The liability issues are the same for table saws: if there is an accessible way to make the product safer then the company is liable if they fail to include them. When is the last time you bought a table saw? The one I bought last year had several safety features for anti-kickback and other common table-saw mishaps.
In the McDonald's case there was an accessible solution: put the scalding hot coffee in a spill-resistent cup. Done and done. The cups exist, they are widely available, and McDonald's knew of the problem from a string of previous lawsuits. For profit reasons McDonald's didn't want to pay the couple extra pennies for the better cups, opening them to liability. Alternatively, they could have served coffee at the maximum temperature that a human mouth can possibly handle without damage, which luckily is lower than the temperature required to melt off a woman's labia, but McDonald's decided to serve it even hotter. (I'm pretty sure the reason was so that people could get hot coffee and still have it hot a long time later when they finally drank it. Fair enough, in which case get the better cups.) Again, that's how things are supposed to work.
It's more like expecting power tool manufacturers to have safety features on their hardware. Have you ever bought power tools? They have safety features.
In this case, if McDonald's wanted to serve coffee hot enough to melt off human skin, then they have a positive duty to sell that dangerous liquid in a container sufficient to the task. It's the reason you can't buy a gallon of gasoline in a paper bag -- if someone tried to sell it to you that way, they'd be liable for the foreseeable injuries.
You're missing the point, intentionally I suspect.
It's not that there is a temperature where coffee "should" be served, it's that any product sold for profit should be generally safe under foreseeable uses. McDonald's knew from a long series of previous lawsuits that normal use of their coffee often resulted in spills especially in cars when served from the drive-thru, and those spills often led to extreme medical emergencies. That's the standard: if you become aware that your product under normal use is dangerous, then your profits from imposing that danger are recoverable. That's unremarkable. Of course that's how the law works.
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The liability issues are the same for table saws: if there is an accessible way to make the product safer then the company is liable if they fail to include them. When is the last time you bought a table saw? The one I bought last year had several safety features for anti-kickback and other common table-saw mishaps. In the McDonald's case there was an accessible solution: put the scalding hot coffee in a spill-resistent cup. Done and done. The cups exist, they are widely available, and McDonald's knew of the problem from a string of previous lawsuits. For profit reasons McDonald's didn't want to pay the couple extra pennies for the better cups, opening them to liability. Alternatively, they could have served coffee at the maximum temperature that a human mouth can possibly handle without damage, which luckily is lower than the temperature required to melt off a woman's labia, but McDonald's decided to serve it even hotter. (I'm pretty sure the reason was so that people could get hot coffee and still have it hot a long time later when they finally drank it. Fair enough, in which case get the better cups.) Again, that's how things are supposed to work.
It's more like expecting power tool manufacturers to have safety features on their hardware. Have you ever bought power tools? They have safety features.
In this case, if McDonald's wanted to serve coffee hot enough to melt off human skin, then they have a positive duty to sell that dangerous liquid in a container sufficient to the task. It's the reason you can't buy a gallon of gasoline in a paper bag -- if someone tried to sell it to you that way, they'd be liable for the foreseeable injuries.
You're missing the point, intentionally I suspect. It's not that there is a temperature where coffee "should" be served, it's that any product sold for profit should be generally safe under foreseeable uses. McDonald's knew from a long series of previous lawsuits that normal use of their coffee often resulted in spills especially in cars when served from the drive-thru, and those spills often led to extreme medical emergencies. That's the standard: if you become aware that your product under normal use is dangerous, then your profits from imposing that danger are recoverable. That's unremarkable. Of course that's how the law works.