There are so many cases of hot coffee and hot tea spills at restaurants that are never, or barely publicized – or that settle out of court – that most people have no idea how many lawsuits and injuries there are. There isn’t an accurate database that tracks these cases, but there are possibly dozens of these incidents that happen around the country every single day.
Look cases up for yourself – the country is littered with them.
From hands-on experience, I can tell you that the number of incidents involving coffee burns, hot tea scalds, soup burns, and hot food and beverage burns of various kinds is truly mind-boggling, heartbreaking, and worst of all… on the rise.
These occurrences happen to employees and customers from nearly every walk of life; and the truth is this – the vast majority of these burn and scald incidents are preventable!
These incidents, accidents, and events change the lives of nearly everyone involved – from the person harmed, to the manager or owner responsible for the premises – in many instances these coffee burn through drive-thru incidents are not only damaging customers physically, but also damaging customers mentally and emotionally for years to come and, in some cases, leaving them marred and scarred for the remainder of their lives.
Think about it – how would you feel if that cup of piping hot coffee dropped onto your lap and marred and scarred your genitalia so severely that you never felt the same using it with your husband or your wife ever again? How would you feel if you felt self-conscious wearing a swimsuit or hanging out at the beach?
These incidents also impact the lives of those who are forced by pure happenstance to watch them take place and deal with the aftermath—family members, other customers, other employees, and other witnesses.
These events can be and often are brutal to experience and even brutal just to watch.
Restaurants that are otherwise perfectly sound, reasonably viable, and substantially profitable businesses are having to close their doors from the overwhelmingly negative impact of these types of cases involving such matters as a hot cup of coffee being dumped squarely onto a customer’s lap while sitting in the drive-thru lane. The same can be said for the potpourri of other burn and scald incidents from hot coffee that take place as the customer is first pulling away or a bit further down the road.
Right now, at this very moment, many restaurateurs are dealing with serious court cases and overwhelming litigation matters that the public doesn’t even know about, all the while watching their hopes and dreams of owning and operating a successful restaurant go up in smoke due to their complete lack of hazardous and dangerous condition awareness and the necessary training that was needed to prevent these types of incidents from happening on their premises in the first place.
Other bigger chains just simply turn it over to their insurance carrier and move on with their day without so much as making even a few changes to their operating systems so that these types of events will be less likely to happen in the future to someone else.
Many times, I have to ask myself: “do these giant brands that have dozens and dozens of these types of cases even care?” Often, this can be said about the small, independent “Mom and Pop shops” too.
“Are their management people at of both the biggest and the smallest restaurant companies ignorant and apathetic?”
Sadly, for the independent operators, once these cases have been adjudicated – and in many instances well prior to the final ruling – the dreams of many will instead turn into life-altering nightmares of epic proportions the likes from which they may never fully recover. For some giant brands, tomorrow is just another day, and we will keep plugging along without the raising of an eyebrow or the changing of a system. Next!
But It’s Not As Complicated As You Might Think
-From the Intro to Howard Cannon‘s upcoming book Coffee Burns in Drive-Thrus©
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