Originally Posted by efincomputer
i've never understood this "look at me the wrong way and i'll sue" culture. I mean, ok so maybe the person in Starbucks could have put it in a nicer way, but my god - taking them to court over a "free" cup of coffee???? It's like people who sue McDonalds for making them fat! (If i went down that road, there would be a few Indian and Chinese restaurants in the firing line) Or people who sue because their hot coffee was too hot (hence the cups all now have a warning on them!). It's a crazy, crazy world we live in.
I'm going to disagree on this one, although I don't have the full facts (not that that will stop me having an opinion
). The suit is a class action one, meanting that all those in the 'class' (in this case those potentially denied free drinks) will share the payout (IANAL though) and not just the person kicking it off. While class action lawsuits are in many ways a bane of US corporate life, they do server a useful purpose. In this case the purpose
might be to punish a large corporation for withdrawing an offer because it no longer suited the corporation. Some consumers might consider this unfair behaviour on the part of the corporation and they may want to hold them to their offer. I guess the FT equivalent might be the airline that tries to welch out on a fare error or unexpectedly generous miles offering. People will be (and have been) up in arms when this has been attempted.
Then again I don't know the details of this case. It might have been a targetted offer, in which case suing them would be similar to suing Tesco over withdrawing targetted 1000 point codes that hit the Internet...