A nearly comical reminder that corporations aren't your friend.
A nearly comical reminder that corporations aren't your friend.
Always remember what really happened with the McDonald's lady who sued because her "coffee was too hot".
McDonald's themselves started the campaign that the issue was laughable, and seeded the notion that it's ridiculous, how could she not know coffee hot?
What really happened was that the coffee was:
- Served well above safe ranges to maximize profits, so the coffee could be served longer
- Was served near boiling temperature
- Was so hot that it FUSED HER LABIA requiring extensive surgery to repair.
She sued only for her hospital bills.
They started a smear campaign against her to convince the public that she was a moron and she just wanted a payday.
Don't trust corporations. Ever.
Not to mention they were warned many times before about serving coffee that's too hot. The woman got such a huge settlement because the judge was tired of McDonald's crap
Also they calculated the cost of lawsuits like that and decided they would make more money selling it that hot than they would lose in lawsuits over how hot the coffee was.
What's that old quote? "A lie can make it around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes", or something like that? I believe that was pre-internet too.
It also happens with politics. I constantly see provocative headlines get lots of attention in one circle, and then the later corrections only get passed around in the opposite circle, if at all.
Also, she got second degree burns, and she was not the first person to be injured by the coffee, and McDonald's was told multiple times that they served their coffee too hot.
During the trial, McDonald's showed zero care for the the people they injured, to the point that most of the fine that McDonald's ended up paying was punitive damages
I'm sorry, it fucking welded her pussy shut????
the news did not report on that part
Yes. Yes it did.
No, they did not report that in media.
I knew about the story, did not know about that detail.. I can feel my own cunt quivering in pain imagining that.
The media are corporations also.
Of course it didn't.
I dont understand this, coffee is generally made with near boiling hot water. Many coffee machines make the coffee in front of your eyes. Of course its served boiling hot, no?
I mean her accident is extremely unfortunate, but her needing money for medical bills is a problem with society, not mcdonalds.
Coffee is brewed near boiling, but the hottest it should be served is 60 degrees C, or around 140 degrees F. Basically her temperature was the same as it was literally coming out of the machine, no one takes a big gulp of coffee the second it comes out of the machine.
McDonalds kept their coffee as hot as possible to give the illusion it was fresher than it was. By keeping the coffee at 190-200F then they believed that customers would feel that the coffee was fresher, even though they knew it was unsafe to serve coffee that hot.
Larger places follow the same rules here, while coffee is brewed extremely hot it usually rests for a bit before serving unless a customer explicitly asks for it. In restaurants it's served for you. Even Starbucks most of their drinks are milk based which cools the coffee, except for Americanos which are just espresso and hot water, and you'll usually see those with an insulator cup to highlight that
Found this, which explains serving coffee better than I can. https://mtpak.coffee/2022/08/takeaway-cups-coffee-temperature-ideal-serving/
https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts
McDonald’s admitted it had known about the risk of serious burns from its scalding hot coffee for more than 10 years. The risk had repeatedly been brought to its attention through numerous other claims and suits.
You can legally kill anyone related to someone who has had Disney+.
Iirc, the wife died, the husband sued, and they tried to say the husband can't sue because HE had had the subscription a long time ago.
Each subscriber loses the right to sue for any of their loved ones.
After all, if they're dead, they can't sue you anyway
If it really boils down to this, how can one fight back? I don't wanna sit here and see these sad articles blow by, what can I do to tell Disney to fuck off. I did not sign up for this, I wanted to watch funny cartoons and superheroes like a normal person, and this is my reward? If suing them is futile, is storming their office and yelling at their corporate head about this any better? I'm pissed, and I can't sit here and wait for other legal heads to shut this stupid clause down.
If it really boils down to this, how can one fight back?
Historically? Guillotines in the village square, and/or Molotovs through the front windows of the overlords’ house. The rich learned a long time ago that when no other recourse is left, people will eventually turn to violence. And they learned that keeping the poors placated is a matter of life or death. Because money and fame won’t stop an angry mob, and even trained soldiers will get overwhelmed by sheer crowd size.
