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A woman who had her “large decaf” slid to her and pushed over the edge onto her foot by a Starbucks employee has had her $301,000 award upheld by the New York Supreme Court.
“I jumped back and looked down,” Alice Griffin, 42, testified. “My foot was steaming, and the puddle was steaming.”
Griffin’s lawyer, Barney Anderson, said the clerk violated Starbucks’ rules that require coffee cups to have sleeves and securely fastened lids, and that they never be handed to customers or slid on counters.
“It was kind of a perfect storm,” that caused the decaf dump on Griffin, he said.
You gotta love lawyers. The perfect storm? I don’t think an incompetent Starbucks employee with poor depth perception really constitutes a “perfect storm”.
That being said after this case and the McDonald’s one a while back, I have a new retirement plan. Cha ching!
—admin
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One Comment
1. Stephen
Want a neat little picture by your comments? Get one here.Try this real quick: heat some water to 205 degrees, then pour it on your foot. Or even better, pour it on your crotch, since that’s where the McDonald’s lady* got it.
Getting burned by near-boiling water (which is what coffee is) may not be worth $301,000. But it hurts, and very possibly that woman had to get medical treatment for her foot and had to miss work. Some compensation is in order.
When I was a barista for SBUX, I would slide espresso drinks on the handoff plane. Never spilled once in 5 years. But I never slid plain coffee. That’s just crazy.
*McD’s had over 800 complaints that year about the temperature of their coffee. Nothing was done, no steps were taken to either cool it down or to increase the integrity of their cups. That was the key point of the trial. The award was later reduced, since the plaintiff never asked for so much in the first place.
Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 at 10:45 am | Permalink
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