Every coffee you've ever had in your life was a lower temperature than what McDonald's was serving up. They were serving super-heated coffee that is hotter and thus more dangerous than what you would make at home. A typical temperature for coffee is 75C -- that's the temperature it'll come out as from your standard automatic drip coffee maker. McDonald's was serving it at 95C, which required serious post-brewing heating to achieve. They admitted that this was wrong and stopped doing it, and to really drive that point home, no one else serves coffee that dangerously hot. You could burn a layer off your tongue in one ill-conceived first sip. The only reason you think this isn't a big deal is because you haven't been exposed to it.
