The judge concluded that because the cups Starbucks uses for cold drinks are clear, it’s easy to see that the drink contains a combination of liquid and ice.
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Ordering a cold drink means it will be served with ice, according to U.S. district judge Percy Anderson. “As young children learn”, Anderson wrote, “they can increase the amount of beverage they receive if they order no ice”.
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit that accused Starbucks (SBUX) of cheating customers by “under-filling” its cold beverages.
The dismissal still leaves the near-identical lawsuit filed earlier in IL, but the company surely welcomes one fewer piece of pending litigation impugning its ice-filling practices. The company also reiterated that any customer unhappy with their beverage could alert their barista and get a new one.
Next time we’d suggest asking them to go light on the ice.
But before you get too overzealous with the ice machine: Starbucks still has another ice-based lawsuit pending in IL and two pending lawsuits saying the chain “underfills hot drinks by over-aerating the milk”.
Instead, as shown in paragraph 27 of the Complaint, Starbucks lists the sizes of its “drinks”, not, as Plaintiff attempts to allege in paragraph 45 of the Complaint, for instance, that Starbucks has made a representation about the size of its “beverages”, and that a reasonable consumer would understand that a beverage must only be a reference to the “drinkable liquid”.
In San Francisco, Judge Thelton Henderson allowed Siera Strumlauf and Benjamin Robles’ latte lawsuit to move forward.
This time, the plaintiffs said that the coffee giant was deceiving customers by serving them too much foam in their lattes and thus providing them with 25% less liquid than advertised.
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“This is not a case where the alleged deception is simply implausible as a matter of law”.
