How Costly are Spills and Burns?

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Spill burns are no joke.

Before we jump into any discussion of hot beverage spill burn costs, we want to make clear that we’ve made it our mission to prevent spill burns from happening in the first place—they can cause significant pain and suffering to victims.

Today we will cover the spill burn costs from the perspective of a business, and a business owner.

When you take into account all of the damage, stress, and fallout, that coffee spill burn won’t be cheap. Here’s an overview of the tangible and intangible costs associated with defending your business against a hot beverage spill burn lawsuit.

Three ways a coffee spill burn will cost you

A hit to your bottom line

This is the first thing that comes to mind for most business owners when anticipating the costs of a hot beverage spill burn. For good reason.

How bad will it be? Unfortunately no one can predict the financial impact. Not only do costs widely vary, but settlement payouts are generally confidential and rarely publicized.

When you are sued, you will need to pay for the costs of your defense even if it’s determined that your business was not at fault—and these costs are rarely recouped. Whether you settle, go to trial, or even have the case dismissed, you’ll be on the hook for lawyers to research and argue your case, and manage the many details, deadlines, and decisions associated with defending.

The lawyers will also need to hire industry experts to bolster your case. This can run anywhere from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands to investigate the incident and file supporting reports, before you even get to trial.

If trial ensues, the costs skyrocket to anywhere from a low of $25,000 to well into the six figures. Depending on your state and court district, there may be peculiar requirements that add to your costs, such as depositions, travel expenses, technical research, industry reports.

At this point, a defendant may have to make a hard call: to fight a complaint through trial or to “swallow pride” and settle (without admitting to fault). For cases where the plaintiff demands less than $100,000, settlement can usually be achieved at a lower price and at steep savings from taking a case to trial. For demands of high six figures and above, cases often go to trial. (That leaves a considerable amount of gray area in between—hiring a consultant who is an expert in hot beverage spill burns can reinforce the defense.)

Distraction from day-to-day operations

Beyond the dollar signs, responding to spill burn litigation comes with costs to your time and attention.

The formal complaint can be a show stopper—to which you must respond in a timely manner. This includes rearranging your work priorities to provide immediate action to defend against the complaint, including:

• Contacting lawyers
• Contacting insurance companies
• Tracking down current and former employees
• Locating incident reports, if they exist
• Locating video evidence from security cameras, if they exist
• Identifying brewing equipment used at the time of the incident

Additionally there is a cost to your mental state. You may feel anger or fear, and those emotions—combined with the overall mental stress load—can significantly disrupt your ability to monitor and manage the day-to-day operations of your business. This can trickle down to your employees, prevent you from acting on future opportunities, and generally impact your ability to run a tight ship in a way that exposes you to future problems.

A tarnished reputation

Finally, beyond the monetary costs and operational impacts, a hot beverage spill burn costs your brand the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.

Though few spill burn cases reach the notoriety of Liebeck vs. McDonald’s Restaurants, your business may still be featured in local or national media pieces. And in today’s social media environment, what was once the “poison pen” is now the “terrible typing,” as stories of injured customers go viral before all the facts are collected. Public opinion will be shaped by headlines, rather than by a careful examination of details—and we’ve seen many business owners do more damage than good during interviews in which they try to defend their brand without proper media coaching.

If your reputation takes this kind of hit, it can be difficult to recover from, particularly for small businesses who don’t have the power of a big PR firm to help them manage the fallout and rebuild.

How can you avoid spill burn costs?

The best way to avoid the costs associated with spill burns is to prevent hot beverage spills in the first place.

Having seen these burns—and lawsuits—up close, we are staunch advocates of using best practices for hot beverage safety, adopting a clear warning label, and routine hot beverage safety training for employees.

I’ve also created a back-of-house hot beverage safety poster, and written a comprehensive book to educate restaurant and food service businesses, airlines, hotels, and more on how to maintain high quality standards for hot beverages, safely serve hot beverages, and protect themselves from liability should a spill or burn occur.

We wish accidents didn’t happen, but the fact of life is they do. But we want to help you preserve your brand, your money, and your reputation if they do.