Personal Responsibility?

I noted with great interest this week the story in the New York Post about a woman who is suing Starbuck’s because they served her a cup of hot tea, which she then dropped on her infant son. The woman’s attorney is claiming that the company was negligent because it should have been served in a cup with an insulated sleeve and stuck in one of those brown cardboard trays that make it impossible to get the cup out of without splashing your beverage across the ceiling of whatever room you are in. It does raise an interesting question about product safety laws; unfortunately, it also raises a few questions about consumer intelligence and personal responsibility…

It’s the second case this year where the plaintiff is claiming to have been injured because a cup of tea was too hot; you can read about an earlier case in New York off of the Reuters website if you’d like to. Now, if all of this sounds familiar, it’s probably because of the well-travelled legend about Stella Liebeck the woman supposedly awarded millions of dollars (some versions of the story put the final award at $18 million or more) after she was scalded by a cup of McDonald’s coffee. But the facts of that case don’t really match the urban legend – Stella attempted to settle with McDonald’s for the cost of her medical treatment ($20,000 – not very much even in 1994 dollars), the jury eventually ruled her 20% to blame for the accident, there had been over 700 similar cases in the previous 10 years (that’s right; over 70 times a year!) and the courts were frankly sick of McDonald’s claiming that they weren’t doing anything wrong. Most importantly, perhaps, the product liability cited in the case was the cup (which could easily pop open and douse the user), not the temperature of the liquid itself…

In the Starbuck’s cases, there’s no question of the containers being faulty; both plaintiffs only came to grief after dropping their cups, not having them pop open. There’s also no real question about the temperature of the beverage; tea is customarily made from boiling water (in order to get the leaves to steep properly) and anyone who drinks tea should already know that. The real question in both of these cases is whether the Starbuck’s people should have known to put insulators on the cups before the customer could pick up the beverage and burn him- or herself, or if the customer should have known better than to pick up a paper cup full of scalding hot liquid in the first place. And, in the more recent lawsuit, whether any reasonably sane person would be holding a cup of scalding liquid over a five-month-old infant in the first place…

Now, personally, I’ve had to get an insulator before picking up a cup of hot liquid; I’ve even had to reach over a counter to get one. And I’ve never been dim enough to hold boiling-hot beverages over a baby (what if you slip, or trip?). More to the point, perhaps, I can usually figure out that a cup of hot beverage is going to be, you know, HOT before I touch it – even if the cup doesn’t have “Warning: The beverage you are about to enjoy is quite hot!” written on it the way all Starbuck’s cups do. In the long run, the juries in both cases are going to have to decide where the company’s responsibility to produce a product that no customer can possibly hurt anyone with ends, and where the customer’s personal responsibility begins. All I can say is it’s probably a good thing that I’m not on either of those panels…