The biggest reason I have read for why machines do not work,
or are not being used is due to lack of maintenance, and
employees who are trained to do so.
(and people quit all the time).
Having worked at a fast food join (not McDonalds) much earlier
in my life, any lacking maintenance and proper cleaning, especially
if there has been a power outage will turn the the machine into a
rapid incubator for bacteria that will make you ill.
Since shifts change and not everyone keeps on the machine,
a power outrage can quickly be lost to the workers.
Getting angry if an employee tells you the machine is broken
and demanding ice-cream is an exceedingly bad idea.
Take that as a blessing. The employee may have saved you from
running to the bathroom a lot.
I personally stay away from softicecream entirely.
But if you must, try to find a place where a lot of
people are buying so the machine is in frequent use.
That doesn't mean its safe but it makes it a lot
more likely.
Of course not being used frequently is not an automatic
reason for the machine to be in incubator mode, it may
will be well cared for, well cleaned, great maintenance.
Part of the issue as I understand it, is that the machine is fairly opaque as to why some failures occur can appear somewhat "flaky" as a result. When this occurs during a cleaning cycle, the whole cycle is void and a new 4 hour cycle must be run.
If the machine was clear about communicating the issue, it would be fine. It's not and can require a technician to come out with a tool to both read the machine status in detail and tweak the machine in the necessary ways to stop it being flaky.
This would all be fine except for the fact that
1. Only technicians from the manufacturer are allowed to be used.
2. Those technicians are unreasonable expensive.
3. The company could make the machines easier to diagnose and repair, but don't because repair calls are lucrative
4. Third parties can, and have, made tools that do make the machines easier to diagnose and repair without the need for a technician, but cant legally sell these solutions because it involves circumventing a digital lock (DMCA violation)
5. McD corporate has an agreement with the manufacturer to maintain this status quo in return for a kickback
I worked at a McD's franchise 20 years ago that had hired a "retired" ice cream machine guy to work for the franchise full time. With only a half dozen stores, he would still almost always be too busy to make it to our store the same day and sometimes we'd have to wait as long as 3-4 days. Flaky does not even begin to describe how awful those machines are.
I'm not sure if having that guy employed by the franchise was technically kosher or not with McDonald's, but you have to imagine the smart franchises all do this.
In principle, but they probably contracted this out decades ago. Theres a lot of licensing requirements and regulations surrounding dairy.
This is actually the real source and meaning of the classic track by Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, "Safe as milk." Dairy is a huge systemic risk, operates on extremely narrow windows everywhere in its production and if left unmanaged will cause outbreaks of horrifying diseases like Typhoid.
Except Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s outside of the U.S. don’t have this problem.
Somehow I doubt DQ employees are paid better or are better trained or more diligent about regular maintenance. The difference is they don’t have a machine designed to require expensive maintenance visits with a DRM lockout to retard attempts to maintain it by normal restaurant/HVAC maintenance contractors.
My stint as a EU McD worker did give me a feel of how well scripted low skill labour can feel like pleasant work. I didn’t appreciate it at the time but it was six sigma checklist everything. There is a magic to smooth operation. In all my other jobs (dishwasher, mechanic, cleaner and now 20 yrs in insurance) nobody came close to the McD smoothness of operations. I hope I bring some of this smoothness to the people working in my lines of operation. I’m going to ask them!
I had the same experience working at one in US from ages 15-19.
The thing that stands out about that job that makes it unique in my perspective is decision-making. Every other job, from dishwasher in a sit down restaurant to engineering team lead, works best when I make good decisions and my coworkers all do too. Everything runs most smoothly when everyone is on their game and consistently making the right choices.
At McDonald's, everything ran most smoothly when no one made any decisions at all.
Their system was literally that good. No one else's has ever come close. And you're right that there's a weird freedom and pleasantness to that: your job requires literally zero brain power most of the time and your sole responsibility is to keep up with the person behind you and not overwhelm the person in front of you, which isn't usually something you worry about. So all that energy every other job has got from me, I still had (and so did everyone else) which made it the most social, most fun workplace too.
Thanks to not feeling alone in the world (thanks u/oorza). I mentioned this story at work today. Is autonomy a necessary part of work happiness? I don’t think so.
Being part of a staff that manages successful delivery (in this case of food items) where at peak moments you deliver in concerto 10x average throughout, time after time was just good for morale. Plus the general goofing of teens. I don’t remember the things that I currently associate with cogs in the machine (say, scripted unpaid toilet breaks for call centers, or a lack of ownership). You owned your tiny part of the customer experience and was near all other parts.
The cogs in the machine part is imho unsuccessfully scripted work. You can’t live up to your own expectations of proper customer service because you are forced in a mold that doesn’t fit, but can’t fix the mold.
Then comes the part that I’m still thinking about. What’s easier to achieve? Great processes and happiness via lean / kaizen that treat autonomy as foundational or great scripted processes that deliver satisfaction without autonomy.
Complexity and autonomy are probably related. Higher complexity makes scripted processes that fit all exceptions a lot harder. On the other hand my experience is that so-called experts frown upon standardization and quality suffers. I’ve done standardization for professionals and have hoped to find a sweet spot between autonomy and scripted work (The Checklist Manifesto comes to mind). But I must admit those sweet spots are harder to find the less I’m intimately aware of what people do from minute to minute.
