pmn1:
"...THE biggest cost of all corporations is I believe false.certainly in some industries like the airline business that may be true but in our example based on the amount of minimum wage employee that McD's has I would doubt it."
First, your average line-cook or fry-guy at McDonalds employees - with few exceptions - makes far above the minimum wage. This may change soon with the minimum wage incrasing, but for the last 5-or-so years McDonalds franchises have had to pay more then the minimum wage requirement in order to attract employees. Now, this being said, you milage may vary. In wealthier, higher-cost suburban and urban areas, this is most definately true. However, in outlying rural areas, this may not be the case.
I can tell you in places like Michigan, Illinois, Texas, and New York, without exception, McDonalds franchises pays bottom-tier workers above the minimum wage. In Michigan, for example, when the minimum wage was about $5.50 / hr, a job at McDonalds started at $7.00 / hr. And that was several years ago.
Secondly, most McDonalds resturants are franchises, and are not a part of the McDonalds corporate structure. The franchise pays a fee to McDonalds to use the logo, have access to supplies and services, and offset costs in for coroprate advertising, but they are not in themselves directly owned by McDonalds. Just as Burger King franchises are not directly owned by Burger King corporate, and Mobile stations are not owned directly by Mobile oil. There are exceptions to this rule, but the vast majority of McDonalds are franchises.
"I believe that today the current 'highest' cost in the business world is health care."
Healthcare insurance is offered by nearly all employers as an employee benefit, and is essentially calculated as the cost of hiring an employee - or, in short, part of the cost of labor. Healthcare insurance is not mandated to be employer provided by most states, and is therefore (when you start crunching the numbers) a factor when you start calculating the cost of hiring a person. If you take a job for $50,000.00 on salary with Healthcare as a benefit, the actual cost of hiring that person comes up to be somewhere in the range of $75,000 to $85,000 when you add in FICA, other taxes, and employee benefits.
So, whatever salary or hourly compensation you negotiate with an employer is only part of the cost that employer eats when he / she takes you on as an employee.
Believe you me, it a fact that the highest cost for any business is labor. There are exceptions, but not many.
"Lastly corporate profits are based on many things & frankly how they figure them are as unique as the individual corporation."
No. Corporate profit is a standard accounting calculation, which basically is (and I'm trying to harken back to my college accounting class) gross sales minus business costs. Where it starts getting complicated is the what and where of business costs. Labor is a cost. State, federal, and local taxes is a cost. Raw materials is a cost. Legal fees are a cost. Legal settlements are a cost. Capital expenditures (equipment like computers, screwdrivers, drills, printers, and so on) are a cost. When the cost of doing business exceeds gross sales (or gross revenue), the company has only 1 of 2 choices: increase prices (which may make the company uncompetitive in their marketplace and drive them out of business or into bankruptcy), or cut costs. The biggest cost, bar none, is labor.
By the way, when a company goes bankrupt, the people that pay the price for that is you and I. The reason? First, some or all of the monies owed to a vendor, whether the company is dissolved or reorganized, is lost so that vendor loses revenue. Since vendors are companies as well, and can't operate at a loss, their immediate reaction is to either cut costs or raise prices (soetimes they'll take a hit in revenue, but not often). Secondly, states cannot take in revenue from companies that don't exist, or employees that have no jobs, so the tax burden get shifted to John Q. Public (and even when the state taxes a company that doesn't go out of business, that's considered a cost and is shifted to John Q. Public in the price you pay for that product).
So, in the long and the short of it, with each additional cost tacked onto any company and/or corporation, the person who pays that price is you.
"However I feel comfortable in saying we should never put corporate profits ahead of consumer safety. If one cannot produce a widget without maiming or killing someone we have to ask ourselves do we really need that widget"
Great then:
1) Don't buy a lawnmower.
2) Don't buy scissors.
3) Don't buy knives.
4) Don't buy water.
5) Don't buy a car.
6) Don't buy a furnace to heat your home.
7) Don't buy ANY form of alcohol.
8) Don't buy food.