I believe Sun Tsu wrote something applicable in The Art of War, along the lines of “Always leave a surrounded army a way out. Show them a way to life so they will not be compelled to fight to the death. Because even an exhausted army will fight to the death if they have no other option.” So the rich and powerful set up systems that are heavily skewed in the rich’s favor, but at least attempt to appear fair on the surface. They set up a visible “way to life” so that people could at least feel like they had a viable way of fighting back without resorting to violence.
But recently, the rich and powerful seem to have forgotten that, and have dropped all pretext of fairness. Now it’s just blatant “you’re going to be killed and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Which means that the people are eventually going to be forced to fight to the death, because they’re cornered and see no other option. And I genuinely believe that if things carry on this same trajectory that people will turn to violence as a means of recourse, because it’s quickly becoming the only effective recourse that is within reach.
It's a small thing, but for me it's refusing to support them as much as I can. I don't use Disney+ and try not to buy merchandise from their IPs. Admittedly this is both difficult since they own so. many. things. while also being a drop in the bucket for such a large company, but if enough folks feel the same, it can move the needle a small amount.
I also shared this message out on all my platforms (that of their shady practices) which influenced at least a few people to say they were distancing themselves from the mouse.
Ultimately though, corporations will always do what is best for their shareholders, and in this case, that means doing anything possible not to pay out, PR nightmare be damned. Meaningful legislation is really the only thing that puts guard rails on this behaviour, so my last recommendation really comes down to being vocal with your representatives that these things matter and voting accordingly. I recognize again this is a small thing but on-mass action like this is how change happens.
My two cents at least.
Stop giving them money is about the only thing the average person can do.
It is a moral imperative for anyone who considers themselves to be a protector of their family to just pirate Disney shit instead
He only had a free trial which makes it even crazier. Also I don't know who thought an arbitration demand would apply to food vs a streaming service, but as insane as our court system is with judges siding with money I can't see a judge feeling a TOS could be THAT fluid is like Nike refusing to return a pair of sneakers because you're cousin owned a copy of NBA JAM in the 90's, although you never played it.
This case has awful optics but it isn't as insane as it is presented here. First, it's just resolving things by arbitration not dismissing the suit completely. Second, Disney didn't own the restaurant in question, it was on their property, and they promoted it on their website. Its reasonable that an arbitration agreement for something like disney+ could be extended to the use of their website.
Binding arbitration is terrible for consumers:
“This is not like having judges, who get paid the same no matter what happens,” says Stanford Graduate School of Business finance professor Amit Seru, who collaborated on the study with Mark Egan at Harvard Business School and Gregor Matvos at the University of Texas at Austin. “Here, you only get paid if you’re selected as an arbitrator. They have incentives to slant toward the business side, because they know that those who don’t do so won’t get picked. Everyone knows what’s happening.”
No, it is insane. I don't know of other countries that allow a corporation to just not allow you to sue them and force you into arbitration.
It is as insane as it sounds. Yes, alternative dispute resolution is perfectly commonplace and indeed in many countries - such as mine - there is an expectation that you attempt ADR before bringing a matter to court, unless there is some reason why you couldn't.
That's fine. That's not an issue.
Disney claimed that due to the terms and conditions of the Disney+ video streaming service, anyone who has or had a subscription agrees to resolve any and all disputes with Disney through mediation and they therefore waive any recourse through the courts. For absolutely any form of dispute, even a wrongful death.
That is absolutely insane and evil to even attempt and there is no justifying it.
it isn't as insane as it is presented here
Arbitration aside, I think you're forgetting these are terms from the streaming service.
If tomorrow I attack you, break your spine and you lose mobility for life, then I come back saying in 2011 you purchased an indie game I made and waived your right to sue me in the terms of service, that wouldn't be insane? Suuure.
Always remember it's morally ethical to yar har Disney content
It is by far the best reason they could give anyone for being pro piracy. Forget the morality of it anymore, when the alternative is signing your life away it would be stupid to pay for it.
The restaurant was directly responsible for the woman's death. The husband went after Disney because it was in Disney Springs and the website said the restaurant worked with allergies. It's more the ghoulish lawyers
It doesn't change what Disney tried to do to get out of it.