I would say that there is an upside to restaurant work in that, they're very small operations on a site level, and everyone's jobs usually feed into each other. So if you have a good leader and the team gets along, you're basically spending the day with people you know well and get to enjoy a pretty loose dynamic.
My favorite days were when I had my preferred set of team members and and the day barely felt like work at all for us. Working in a bigger org now, days like that aren't nearly as common.
> Except Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s outside of the U.S. don’t have this problem.
Heck, even Ikea has successfully been selling ice cream (from self serve machines!) here in the Netherlands for like 20 years now. €0.50 back in the day, €1 now. Can't remember the last time all machines (yes, they do have at least 2 usually) required maintenance.
As a former DQ employee, I think they are better trained. We were required to know how to take down the machines and rebuild them, and we did it daily for cleaning. But DQ is in a unique position, because ice cream is the majority of their draw. We also taste tested the ice cream 5 times a day and measured air content 5 times a day.
I agree with the sentiment, but ideally people should not have to do X to empathize with/respect people who do X. It's sad that they have to, but I wish people just learned empathy/respect better.
Some people have internalized that underpaid employees get what they deserve (i.e. they're not actually underpaid at all) and I believe that's one of the factors that leads to the abuse.
> any lacking maintenance and proper cleaning, especially if there has been a power outage will turn the the machine into a rapid incubator for bacteria that will make you ill.
Yes, the correct frame of reference here is “how can we scale ice cream delivery to millions a day while keeping everyone healthy?” At this scale a single failure can make a lot of people very sick in a very short amount of time. Under these conditions maintenance needs to be extremely rigorous and performed by qualified people.
“Right to repair” says that equipment owners can’t be stopped from performing repairs if they want to. They’ll still be on the hook for demonstrating that they were qualified to make the repairs, so I predict this will do little to improved McDonalds ice cream availability: They’ll still need to wait for the qualified technician.
Yeah no, McDonalds in Europe don't have this problem at all. Maybe we take better care of our machines, but I can assure you the turn over is huge too.
> Meanwhile, Canada is in the final stages of considering legislation that would fix the Canadian version of the DMCA, a bill called C-244 that is in its third reading in the Senate and expected to move before the end of the month. If Canada legalized circumventing technological protection measures for the purposes of repair, we might just have to head north to find the tools we need to do repairs.
That's good news, I didn't know about that bill. It looks like it was voted for unanimously in parliament. It's nice when you hear about our government doing something good for once.
What the hacker community should be lobbying for, everywhere is the complete repeal of these anticircumvention laws. DRM does not meaningfully protect against piracy, and most of the things it does protect against are otherwise-legal
Anticircumvention laws are the backbone of big tech's business models. They're all about creating little digital fiefdoms with us as their serfs. They own the platforms, they have all the keys to the machines and they aren't interested in hackers taking away their control.
Same tech companies that used to reverse engineer and adversarially interoperate whether their competitors liked it or not. They're the ones lobbying now. They don't want others doing the same thing to them.
> It's nice when you hear about our government doing something good for once.
Critically, what the government is doing here is reducing its own authority with regard to information, the internet, and ultimately at some level, thought. Sharing methods for basic home and business improvements, including repairs of machinery, is one of the most fundamental functions of society.
It's rare (but of course not unheard of by any stretch) that the governments of the largest nation states do anything _proactive_ that is helpful to society, but in many cases when they choose to reduce their own capabilities (even for the wrong reasons), it seems more forward-looking.
just as an aside, in political science/international relations, a "state" is what you are calling a nation state. A "nation" is like canadian first nations or the cherokee nation or the german nation before there was a german state (not very long ago), i.e. it's an ethnicity/language.
A nation state is when a nation and a state are combined, like Italy (a country, a polity, where the italian people live) and Japan. The USA is not a nation-state, it is just a state, nor is Canada.
You know it's funny; I actually went back and forth several times on that part. I really just wanted to distinguish between city-states (and for that matter, cities), which, it seems obvious, have an easier time staying in their lane with regard to this conflict with IP.
But you're absolutely right; the point was better made with simply the phrase "large states".
(FWIW - and I think it's not worth much - I have a degree in political science).
not your fault, the computer security community and crypto defi community just say "nation-state nation-state nation-state" as often as they can these days. I think it's because "the United States" which is made up of little states that-are-not-states internationally, has ruined the word "state" for the thing they want to talk about, the financial equivalent of state-sponsored-terrorism for example.
I swear I’m not trying to pull an RTFM, but the Wikipedia page is genuinely an interesting one and goes into the history and the fact that nation-states, in particular, are a relatively modern phenomenon.
With today's (good) sensitivity to not letting ethnicity guide us to whether someone is a friend or an enemy, the rise of the nation state can seem like a bad idea. However, it should also be kept in mind that prior to nation states emerging, ethnicities were combined in states through the force of Royal or Imperial power; Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, Angevins, Carolingians DnGAF what nations they were ruling over, just as many as possible; and often times there still were ethnicities with greater power at the center who simply wanted to take your mind off of that.
then of course, prior to the age of empires, nations formed where there were geographical boudaries between them and their neighbors, and they did exist as nation-states. The modern rise of nation-states took place in the context of the downfall of nobility/aristocracy. Democracy and free speech do, by their nature, unlock the expression of vulgar passions.
Less than 1% of the population would understand this bill. What concerns people on the day to day is quite different and that’s what the government is talking about (housing, immigration, policing, health care, dental care, pharmacies etc).
