True story: once when I was a kid I asked my mother if we could buy a certain bathtub cleaning spray. No, I was not precociously enamoured with keeping a clean house. My interest in the product blooomed after seeing a commercial where an infinite number of animated bubbles performed an Esther Williams ballet until poof! The tub was clean! My mother gently explained to me that the spray did not actually come with the dancing scrubber bubbles. And so the harsh road into adulthood began… Again, I was maybe seven-years-old when this happened. I was not a fully-grown, independent woman making my own way and money.
Enter plaintiffs Bill & Ted Nathan Vidal and Eduardo Granados, two adults in Florida who recently purchased Reese’s Halloween pumpkins. It’s a seasonal staple for Reese’s to mark the holidays with specialty shapes: pumpkins for Halloween, trees for Christmas, hearts for Valentine’s, eggs for Easter. Reese’s does this every year. Yet Nathan and Eduardo were surprised, shocked, and dismayed when they opened their Reese’s and — wait for it — the pumpkins were faceless!! Even though the packaging showed Jack-o’-lantern carvings on them! So the wronged gentlemen responded in the only appropriate way and filed a class action lawsuit against Reese’s business daddy Hershey’s. The judge has reviewed all the nutritional facts, and just tempered her verdict in flavor of Hershey’s.
Hershey won the dismissal of a lawsuit claiming it let down consumers because its Halloween-themed Reese’s pumpkins lacked the decorative carved designs shown on the packaging.
U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian in Miami said the two Florida residents leading the proposed class action lacked the legal standing to claim they overpaid upon discovering that their peanut butter-chocolate pumpkins were faceless.
The plaintiffs, Nathan Vidal and Eduardo Granados, said they bought their Reese’s candy for the “novelty” value of its “cool and beautiful carved-out designs,” including for eyes and mouths.
“Accepting plaintiffs’ allegations as true, it is clear that their only injury is their subjective disappointment,” Damian wrote. “Plaintiffs do not allege that the Hershey’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins that they purchased were defective or worthless or that they lost all economic value because of the absence of the decorative carvings.”
The judge also said Vidal and Granados could not show they paid up to 25% too much by citing Reese’s prices at Target, at Walmart and in Hershey’s online store, because they bought their candy at a Publix supermarket.
Damian dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit in September.
James Kelly, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said his clients were disappointed and planned to appeal.
“Consumers in Florida deserve to get what they pay for, and it is troubling to see them left without protection,” he said.
Hershey declined to comment, saying it does not discuss litigation.
In a court filing seeking the lawsuit’s dismissal, Hershey said its packaging included a disclaimer that the depicted carvings were a “decorating suggestion.”
The Hershey, Pennsylvania-based company also said objectively reasonable consumers would not believe the carvings guaranteed what was inside, and the plaintiffs “got what they bargained for — delicious candy.”
[From Arizona Daily Star Tucson]
“It is clear that their only injury is their subjective disappointment.” Oof, what a bittersweet judgment. And I don’t have a Publix near me, but I’m fairly confident that the cost of some Reese’s pumpkins is significantly less than lawyers’ fees for filing a frivolous lawsuit — twice, apparently. And they say they’re gonna appeal! I’m always hung up on this obvious net loss when people decide to get litigious over alleged food fraud. But these guys definitely take the cake candy for most ridiculous case. At what point is it malpractice for the lawyer to keep leading his clients on that this is a viable case? Plus, everyone knows that if you’re gonna sue Hershey’s over anything related to Reese’s, it should be about their futzing with Reese’s original, PERFECT recipe! (Which Hershey’s says they’re reinstating starting next year, only taste will tell.) Incidentally, when I went to see Coyote vs. Acme, I sat through 20-40 minutes of trailers. One of them was so bad, filled with so many stereotypical trailer tropes, I thought it was a parody. But no! This Thanksgiving we’re getting a Milton Hershey biopic. Here’s hoping what’s inside the wrapper is better than the packaging.
Photos via Walmart/Reese’s
We truly need some guardrails on what we can sue over. Because this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Right after suing McDonald’s because their hot coffee was actually you know hot!
I know people keep citing the coffee case – the woman’s labia fused to her thigh, it was so hot. She needed skin grafts. There’s frivolous, and then there’s “so hot I needed surgery when it spilt on me”.
Yup very frustrating…even today people are taking those tabloids and newspapers at face value. They ran with the enticing ridiculous part and forgot context thus we still get ‘ the coffee was hot’ takes.
