It was meant to be a normal morning. Around the end of June, Leota Walker drove through a Starbucks drive-thru in Wildomar, California. Wildomar is a quiet city in Riverside County. After she took the cup and went to put it in the cupholder, everything changed in an instant.
The cup broke. The lid came off. Coffee that was very hot poured all over her lap, stomach, inner thighs, and private parts. Walker was picked up by an ambulance. She would be in the hospital for 24 days getting surgery and skin grafts. She is still getting better. She sees the doctor twice a week to have her wounds checked out and bands changed.
Walker sued Starbucks in Riverside County Superior Court on July 22. He said that the cup and lid were broken and that the company has known for a long time that serving drinks at dangerously high temperatures is dangerous. In a phone interview, her lawyer, Daniel DeSantis of Morgan & Morgan, said, “Starbucks has known for many, many years that they serve their drinks way too hot.” These kinds of things keep happening, and Starbucks won’t change its safety rules and policies.
It seems especially hard to just ignore this case because of how specific what Walker went through is. Burns of the second degree. Skin transplants. A hospital stay that lasted almost a month. No, these are not the effects of a small problem; these are the kinds of injuries that usually happen in work accidents. There’s something unsettling about the time gap between the normal setting (a drive-thru, a morning coffee) and what happened next.
Starbucks wouldn’t say anything about the lawsuit. People have the right to remain silent, so don’t make too much of it. But it doesn’t make sense with the lawsuit’s claims that the company has known for years about problems with its lids and cups. The lawsuit says that online records show that customers were complaining about the business long before Walker’s name was mentioned in a court document.
It is important to note that this is not the only time the chain has been in trouble with the law. In the same kind of burn lawsuit against Starbucks last year, a jury in Los Angeles County gave the man $50 million. That number is big enough to get your attention. Still, here is another case from a different county in California with eerily similar claims. At this point, it’s really not clear if Starbucks has made any important safety changes since that verdict.
DeSantis says Walker’s goal is more than just getting paid. The lawsuit does ask for money for lost wages and physical and mental pain, but her lawyer says the real goal is to change the rules. “Walker’s priority is so that it hopefully changes its corporate safety policies and procedures so that this type of situation doesn’t happen to another person,” he said.
How you frame it matters. What used to be a claim for personal injury is now more of an argument for public safety. And since similar things have happened before, it’s hard to say that that way of framing is just courtroom strategy.
Walker still has a long way to go. The cuts are slowly getting better. The court process will go at its own speed. And Starbucks won’t say anything for now. That part of the case that talks about what the outcome means for corporate responsibility and consumer safety is still being written.