For some reason it another the broken ice cream problem doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent in Canada. I don't have ice cream at McDonald's often, but at least a handful of times a year and don't think I have ever encountered a broken machine. This is mostly around Toronto.
Does anyone else thinks this is actually a great incidental marketing campaign for McDonald's? Not only the free reach but also tons of people discussing the "problems" with a big co and how to "fix" them as they are an essential part of society, and this case ice-creams.
Sure we focus on the big brain things like copyright, business malpractice and MBA lore but with it comes McDonald's embedded.
I know this might sound a bit snobby, but just don't play the game, ignore them. If there is criminal activity let who gets paid deal with it, otherwise just move on and stop "fixing" problems that are not of your concern, let alone "fixing" them for free.
> Not only the free reach but also tons of people discussing the "problems" with a big co and how to "fix" them as they are an essential part of society, and this case ice-creams.
It is an example of a general problem. I very much doubt the number of people discussing this are a significant proportion of McDonald's market.
The actual ruling was an exemption for "commercial food preparation equipment", so it applies to all machines in all restaurants in the US.
> If there is criminal activity let who gets paid deal with it, otherwise just move on and stop "fixing" problems that are not of your concern,
This is not about criminal activity, it is about not making criminals out of people who fix their own property.
Fixing the public interest is everyone's concern. This ruling would not have happened if people hd not campaigned for it.
Either the McDonalds by me is fairly lucky or this is far less common than the meme makes it out to be.
It doesn't seem like good marketing - I hadn't had it in years but wanted to try a promo mcflurry a couple years ago, and wasn't expecting it to work, which make me wonder if I shouldn't even bother going. That's the opposite of what they'd want.
But then I went, and have gone probably a couple dozen times since then in two or three years, and it's never been out of order. Obviously I'm not going every day, but across that many visits I'd be likely to catch one if the rate of failure was THAT high.
The machines go into maintenance if not cleaned in time. Smart franchises clean the machine in the morning or after closing each day so it “never runs out”.
Just like smart airlines always reboot the plane regularly instead of learning the 787 has to be rebooted every 56 day.
> Smart franchises clean the machine in the morning or after closing each day so it “never runs out”.
And when they arrive in the morning to a failed cleaning run and an opaque error code they get to pick between first calling an expensive technician to spend just a few minutes with a tool only they have to read a more detailed error and change settings. Or they can cross their fingers and hope it's not a persistent issue. Either way it's another four hour checking cycle before it's ready.
Perhaps the “good” McDonaldses (in terms of whether they have broken machines all the time or not) are that way because they faithfully and promptly throw the requested amount of money at the Taylor licensed service providers to fix it every single time it throws its error code of doom. So we wouldn’t know how common the avoidable issues are without seeing, not just the downtime stats, but the authorized service records.
This is the biggest international travel trip I can give - download offline maps (Here, or google maps or Apple Maps all have offline maps now) and when in doubt locate a McDonald’s. WiFi and bathrooms, and sometimes even beer. ;)
Not if they don't now fix their machines, no. Then it's just "despite now being legal, McDonalds still refuses to fix their machine". Because remember: McDonalds is make of so much money that they could have trivially forced this though literal decades ago if they'd actually cared. Which they didn't. They could have even flat out bought the company that makes their machines. They didn't.
I thought it was intentional because the people that control McDonalds corporate also have shares in the ice cream machine vendor and use it as an additional vector to squeeze franchisees for their own enrichment?
>because the people that control McDonalds corporate also have shares in the ice cream machine vendor and use it as an additional vector to squeeze franchisees for their own enrichment?
I'm mostly just being playful with a fun conspiracy theory. But, McDonald's and Middleby (current parent company of Taylor), are both publicly traded. Previous parent companies of Taylor were also publicly traded.
It's not inconceivable - it wouldn't make sense to intentionally use a low quality product or intentionally cause service calls because of the decrease in revenue for McDonalds. But it would make sense to mandate a particular vendor you have a stake in.
It’s not a major problem for McDonald’s Inc. though! They don’t sell McFlurries! They lease buildings and land, and they do collect a 4% royalty on sales. But the franchisee loses the other 96% of the revenue and has to pay 100% of the “authorized Taylor repair” bill. So it’s a much bigger problem for them, and a moral hazard for McDonald’s to be able to force the store owners to use the overpriced and supposedly unnecessary (other than due to digital locks) Taylor service offerings.
If they want to squeeze more money from franchisees why not jack up the rent or royalties? The Taylor conspiracy is far less efficient at getting revenue (at the very least, you need to pay the technician), and doesn't even seem to be working very well, as evidenced by the number of stores not bothering to repair their machines.
> If they want to squeeze more money from franchisees
It's probably safe to say that any public company very much does want to ;)
> why not jack up the rent or royalties?
I assume that they will always do that (as much as contracts allow, and as much as the market will bear) regardless, so any upside from this scam is just incremental revenue on top of that.
Although I admit it's been so long since I read the original stories about this that I forgot what's in it for McDonalds Inc. Clearly Taylor's parent company makes out like a bandit (I'm assuming they pay the techs poorly and thus have a high margin) but IDK how much visibility we have publicly to what the financial arrangements are now, vs. what it might be if McDonalds Inc ripped up the Taylor contract tomorrow and say, signed a new one with a company that wasn't evil. Because I agree that I don't know how those dots are connected.
