HOUSTON — A Houston man is suing Whataburger for nearly $1 million after he says his burger had onions on it.
Turns out he had asked for a no-onions order.
On July 24, 2024, Demery Ardell Wilson had an allergic reaction after eating a burger that had onions on it at Whataburger, court documents say. He alleges that he requested the fast-food chain to take them off before serving him the burger.
What argument do you think the lawyers would make? A food establishment is supposed to be able to safely handle food. He requested food without an ingredient for health reasons and they agreed. Then they failed at food handling and he got sick.
It’s a civil case, so the result can be a divided share of the blame. Something also tells me that they won’t want to make the argument “no reasonable person would have any expectations that we got their order right”.
Having a lawyer on retainer doesn’t mean you’re going to win, it just means you expect enough lawsuits to justify it. Recall the “absurd” McDonald’s hot coffee case that 1) they lost despite having a lot of lawyers, and 2) wasn’t absurd except through the lens of our society tending to label anyone suing a company as some combination of foolish and greedy.
I doubt that he’s the one actually suing. I suspect that the actual plaintiff is his health insurer.
So many of these frivolous lawsuits ultimately originate from the insurance industry.
I’d be curious why you think it’s frivolous. Why shouldn’t people use a lawsuit when another hurts them? The civil court system is literally there for disagreements and “you hurt me, make it right”.
Patent vs latent defect. Any issue with the product that the customer could reasonably identify before suffering harm is the customer’s responsibility to avoid. The vendor’s liability here is the cost of the burger. The vendor is not liable for the harm arising from the customer’s failure to look at the food they are about to eat.
The vendor is responsible only for harm caused by defects the customer could not reasonably avoid. Hiddent, latent defects.
If this is a case of subrogation, as I suspect, the customer acquired insurance coverage for the purpose (in part) of mitigating harm due to their own negligence. If this is the case, it is that insurance policy that is liable for the harm caused by the customer’s failure to verify the burger met their requirements.
That doesn’t really sound like an argument that it’s frivolous, it sounds like an argument about why the company shouldn’t need to pay much. What if the onions weren’t obvious? I don’t know if they put their onions in a sauce, in the bun or something else.
It’s entirely plausible that lifting the bun would have revealed the onions, even most likely. I wouldn’t, however, say that the concept of difficult to spot onions is so unreasonable as to say the case is frivolous.