Ordering a coffee in a drive-thru lane presents multiple opportunities for calamity. And you can’t beat the clock once that calamity happens…unless you can remove the liquid from your body in three seconds.
If you are seated in your car when the hot liquid spills, it is most likely going to land on your torso, crotch and/or legs. Because you are “stuck” in the car, wearing clothes that are holding the heat on your skin, you will not be able to get those clothes off fast enough to prevent a significant burn. It only takes three seconds of exposure to cause serious burns – possibly enough to require surgery – it just isn’t possible to beat that clock.
After that first – now infamous – hot coffee burn case, restaurants made sure that any kind of hot beverage – especially coffee – had a warning label that was large enough to see upon first glance that reads “Caution: Contents Hot.”
First of all, if you need a warning label to remind yourself that the hot coffee you just ordered will, in fact, be hot, then you really have no business handling hot coffee, or even operating a motor vehicle, for that matter.
Secondly, most people that order hot coffee expect it to be served hot, so they are going to be highly disappointed to take that first sip of coffee just to find it served cold or lukewarm.
There are plenty of cold coffee concoctions to choose from if that’s what you’re going for. You can literally order coffee now with the word “iced” in the name — iced coffee, iced latte, iced mocha latte. You can even order what is essentially a coffee milkshake in a Frappuccino.
So, again, to reiterate, it isn’t the temperature of the coffee being served that is the problem. The problem is that we don’t take into consideration the cups and lids being used to hold hot liquids, and should that cup or lid fail, the amount of damage it could cause. These cups and lids are being served to customers by employees working at drive-thru windows who don’t know or care about all factors that have the potential to wreak havoc in a split second.
Keep that in mind the next time someone hands you your hot cup of joe in the drive thru.
And pay attention to whether or not they even seem to know or care about the hazards that hot beverage presents to you.
Do you have a drive thru hot coffee or tea burn case? There are many restaurant industry standards that could be critical to your case – and the highly sought after expertise of Restaurant Expert Witness could be the factor that secures a victory in your case.
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