All of the things mentioned above can maim or KILL you if they are used improperly. Consequently, all of these things can go bad or wrong, as a product of a manufacturing defect, general wear, or a single instance of a flaw somewhere in the product. Water can be tainted, food can be tainted, a bolt on a lawnmower can have an internal defect that can't be detected without some level of precognition or ESP. So, companies that provide any sort of service or product must analyze the risks involved with the use of their product, prepare for them when they occur, make adjustments where necesarry, and so on.
By the way, that cell-phone you use...did you know that there is the potential for the battery to explode during charging? I worked at a company (the same, I might add, that exposed me to the McDonalds corporation) whose headquaters burned down because someone left their cell phone in their charger. The battery shorted-out, and exploded starting the fire.
So you might say, "well that's a manufacturer's defect, and that company should be sued for distribution a defective product", right? Wrong. Every battery in existence today has the potential to explode at one point or another. The batteries in a hybrid car have the potential to explode, as does the battery in a pen light. The difference in how much damage they can do is a matter of how much energy the battery can store, and to what lenghts a company will go to produce a battery that can contain or minimize the effect of a shorted battery. So, unless you want to be dragging around a 12 lb cell phone, or one that give you about 10 minutes worth of air time, your cell phone battery is going to have the same potential to cause the same type of catastrpohic damage as the one that burned down the HQ of the company I once worked at.
The facts are:
1) Coffee is hot, and can scald.
2) The process of making coffee involves using water that can scald.
3) No one will buy coffee that isn't served at temperatures that have the potential to scald. The exception to this is iced coffee, and sales on that tends to drop when the temperature outside drops.
4) McDonalds served it at temperatures recommended by a well-known, nationally recognized Coffee establishment.
5) Nearly everybody who drinks coffee, and nearly everybody that doesn't drink coffee, knows that coffee is hot, and will burn you. Everyone, it seems, except Selma who was 70-something at the time, and obviously NEVER drank coffee until that fateful day at the McDonalds drive thru, when she decided, out of the clear blue, to buy a cup of coffee and try it with cream for "kicks."
And this isn't even scratching the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the flaws of the Selma vs. McDonalds case. Being somewhat familiar with McDonalds practicesm, and doing some work with the food and beverage indistry, I can tell you that - with some measure of confidence - the readings taken by that law student, and subitted to the court, might have been a complete truckload load of crap.
The reason?
The coffee maker.
Despite McDonalds almost fanatical control of every aspect in the way their product is prepared, the one fly in this ointment is the distribution of raw material and equipment to the franchises. There is no one single distibution hub for the McDonalds chain, but a number of regional distributors that purchase raw materials locally or regionally (like hamburger patties and dehydrated onions), and make sure they conform to the McDonalds specifications. However, this stuff can vary from one distributor to the next. Sometimes you notice the variation, but most times you can't. I mean, a hamburger patty is a hamburger patty, right? So long as it's made with the same parts of beef, with the same fat content, you pretty much can't distinguish whether it came from a Black Angus cow or your three-bit calico heffer, correct?
Well, some of the equipment distributed to a McDonalds franchise works along the same lines, and this is especially true of coffee making machines. During this period of time, many of the McDonalds franchises were using the same Bunn coffee maker machines that most other resturants were using at the time. These were the glass-pot coffee makers that had two warmers on the top of the machine, and a brewer on the bottom. You can see them in use at your local greasy spoon, corporate offices, fine dining establishments, and so on. It looks something silimar to this:
http://www.bunnomatic.com/pages/commercl/1coffee/automatic.html#Axiom2top
Granted, it's been nearly 15 years since this case, so the model may have changed. However, some of these coffee makers may still be in use at various McDonalds around the country...I kinda doubt it, given the volume of coffee they make and the amount of waste coffee they produce (old coffee gets periodically pitched as putting it on a warmer tends to give it a burnt flavor), but you never know.
Bunn is one of the largest coffee macine makers in the United States.
While I can't say whether the McDonalds in question used the same coffee maker or not, the odds are that they did use a similar model, which is extremenly popular with many resturants, and is still in use today. If this is the case, and I feel pretty confident that it is, those temperature readings may have amounted to fraud.
It'd also be interesting to see if ole Stella asked for her coffee either "fresh" or "hot" when she made her order. In this instance, they would have given her stuff straight from the brewer (which is about 205 degrees). I guess no one bothered to ask that question during the trial...