If I recall, Disney Springs is outside of the parks, basically an outside mall-type area with a bunch of third-party shops and restaurants. Disney is plenty evil, but they're just the landlord in this situation.
You are more physically, financially, mentally, and psychologically safe by pirating Disney content than legally renting it.
I can't comprehend how they give so few f's about their image as to even contemplate that in public.
I hate to be a back in my day kinda person, but there was a time at which large family-friendly companies were concerned enough with their image not to pull that shit, at least out loud.
Perks of being a monopoly. Every time someone gets upset with them, their response is just dripping with a "you'll be back" mentality. Same as u/spez during the reddit third party app stuff.
I am going to be the "back in the day" guy. Huge corporations have never been paragons of virtue, but at least they used to be smart enough to protect their image.
"Back in the day", I could see Disney firing the lawyer who was dumb enough to suggest such a strategy.
Because they know most people don't care, and this will blow over in a few more days.
I don't know which of these two situations happened
-
Someone incredibly and insanely out of touch was watching The Boys and thought Vought was a guideline for how a good business operates
-
Someone on a power trip wanted to try to legalize murder for his brand
I'm not sure which scenario scares me more, the incompetence or the evil.
I'm guessing the legal department had been looking for a test case to see how far they could take the forced arbitration clause in the Disney+ ToS, but they didn't consult the PR department as to whether this would be a good idea.
I'm kind of horrified that someone not only didn't run that idea by PR, but couldn't piece together using their own common sense that loudly declaring "Our company is allowed to straight up murder you because Mickey Mouse is bigger than God, and we're not even kidding!" was not exactly going to fly with...
Anyone at all really
- Realize they bear a large liability for this, and hope to weasel their way out of it.
I honestly don't think they hear ANY liability at all. This would be like saying your friend's landlord is at fault for your friend feeding you allergens because the landlord introduced you to each other. Like, sure, they're related, but by no stretch of the meaning of "obviously at fault". That's just ridiculous.
Neither happened. The restaurant isn't owned by Disney, it is just listed on their website as a recommended place for allergy free dining, and they while own the property, it isn't a part of the actual park, springs, etc. The family signed up for D+, and therefore "read" the terms, including the arbitration, and then used their D+ account to sign up for the trip, and had to "read" the terms again. The whole D+ argument wasn't that they had to go to arbitration because they used the streaming, it was to show they had to go through the same terms multiple times and should be familiar with them. And basically, this is an issue with the labeling on the website, so would be covered by those rules. Who they really should be going after is the restaurant, if they made the same allergy free claims there. Agreements requiring arbitration are indeed bullshit and should be more limited, but this is proper enforcement of a shitty system, not the batshit insane enforcement it has been memed into.
They are going after the restaurant. The restaurant is whom they are suing. But they know they won't get much from an allergy lawsuit settlement with an Irish Pub themed restaurant, so they included the deeper-pocket Disney in the suit (which IMO is a less than honorable act, but in a capitalist society I'm always going to give the benefit of the doubt to the person, also you never know if the legal system is going to choose you to fuck with so I dually recognize the spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to damage remuneration).
Even with that said though, since the guy who decided to risk a life-threatening condition on whether a likely not much more than minimum wage employee could or would know if a thing was allergen free decided to rely on a technicality of civil litigation to get more money, then I can't fault Disney for using a technicality to try to get out of it.
Fuck Disney in general, but kudos to Disney for taking this on the chin just to not make someone even a perceived victim of their greed. I think it's honestly respectable. They're still probably not going to be at fault were it to go to trial, but they're going to settle and give this guy the obvious payday he wanted.
A woman is dead and Disney is happy about it.
I'm guessing that the legal team didn't have a case, but corporate told them to fight it anyways, so some legal intern just threw some wild shit at the wall and the more senior layers were like "well, we got nothing else. If corporate wants us to fight it, this is all we got"
-
Why the fuck is it allowed to force arbitration when someone dies? It’s insanity
It's okay, they didn't force arbitration. They decided to "waive their right to do so."
