
become.
For those seeking reforms in the legal system since a jury tried to
award Ms. Liebeck $2.9 million for the third-degree burns she suffered
from the spill, little has changed despite efforts to cap
multimillion-dollar verdicts like her original amount.
But when it comes down to the morning brew at the center of the case, a
lot has transpired in the two decades since the lawsuit caused such an
uproar.
We have become a society that totes hot liquids everywhere. Our palms
seem to be permanently attached to an elongated cup with a plastic lid.
This is partly a matter of growth and supply. The number of Starbucks
stores in the United States has swelled from 146 in 1992, mostly in the
Northwest, to 10,924 all last year, in cities, strip malls and small
towns throughout the country. (There are six in my one-square-mile ZIP
code on the Upper West Side of Manhattan alone and a seventh is opening
soon.)
The point is, the world now caters to the coffee drinker. The idea of
getting into a car without cup holders and lifting the lid off the cup
in order to add milk and sugar and drink the coffee, as the facts of the
case show Ms. Liebeck did that morning, seems strangely anachronistic.
Within the ensuing years, some genius invented a sculptured lid with a
little sipping hole in the top, eliminating the need to open the cup and
reducing the potential for spills. Sloshing grew less likely once the
lip was raised above the cup rim.
Let’s not forget the evolution of the cup holder. Teams of car engineers
continuously work to perfect their design for drivers in the front and
those passengers two rows back.
Coffee technology has definitely come a long way.
We now have that little cardboard thing that goes around the disposable
cup so you can hold a cup of hot coffee without discomfort. (It actually
has a name: the zarf, and one Jay Sorenson is said to have invented it
in 1993 and he holds a patent on it under the trademark Java Jacket. Now
multiple companies make them.)
Berry Plastics, a company based in Evansville, Ind., that manufactures
cold-drink cups for fast-food vendors, including McDonald’s and
Starbucks (they’re the ones who created those clear plastic cups with
the dome tops for Frappuccinos), recently got into the hot-drink
business by developing a “fully recyclable thermal management packaging
solution.” In other words, a cup.
But not just any cup. This one — called Versalite, with 20 patents
pending, and currently being tested in several markets — is a disposable
cup that insulates the liquid to keep hot coffee from cooling but also
to keep the cup from feeling hot to the touch. “We’ve known for a long
time that there’s been a need for a better insulating cup,” said Jon
Rich, president and chief executive of Berry Plastics. (Incidentally,
the Versalite cup performs the same function for cold drinks.)
Not to mention the variety of insulated, metal refillable travel mugs,
with any number of push-button, sliding openings from which to sip a hot
or cold brew.
But all of this means we are even more lackadaisical about the
potentially scalding liquid we carry. We nonchalantly sip coffee over
babies, while pushing them in strollers (and stow them in the holders
intended for bottles and sippy cups). We jostle one another on crowded
subways and buses while clutching our coffee cups. We take them to
class, carry them through stores, in libraries. Museums seem to be one
of the few places that forbid them.
Sure, warnings, then and now, are plastered all over cups and tops:
“Careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot,” says
the Starbucks cup. “Caution Contents Hot,” says the lid. “Caution Handle
with Care I’m Hot,” says the McDonald’s cup.
Nevertheless, an average of 80 people a year are hospitalized for coffee
and tea scaldings at the William Randolph Hearst Burn Center at New
York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said Dr. Robert W. Yurt,
the chief of the division of burns, critical care and trauma. Seventy
percent of them were children under 6 years old, he said, though the
majority of those accidents occurred at home.
During the Liebeck court proceedings, McDonald’s said it served its
coffee between 180 and 190 degrees. The company has refused to disclose
today’s standard temperature, but Retro Report shows a handbook for
franchisees calling for temperatures 10 degrees lower.
At my local Starbucks, I asked the young barista who took my order
(grande 1 percent latte) how hot the store brews its coffee. “We brew it
at 200 degrees,” she said. (That is also the standard recommended by
the Specialty Coffee Association of America.)
But the serving temperature is lower than McDonald’s was back then. “We
let it sit for a half-hour,” she continued, “so it is about 170 or 180
when we serve it.”
These days, with so many choices on the coffee menu, customers may be
more protected today from a scalding by inadvertent shields. In 1992,
little in the way of milky coffee drinks was available that would act to
drop the temperature a few degrees.
After all, the word “latte” — whether whole, skim or soy — had yet to become part of the mass lexicon.
This week’s Retro Report is the 16th in a documentary series. The
video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro
Report has a staff of 13 journalists and 10 contributors led by Kyra
Darnton, a former “60 Minutes” producer. It is a nonprofit video news
organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s
24/7 news cycle. The videos are typically 10 to 14 minutes long.
