i have a new understanding of the mcdonalds coffee case now

[shmokes]

In France McDonald's sells espresso drinks.  I got a latte there a couple times and it was pretty good, and far less expensive than it would be anywhere else.

[boykster]

In seattle, a 12 drip coffee at McDonalds (made with SBC beans) is cheaper than a 12oz drip coffee at an SBC shop - if you can find one that is.  There weren't a ton to begin with, and after starbucks bought them out a few years ago, they closed a bunch of SBC stores that were nearby starbucks locations, or re-branded them to be starbucks.   They've spun SBC to be more of a non-retail location brand, ie selling to restaurants, businesses, and some in the grocery store as packaged beans.

The funny/cool thing is that they left the SBC bean production/roasting process alone and seperate from their own process.  That's great IMHO because SBC really does have a different flavor that starbucks. 

[ChadTower]

Doesn't McDonald's work very heavily on the franchise model?  I don't think we're talking about thousands of corporate owned stores... so the corporation itself isn't selling millions of cups of coffee and isn't profiting from them all.  They're profiting from some, sure, but the rest is license/franchise fees and supplies.

[ChadTower]

Right.  So they could easily be selling millions of cups of coffee a day but the corporate numbers wouldn't directly reflect that.  You'd have to look into supply breakdowns of stuff like coffee beans (or grounds) and cups.

[Dartful Dodger]

A friend of mine was in law school after she won this case.  They use it as an example of why an attorney shouldn't belittle the witnesses no matter how wrong they are.

McDonald's attorneys knew this case was a joke so they ripped into her.

At the end of the trial all the jury could think of was how disrespectful these powerful lawyers were to this poor little old lady.

[Jouster]

WOW...long ass thread...I admit that I didn't read it all...did anyone bring up that McDonald's did all kinds of market research and found out that coffee drinkers perferred the coffee that was brewed at the really high temperature?

I worked at McDonald's before this all went down...and we were trained about that...so it isn't some spin thing that came out afterward.  The old lady was being dumb...or maybe she was trying to see if there was still life 'down there'??  I guess she found out.

Jouster

[Crax]

http://www.overlawyered.com/2005/10/urban_legends_and_stella_liebe.html

[Crax]

Yeah, not sure about that part, but I do agree with the last part

"McDonald's took responsibility when one of its employees spilled coffee on a customer and settled cases of burns from such spills. Because a coffee-spill is usually the fault of the person who spilled the coffee"

[danny_galaga]

I got about two paragraphs into that article, biting my tongue, until I got to this part:

"today Starbucks has gone from a local shop to a dominant national chain, despite prices several times higher than McDonald's, because they serve their coffee hotter than McDonald's served it to Stella Liebeck"

Starbucks is a dominant national chain because their coffee is hotter than McDonald's?  That doesn't even make sense.


"boss, we're losing all our market share to Starbucks, cause they're 10 degrees hotter!"

"damn them and their magic coffee makers!"


 

i cant get very far into that link either. but for me its because it keeps questioning the legitimacy of the case. was it not held in an american court of law? does that not make it legitimate? 

[Jouster]

Well, according to the link, only one court in about 12 picked up the case...I think that clearly shows that the case was not legitimate and that it ran into a judge looking to get his name in the paper.  That's a completely different story.

Jouster