McDonald's Corporate dictates every piece of equipment in the kitchen, from the spatulas to the fryers to the grills to the soft-serve machines. The franchisees have very little choice in any of it. It all must be from the approved list of vendors and models.
Who cares if the McDonald's ice cream machine is broken? It's shit ice cream. Most of you probably live near a better local ice cream/soft serve/custard joint. Heck, most of you probably live near a better corporate chain ice cream joint that probably also serves better food than McDonald's: Dairy Queen, In-N-Out, Shake Shack, Culver's, etc.
If McDonald's didn't have breakfast or coffee the whole chain might be out of business or at tiny fraction of its current size by now.
The McDonald's ice cream machine monopoly only negatively affects millionaire McDonald's franchise owners who deserve to be abused by the franchise for being so un-innovative that they resort to purchasing/renting access to a successful business model. Talk about the most opposite-of-meritocracy business venture imaginable!
Imagine if you had a half a million dollars in freely available non-borrowed assets and you couldn't think of your own business model to try. What does that say about you as an entrepreneur/trust fund kid?
Of course, ice cream is damn easy to make at home, can be made in large batches and kept frozen forever, and it'll come out far better than any fast food ice cream I know of.
It's pretty good soft serve ice cream, which is a style many people like. It isn't really any worse than other chain soft serve ice cream like Dairy Queen's. It's not the same sort of thing as scooped hard ice cream, and it isn't something you can really make at home, whatever the merits of home made ice cream are.
We've made homemade ice cream dozens of times over 50 years... and the way I think about the delicious result is that it's like... soft serve ice cream. I think I prefer the texture of "scooped hard ice scream" but homemade with just cream, eggs, sugar, and whatever for the flavorings is just an outstanding tasty thing to eat.
I've never tasted industrial soft serve, maybe something else is going on?
Thinking back we always made it with a hand cranked machine[1], cooled by lots of salt on bagged ice cubes, maybe the current generation of electric home machines makes a different texture.
The home ice cream market is perhaps far more developed than you realize.
You can make a harder scooped ice cream style with compressor-equipped machines from brands like Whynter.
You can make soft serve, milkshakes, concretes, and gelato with the Ninja CREAMi. I've heard it even does a decent job of making a knockoff of what you get out of a Pacojet [1] at Michelin-starred restaurants.
And of course there are a number of insulated bowl-style ice cream makers like the KitchenAid ice cream maker, which is the one I use and enjoy. I don't find that I would describe the end product as soft serve-like.
I think I spent a dollar, maybe two, at the flea market, on our second hand mechanical ice cream maker. The social benefits of having the various kids, always including the guests', working it, trading off until the beautiful result happened, makes me intensely glad we weren't being judged by having some of these oh so awesome technological miracles expected.
I’m not understanding the negativity you’re projecting.
I personally think it’s wonderful that so many kitchen technologies are more accessible to home cooks. A machine like a Ninja CREAMi is opening up accessibility to ice cream varieties that were previously difficult or impossible to make at home.
I’m also not really understanding how improved appliances equals a lack of social family opportunity. You can still make cooking a group activity and I still do that with my family.
I’m not saying everyone needs some kind of expensive appliance. My ice cream maker is a KitchenAid ice cream bowl attachment which costs $60 brand new, and you could certainly find one used for much less. Products like that have all the modesty you’re desiring, it’s basically just an insulated bowl that attaches to an appliance that hasn’t changed in almost a century.
The top recommended ice cream maker on WireCutter is similar, it’s a $70 insulated bowl with a motor on it.
What I am saying is that the home ice cream market has become a gourmet hobby, so much so that commercial ice cream brands are really competing with home cooks who are saying “I can make better ice cream than this junk from the store.”
> if you had a half a million dollars in freely available non-borrowed assets and you couldn't think of your own business model to try
the problem isn't a lack of thinking-up something new. It's a matter of risk management. Any new business idea has a significant risk of ruin. Compared to owning a chain restaurant, especially mcd's.
The DMCA, though a mostly terrible law, actually doesn't prohibit any of what the ice cream machine people want to do, at least according to the CAFC.
Chamberlain v. Skylink, final court of appeals for the federal circuit opinion, page 39:
"Underlying Chamberlain’s argument on appeal that it has not granted such authorization lies the necessary assumption that Chamberlain is entitled to prohibit legitimate purchasers of its embedded software from “accessing” the software by using it.
Such an entitlement, however, would go far beyond the idea that the DMCA allows copyright owner to prohibit “fair uses . . . as well as foul.” Reimerdes, 111 F. Supp. 2d at 304.
Chamberlain’s proposed construction would allow copyright owners to prohibit exclusively fair uses even in the absence of any feared foul use.
It would therefore allow any copyright owner, through a combination of contractual terms and technological measures, to repeal the fair use doctrine with respect to an individual copyrighted work—or even selected copies of that copyrighted work. Again, this implication contradicts § 1201(c)(1) directly. Copyright law itself authorizes the public to make certain uses of copyrighted materials. Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software. What the law authorizes, Chamberlain cannot revoke." (Emphasis mine)
> Unfortunately, the exemption allowing circumvention of digital locks on video games for accessibility purposes (introduced in 2021) was not renewed. No petition for renewal was submitted, and as a result, individuals with disabilities who need alternative input methods to play video games are left out.
I think they're going to stop selling ice cream period as a company. If it was important to their bottom line McDonalds would have done something as a collective rather than having individuals enter this fight for back-channel repair options.