The McDonald’s coffee situation was not a frivolous law suit. That poor woman had 3rd degree burns that required multiple surgeries and skin grafting. She was in the hospital for like 8 days and then disabled for two years. (Don’t search for the pics of you get queasy!) She asked McDonald’s to pay for her medical bills ($1100) and they offered her $800 before she sued. And they knew the coffee was too hot, and she was not the first person injured. She was the victim of a horrible smear campaign that is apparently still working
While I respect the coffee was too hot she also chose to place it between her thighs. Now there is no excuse for McDonald’s not paying her medical bills but we need to take some ownership of our choices.
She put the cup between her legs because the car her grandson drove (a Ford Probe) didn’t have cupholders. He pulled over into a parking space at McDonald’s after receiving the coffee in the drive-thru so that she could add sugar and cream, and the cup disintegrated in her lap when she removed the lid. As previous commenters have said, McDonald’s knew they were serving dangerously hot coffee and did so expressly to save money; serving it at that temp allowed them to avoid brewing new coffee on a shorter cycle. Please also note that the amount of the judgment was the amount of money McDonald’s earned for two day’s coffee sales.
There is a reason that attorneys say that consumer protections are written in blood.
The Hershey’s case is silly, nobody was harmed because the candy doesn’t have a face. Their attorney is also almost certainly working on contingency (hoping to settle pre-litigation for essentially free money, then hoping for a friendly judge/jury to eke out a judgment for not a whole lot of work.) There are whole plaintiff’s firms who will take basically any case they get with a big-enough defendant in the hopes the company throws some money at them to go away.
@Sarah
Try looking it up and learn about it, instead of making assumptions.
She didn’t originally want to sue. She sued because of McDonald’s behaviour after the incident.
Stella Lieback suffered second and third degree burns on her legs and genitals because McDonald’s knowingly served coffee that was dangerously hot (30-40 degrees above normal serving temp) and had received hundreds of reports that its coffee had caused serious burns, but continued its policy of requiring coffee to be served at temps just short of boiling.
Initially, she only asked McDonald’s to cover her medical costs – she was in the hospital for more than a week and had multiple skin graft surgeries. McDonald’s refused and then (successfully) discredited Lieback and her suit in the press.
The jury found Lieback 20% responsible for her own injuries and her award was reduced accordingly.
Deconstructing from the McDonald’s PR about this case is a universal and foundational memory of everyone who has sat through Torts I.
The McDonalds lawsuit was valid. They had over 700 previous burn complaints in the 10 years prior to the lawsuit.
They were warned by medical experts, including burn care experts that liquids served above 130°F would induce severe scalding which they chose to ignore.
Theirs was set at 180–190°F which would cause third-degree burns in under 5 second.
The $2.7 million punitive damage was based on TWO days worth of coffee sales. She only ended up with $500-700k in the end.
FWIW, Milton Hershey treated his employees wonderfully. He built housing and schools for the kids, and that theme park at Hershey. That doesn’t mean the biopic will be good, but it could be interesting.
I love me a Reese’s peanut butter cup!
The strategy of that business is so interesting to study, and goes to show you can build wealth and a huge business without screwing over people.
And the Milton Hershey School continues to do amazing things for impoverished students with struggling families. It’s funded by a multibillion-dollar trust established by Milton and his wife Catherine. The kids live in houses with houseparents and then, after they graduate, they get their college tuition mostly covered.
There’s a great book from 1998 called “The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey & Mars”. Engaging read about early 1900s business history of these two competitors.
There’s at least one lawyer (often times many) out there willing to rake in the cash over a frivolous lawsuit, especially when it’s retainer-based payment and not payment upon settlement.
A rich, bored fool and their money are soon parted.
These plaintiffs didn’t go looking for a lawsuit. Class actions are largely planned by law firms (who get a percentage of the total settlement) who then look for class representatives (a requirement to file a class action). These two fools were just willing to have their names on it in exchange for some fee in the event of a successful settlement or award.
Yeah, it’s the lawyers who benefit with class action suits. In the past 12 months I’ve been notified about 4 different class action suits of which I am a part–my settlements ranged from $5.00 to $120.00. I’m sure the law firm got a pretty big chunk out of the million-dollar class action suits. These two idiots would have ‘won’ nothing.
And I may see that movie or better yet, read that book about Hershey & Mars mentioned above. That sounds really interesting! I always wanted to visit Hershey, PA and take the tour.
Just came here to say that I bought one Reese’s Pumpkin last week and it had no face, either. I just ate it, happily, and went about my day. LOL