*Disney+ may cause death
Watching Mr. Robot now makes this meme hit hard
I wonder what the internal discussion looked like after this.
I can't believe they were only seeking 50,000$ too.
That's the minimum, they're seeking damages starting at 50k
Really? Weren't they a doctor too? 50k seems like it would be next to nothing for what happened.
They aren't. It's stated "in access of". They're going after more.
Also, the restaurant isn't owned or operated by Disney. The husband's lawyers attached Disney to it because of the super deep Disney pockets. But the husband is suing both the restaurant and Disney.
LegalEagle has done a video on the whole thing, here's a proper explanation of the ordeal.
M'fers had a meeting and a lawyer brought up the Disney+ TOS and they all agreed that was a great idea. Corporate nods all around. Idiots.
Just couldn't stop salivating over the legal precedent they could set
But for real, shit’s starting to get weird
We may be trending away from the Bell Riots to Starfleet timeline and more into the Corporate Wars to Rollerball (1975) timeline. May want to brush up on your skating ability.
Disney; just know that if I die because of you my Wife has strict instructions to mail my burning corpse to Bob Iger's home address. We will not see you in court.
You should save some part to mail them later ,so they can never be sure when their are done with you.
As someone who did a trial Disney plus 4 years ago, is that TOS still valid if they came and murdered me in their restaurant?
I'm legit asking.
The mouse can now can legally assassinate you in your sleep.
oh boy!
You mean you didn't fully read the TOS?
I just copy and paste their TOS and ask ChatGPT and according to it, even if I'm no longer a subscriber, they can still enforce arbitration.
If you're asking whether the binding arbitration clause would apply to the murder case, then no. Homicide falls under criminal law, where the state is the plaintiff. The state didn't enter an agreement under the TOS. I suppose Disney could try to argue it applies if your legal estate filed a civil suit; in the real case it argued that the arbitration clause applied because the husband (who'd agreed to it) filed a civil suit as the plaintiff.
Instead, Disney would get away with it the old-fashioned way: because it's a rich corporation.
That's exactly what happened here. So the result of this suit will be your answer
Disney backpeddeled on that argument because of the PR nightmare. But the damage is done
Disney thought they were doing the ol anime glasses push moment. They didn't realize they were actually granny from squidbillies.
Gotta be honest, I have been hearing about this but have no idea what the deal is. Can someone enlighten me?
Edit: Nm I should just actually read the comments.
I've read the comments, still unsure what is happening, and no I'm not gonna watch a 20min video on something that someone can summarise in 2 paragraphs.
A doctor died of an allergic reaction to something in her food at a Disney owned restaurant after repeatedly informing staff that she was allergic to said thing. Husband filed a wrongful death suit. Disney lawyers are trying to have the suit dismissed as he once had a trial of Disney+ for a bit and the terms of service includes an arbitration clause.
All the dude asked for was $50,000. I'm sure the reputational damage was totally worth it.
One of LegalEagle's corrections was "50k minimum, to be determined by a judge".
Still, fuck the mouse.
I'm pretty sure that Disney can't outright kill anyone unless they came out of a Disney pod gasping and crying, "what am I?" to the universe before being given their prime corporate directive of being a kid's movie star, but I'm not a lawyer.
Lock your doors if you ever had Disney plus! 😱😱😱
The real PR nightmare is the misinformation being spread. Disney has fuck all to do with the running of the restaurant. This was just a lawyer looking for a quick buck.
Ok, but did Disney not use the Disney ± arbitration claim? Regardless of how outlandish the class is M, this is psychotic response.
It was never Disneys restaurant. Y'all should get your facts straight. It's an independently owned restaurant leased on Disney Land. Y'all thirsty for blood lololol.
They could have avoided the bad pr but y'all running wild with imaginary stories and propaganda.
I was never Disneys restaurant.
Then Disney should have argued that, not this "you had a trial for Disney+ so you can't sue us for murder" nonsense.
This exactly
Also with it being on the Disney property and advertised by Disney parks their association with the restaurant is definitely deeply intertwined.