At some point they'll probably have their main contracts expire and stop dealing with the mess altogether.
You're assuming McD cares about anything but how much money they can get from their franchisees next quarter
"You're fixing our crappy machine yourself (translation: figure out code XYZ means it was overfilled or that AYZ means it froze and needs to be flushed) instead of hiring a service technician where we make some more money on top? We can't allow that!"
McDs are one of the worse franchises to own. Very tightly controlled with minuscule profit margins
I'm sure a lot of older franchisees want nothing but sell their businesses, especially in areas with lowering traffic
While I agree that the ice cream/milkshakes has been problematic for McDonald's from an operational standpoint, I think your business analysis is pretty terrible.
If anything, ice cream products represent a very profitable item that often serves as an upsell helping drive the APV (average purchase value) higher.
They can be eaten easily in the car, can be savored slowly over time on a long commute, and are relatively filling and inexpensive. There are a lot of people who actually consume them earlier in the day before work because of those characteristics.
You'll notice that basically every burger chain offers milkshakes, and some even emphasize the shakes more than the food, like Shake Shack, Dairy Queen (which has quite good fast food burgers and food if you aren't aware), and Steak 'n Shake. They all do this because it's an extremely profitable product and a driver of high APV.
The ice cream machines at McDonald's also deliver multiple products: McFlurry, hot fudge sundae, milkshakes, and ice cream cones. One small machine that dispenses vanilla soft serve can make a whole bunch of products.
While some of that might be true, explain to me why an organisation like macdonalds would allow up to 30% of such machinery to be out of working order for years and years in high value areas.
Your analysis posits what, that they’re just blatantly incompetent?
I don’t believe that.
If the economics of a working ice cream machine were that good, it would be a solved problem.
You don’t run an organisation like MacDonalds with a basic inability to maintain infrastructure. Imagine if that was true of fryers? Or microwaves? That almost never happens. It’s clearly not a technical problem.
The only way that you could justify the continued maintenance failure you see is if the benefits of a working machine were negligible at best.
Perhaps what you say might be true in general but in this specific circumstance I think you’re applying an “in general…” kind of logic (like “in general more unit tests are better…”) which doesn’t ring true here, to me.
I think it's actually telling that so many of them are broken but the product hasn't been discontinued. It tells you that it's not really a burdensome product to have on the menu.
Dump the liquid in the machine, turn it on, empty and clean the machine at close. There's almost nothing else in the store that is so low-effort.
I'm not saying that the high rate of failure isn't a problem or lost revenue.
I also have a hunch that the problem disproportionately affects specific franchise owners who benefit from the product less than others.
McDonald's also has no problem phasing out items from its menu. It does so with regularity. Why keep something on the menu that it doesn't want to sell? It either wants to sell it or it doesn't want to sell it.
Ice Cream products would be one of the last things they phase out.
First, the ice cream machine produces multiple products: milkshakes, McFlurries, hot fudge sundaes, and ice cream cones.
Second, dessert is an upsell and driver of APV. If you lack dessert options you basically leave money on the table from customers who are willing to buy dessert.
Third, the ice cream machine, despite its problems, is a pretty small and manageable piece of equipment. It doesn't need an employee to babysit it like a fryer or flat top. The only thing simpler at a McDonald's is the Apple Pie heater.
If you don't believe me, find a burger chain that doesn't have ice cream on the menu. Wendy's, Burger King, Shake Shack, Steak 'N Shake, In-N-Out, Whataburger, Culver's, Carl's Jr/Hardee's, seriously, which restaurant that serves burgers doesn't have ice cream/milkshakes?
God damn. Antitrust comes up and HN insists that businesses are just going to pull out of the EU any day now. McDonalds is forced to start fixing their ice cream machines and now you want to tell us that they'll refuse to serve ice cream out of petty anger.
Do we just assume every business is run by the zombie of Steve Jobs? I genuinely have no idea where this libertarian extremist sentiment is coming from.
No, I think you're reading too far into this and trying to present a nonsense scare-story to make this seem like a net-zero accomplishment.
Here's a question for you economics geniuses out there; if McDonalds wasn't interested in serving ice cream to customers then why did they buy machines for thousands of franchises to do that exact thing?
And even if you're correct - the secondhand customers of the machines McDonalds would sell would directly benefit from having parts made available. Selling their machines after the repair process is made cheap is an incoherent line of logic that only tracks if you want people to fear over-regulation.
TL;DW: there are some perverse incentives to keep them broken. Basically the owner operators are forced to use a particular brand by corporate. Corporate McDonalds has a deal with a particular ice cream machine company. That particular company is the only company owner operators are allowed to buy from, and the only company allowed to service the machines. And it's no skin off of McDonald's back for these machines to always be broken, the cost falls on the owner-operators.
I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes. And if the franchisee's are paying unnecessary costs, making a Macdonald's franchise less lucrative for the owner-operator, that will lead to fewer franchises renewals and new franchises in the future.
Been a while since I first watched the video. I would imagine the ice cream machines are a relatively small part of the McDonald's business. As evidenced by the fact that McDonalds ice cream has been an issue for quite a while. I would imagine franchises of a similar caliber to McD's also exploit their owner-operators on a similar scale because they can, we just don't necessarily hear about it because McDonalds is the largest.
