Why a McNugget Is Like Coffee and Tea

An “unreasonably” hot McDonald’s Chicken McNugget burned a four-year old. Given the Happy Meal in her car, the child dropped one of the nuggets. She wound up with a second-degree leg burn after it got stuck in her car seat. The girl was just awarded $800,000 for the injury.

(Too) Hot Fast Food Beverages

The Coffee Case

During 1992, an Albuquerque McDonald’s sold a 49 cent drive-thru cup of coffee to a 79 year-old woman. In her car, trying to add cream and sugar, she placed the cup between her legs. It spilled, and gave her third-degree burns. Needing hospitalization, she received skin grafts. While the media said she received less than $600,000, actually it appears that McDonald’s provided an undisclosed settlement.

Temperature is among the many decisions McDonald’s, Starbucks, and all other fast food retailers have to make. The problem is that they tend to serve coffee at its brewing temperature, a dangerously high 200 or so degrees. Below, you can see that 30 to 60 degrees cooler is recommended:

A Hot Tea Case

Although the hot coffee case was from more than 30 years ago, the problem remains. According to a March 2025 NBC News report, Starbucks owes a California delivery driver $50 million for the damage to his groin area from scalding tea. He had been doing a pick-up from a drive-thru window when the cup tumbled from its cardboard carrier. Losing its lid, the liquid spread across his lap.

Our Bottom Line: Thinking at the Margin

As most economists will tell us, everything happens at the margin. Defined as where we decide to do extra after weighing cost and benefit, the margin is a dividing “line” between where we are and where we might be. I think at the margin when I decide to use the snooze alarm for an extra 10 minutes of sleep. Similarly, when Congress cuts taxes or a driver accelerates beyond the speed limit, the decision to do less or more is at the margin.

You can see that all of the controversy surrounding coffee and tea temperatures (and too hot McNuggets) is also at the margin. McDonald’s and Starbucks decide whether and how much to cool a beverage (or a McNugget) after optimally preparing it. Subway also had the dilemma when it gave us an 11 1/2 inch footlong.

It all happens at the margin.

My sources and more: Yahoo had the recent facts for the McNugget case, while the media, here and here, dug into the 1994 coffee decision (1992 incident) and the ideal temperature for coffee and tea. But we can see the issues remain through the current award to the California delivery driver and this footlong Subway case.

Please note that several sentences in our “Bottom Line” were in a past econlife post.