McDonald's isn't known for its quality anyway. I've had my fair share of sketchy McDonalds experiences. McDs is as large as it is because it is cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous. McDonalds has no qualms with cutting corners on quality, as evidenced by its entire menu.
I'd suggest the quality of McDonald's ingredients is superior than the vast majority of restaurants that rely on Sysco or US Foods. Just my opinion, I know it's not going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up about McDonald's.
aww man dont tell people about sysco. Once you learn to spot unmodified sysco foods it's impossible to stop and the illusion of sitdown restaurants is tarnished forever.
One option might be to visit your local Jetro or Restaurant Depot, if you live in the US. If Sysco has showrooms/open warehouses I’m not aware of them, but Jetro and RD are of a very similar ilk.
Sure you can have french fries made from the best fat and potatoes but it doesn't change the fact that you're eating a burger with french fries instead of a steak with baked potatoes.
That's not an explanation. You could say that about a thousand things in McDonald's business. They are all a relatively small part, but in fact McDonald's has an army of people optimizing them all, and they are overall very successful.
Why do you think they would be able to abuse any of the operators? There are dozens and dozens of fast food franchises in the US, all in cut-throat competition. You may have heard of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Subway, KFC, Chick-fil-A, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’, Sonic Drive-In, Popeyes, Little Caesars, Arby’s, Chipotle, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box, Hardee’s, Panda Express, Jimmy John’s, Five Guys, Wingstop, Culver’s, Zaxby’s, Raising Cane’s, Whataburger, Bojangles, Shake Shack, El Pollo Loco, Firehouse Subs, Jersey Mike’s, Del Taco, Checkers, Rally’s, Church’s Chicken, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Qdoba, Captain D’s, Freddy’s, Tim Hortons, Smoothie King, Blaze Pizza, Baskin-Robbins, White Castle, Portillo’s, Noodles & Company, Schlotzsky’s, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, Auntie Anne’s, Marco’s Pizza, Boston Market, Smashburger, Fuddruckers, WingStreet, Krystal, Papa Murphy’s, Hungry Howie’s, The Habit Burger Grill, Jamba, Nathan’s Famous, Steak ’n Shake, Waffle House, Big Boy, Pizza Ranch, Cook Out.
But it’s still just as poor quality, if not worse than before. Last time I ate there I bit down on something in my burger so hard I thought I broke a tooth. I’ll never eat it again.
I like how the answers include both "they've done the math and it's worth it" and "they're idiots who don't know what they're doing". I don't think anybody cares what's really going on, as long as they can say McDonald's is bad.
I think the machines are broken way less often than people give McDonald's negativity over. In my estimation that's probably why corporate hasn't cared to fix the problem until recently.
Sure, a lot of people notice when they're broken, but a lot of people notice when AWS is down for an hour ~one time a year, too.
On top of that, depending where you are if your local McDonald's has a broken ice cream machine you probably aren't all that far away from another one. Perhaps corporate gets their sale either way?
There's an uncertain future cost (basically an externality that impacts McDonald corporate) but in return they get a nice premium now and immediate uncertainty for franchisees. It's possible it's overall a net negative for MD corporate, but it's also possible it's an overall economically profitable trade (even though it's clearly immoral).
I'm sure corporate has done the math and concluded that whatever money the machine provider pays them is higher than any expected losses in franchise revenue due to franchise owners quitting due to poor ice cream sales.
I'm pretty sure that ice cream is a high margin product like drinks and McDonald's has found an indirect way to extract most of the margins. The problem is that the technician service fees are a fixed cost designed to be revenue maximizing for the average restaurant. Franchises selling enough ice cream to pay the fixed costs stay in the game, the ones who don't simply keep them out of order. This is effectively a price discrimination strategy. By making the machine mandatory, they can offer the menu item in every restaurant, but they only have to collect money in proportion of ice cream revenue.
Modern capitalism isn't particularly rational. Money in the pocket is more tangible than minor brand damage.
If you want to be really cynical, you can assume that somebody at McDonald's and Taylor have crunched the numbers they know exactly how much they can squeeze their franchisees and the customer to effectively make money out of nothing. So many businesses operate this way now.
> I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.
Try to quantify that to the MBA bean counters, good luck.
No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's, given that most employees in fast food stores are high school kids and I got the runs more than once from that shit, I don't trust them anyway to follow up with the stringent hygiene requirements that serving ice cream demands. Burger patties at least are grilled/fried.
> No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's
People care enough that there's a website mapping working McDonalds icecream machines across several countries, that has been up for years, and was referenced in the linked article:
Most importantly, McDonalds has a strong incentive to avoid headlines like "37 people hospitalized after shit-bacteria in improperly maintained ice cream machine", which is why the machines self-monitor and shut down at the slightest excursion from some specified norm.
And McD wants the machines maintained by the official technician, because they'd rather screw their franchisees a bit than risk someone ripping out the offending sensor.
IMO, the perverse incentives come on top of this (Taylor has no motivation to make the machines more transparent since they profit from the call-outs, McD either doesn't care or may even prefer this since it could reduce the risk of "creative" solutions like an employee holding an ice cube next to a sensor), but the "McD would rather have 50% of the ice cream machines 'broken' than have a single one serve E.Coli to its customers" is what kicked this whole thing off.
In general, acidic or basic foods are very safe from bacterial contamination standpoint. Soda is very acidic (due to all that dissolved carbon dioxide).
It's not that it doesn't get bacteria (they live everywhere), but it's unlikely to get pathogenic bacteria. This makes sense, a highly acidic environment is very different from a human body.
That's why foods such as milk, ice cream, potato or egg salad, are the most dangerous from the bacterial contamination standpoint.
Soda is not "very acidic", for the exception of coke, which has strong acid added to it. Carbonic acid is very weak, and won't prevent bacteria from growing.
The Wendy's frosty machine doesn't have the same automatic cleaning cycle and pasteurization feature that the McDonald's ice cream machine has. Thus Wendy's employees need to tear the machine down and clean it by hand, a long and tedious process.
The whole reason McDonald's wanted this machine was to reduce training costs and labour. However, the machine does need to be operated correctly or it simply shuts down.
Maybe for you but when closing a Wendys down for the night you need to begin the teardown process quite a bit before official closing time. You need to wait for the machine to allow the remaining frosty mix to melt, dump the remainder into a metal bucket (to use for tomorrow). Then you have to flush water through the machine to be able to disassemble it, then the machine needs to be loaded with a sanitizing solution (along with all the parts which are placed in the hopper).
Finally you gotta re-do all of this the following morning! Sure its not like taking apart an iPhone but its not a 5 second job either.
The worst part? This damn machine can only produce one flavor of frosty at a time! The mcdonalds machine avoids all of this, produces 3-4 flavors of milkshakes from one unit and handles soft serve ice cream!
It's not a self-contained TPN compounder in a hospital cleanroom. It's a machine that has many parts that get wet with sugary water. It has parts that need to be cleaned that seldom are, and judging by the average fast food employee, would probably be better off left alone than further contaminated by them attempting to clean it. Google "soda fountain mold" and you will be stunned to see how nasty these can get. I don't eat fast food often, but I skip the drink unless it's from a meticulously clean place.
Similarly Instagram started adding tracking querystrings (igshid or something like that), and for a good few weeks any Instagram link with it was completely broken for me (few loops, errors, and throwing me to the home page), I had to manually remove that part of the url.
Implicit here is the assumption that (a) when evaluating many franchises McD is still attractive for new owner operators despite the obvious flaw, or (b) switching costs are high for existing McD owner operator victims, and the issue wasn't known or believed to be this bad when they started.
Does McD's still use these machines today? It seems like this has been going on for decades, more than long enough that pretty much everyone seems to know about it. I would have guessed that by now McD's would want to move on to a new setup that did not cause them such consistent negative PR and leave a trail of unhappy customers.
McDonalds owns the company that makes and fixes these machines, and franchise owners foot the bill. It's a way of taking more money from franchise owners.
That’s not correct. Taylor Company, who supply the notorious C602 ice cream machine to more than 13,000 McDonalds franchises, is owned by Middleby Corporation of Elgin, Illinois since 2018. Previously it was part of United Technologies’ climate & controls (Carrier) unit. [1]
Not all McDonalds use the Taylor machines. Some use machines from other manufacturers such as Carpigiani [2]
They do not, this is disinformation. The machines are manufactured by Taylor for McDonald’s and maintained by Taylor’s service network.
Taylor’s the largest manufacturer of commercial ice cream making equipment in the US. Franchisees also have the option of using Carpigiani machines, but they’re Italian so parts and service are not as easy to come by. And all ice cream machines are known for being easy to break, especially if used by poorly trained teenagers.
This also makes no sense, if McDonald’s wanted to make more off the franchisees from ice cream, surely they’d rather do it by having the machines work (so they can sell product). They sell the mix that goes in the machine to the franchisees. It would be idiotic to try to gouge them by making the machine crappy rather than just charging them more for the mix and using a good machine. Then they wouldn’t need to employ these imaginary service techs and the franchisees would be happier with the situation.
Then why is the situation what it is? As numerous people have pointed out, other fast-food chains don't have this problem. They are able to provide ice-cream products that are consistently free of either toxins or excuses.
Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely explanation is that the McDonald's Corporation is deliberately setting their franchisees up to fail by continuing to sign contracts with Taylor. Which I agree makes no sense.
That’s not what Occam’s razor would suggest at all. That’s a silly conspiracy theory that’s easily verified as false if you know anything about the ice cream industry or just bother to Google who makes the machines.
Occam’s razor might suggest that their competitors use a different machine entirely (I really don’t know but Wikipedia’s page on Taylor only mentions McDonald’s).
McDonald’s corporate making a bad decision about a machine seems a whole lot simpler than some convoluted conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?
Accountants at these places evaluate the cost of replacing all the machines with a new vendor while still paying out the old contract vs internet comments
I’m sure they’ve done the math somewhere, and possibly determined this is more of a meme than an IRL business liability
It’s not an excuse, almost everyone agrees they screwed up. But it’s an explanation. They likely signed a long term contract. Then a few years ago they allowed franchisees to use another brand.
> Integral to the Court’s decision was the conclusion that Section 1201’s ban on circumvention of access restrictions is a regulation of “conduct” rather than “speech.”
As per the US Code, title § 1201(D) "noninfringing uses" including but not limited to non-profit or archival purposes aren't a circumvention of the technological measure. No need to skirt DMCA if the fair use doctrine is in place.
I've heard plenty of stories about the MCD ice cream machines, but it doesn't add up for me. Can someone who has more insight shed some light into this?
- Are the machines listed as "broken" on https://mcbroken.com/ actually broken? Or is that more of a meme, with many just undergoing routine cleaning, etc.?
- Why does this seemingly happen only in US? In European McDonald's it's pretty much unheard of.
- Why would McDonald's Corp. be happy with the status quo? Is it some kind of tactic to squeeze more revenue from the franchises? If so, why not address it in the franchise agreement and just let restaurants sell more ice cream?
The short version is that the machines' sensors are extremely picky (because the stuff that goes into soft serve is just begging for massive bacterial growth if not handled correctly), and McDonald's corporate requires (I'm pretty sure by franchisee contract, not just by the copyright restrictions the article is about) that their specific chosen vendor handles it, even for minor issues.
A lot of people like to treat this as a conspiracy, but I think it's much more likely it's the corporate people being paranoid about local franchisees overriding the machines, and that leading to listeria outbreaks happening in the only non-sealed food item that isn't heated to safe temperatures shortly before it's handed off to customers.
I don't know about the contrast with Europe, but it might just be geographical size causing time delays for individual techs showing up. McDonald's franchisees are everywhere, and the U.S. is gigantic.
More than 120 people were sickened after eating ice cream at their local McDonald's. The health department says the restaurant's dairy mixture somehow was contaminated with staphylococcus, and a mechanical malfunction in the soft serve machine allowed the bacteria to grow. So many people became so ill, so quickly, the director of the local emergency room told me he at first thought there was some kind of bioterrorism incident in the town.... Nancy Smith says she had taken her grandchildren for an outing, and stopped at McDonald's to buy them a treat. Her grandson Darien had a milkshake, and she says he was violently ill an hour later. He became limp and listless, Smith says, and they rushed him to the hospital, scared to death. Then she got sick. She says she had just three sips of Darien's shake, but it was enough to make her very ill. She told us she was vomiting so violently, she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She's now suing McDonald's, as are many of the other people who got sick in that incident.
In UK McDo often have broken ice-cream machines too, at least where I've been. It seems to be higher incidence than other fastfood outlets (Burger King, KFC), but that might be observer bias.
I just figure margins must be low on their ice-creams, so when it's broken they sell more fountain drinks and make more money than they would if the ice-cream machine was fixed.
Also I would be surprised if people buy a soda instead of ice cream. I believe most either get an ice cream in addition to the menu or specifically because they came for an ice cream.
Re: specific tools staying outlawed even after this win:
What about offering a tool for some legit purpose, but it just happens to be the right tool that can be used to repair the protected item?
Nice, the politicians were able to get some brownie points on a hot button issue without actually doing anything! Good for them, I bet they feel proud, they deserve some of the ice cream they so valiantly saved.
The US Copyright Office isn't elected, and the woman running it was appointed by a non-political appointee herself.
I have a pretty negative view of politics, too, but it doesn't mean we can't be happy when something good happens – no matter how small. The government doesn't pay well, and while we know the names of a dozen or so shitty self-serving jerks in Congress, most people in the government are genuine people doing it to help others.
It took this long to establish a Right to Repair for Ice Cream Machines... So, where shall we set the over:under for number of years til regain a Right to Repair our own cars?
iFixit is a strange entity. Their website, repair kits, and tutorials are all excellent. The amount of success they've had in championing right to repair initiatives in legal arenas is commendable. But it's not so great that the two are intertwined. It seems inevitable that conflicts of interests will arise between their exclusive deals with manufacturers, business selling repair kits, and increasing influence in the legal system.
I don't see it. No single manufacturer deal they make will be worth enough to them to change their strategy or values. They also know from experience that companies withdraw from such agreements or deals without warning, so they can never rely on them
They aren't; they're motivated to ensure ice-cream machines are only fixable by them. Still a perverse incentive. It makes zero sense for a company to be motivated to have their own product... not... work.
It correlates with demand. These things go down quickly during peak demand because they can't maintain cold temps. You'll often see this during summer heatwaves as people flock to drive-thrus to grab some ice cream!
I think McDonald’s is under different ownership in different countries. They may even be using a different supplier for ice cream machines in Australia!
If you can raed tihs, you hvae voilated the DCMA and cmomitted a fleony.
The oirginal palin txet of tihs msesage was put trhough a porprietary ecnryption aglorithm I cerated, and waht you see hree is the rseulting cpyher txet. It is illegal for you to rveerse my porprietary ecnryption aglorithm.
Under no circumstances should we need an exemption from the copyright office just to be able to repair an ice cream machine. It's not even a permanent exemption! The DMCA causes many weird problems.
It's still weird to me that we ended up in a world in which every bit of information can now be copied at zero cost and instead of heralding and building upon that technological achievement we've somehow decided that instead we're going to make laws to protect and enforce rent seeking instead. I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population; just like universal health care, or public education.
This seems like a very one-sided take. Just look at all the artists (actors, painters, musicians, etc.) that are fighting tooth and nail against AI, and for good reason. While there are plenty of issues with copyright, I don't agree at all that just because the marginal cost of copying is 0 that if someone puts a ton of time and effort in creating a piece of work that I should just get to copy it for free.
That's not the argument though. The argument is that rent seeking as a business strategy is a deeply flawed and counter productive economic practice that ultimately limits our species' technological advancements and societal progress. The sooner we move past it, the better off we will all be. I agree that you should be able to create whatever you want and keep it 100%. So, clearly if someone were to steal your creation from your home and publish it online that would be theft. However, if you decided to take advantage of your creation by creating an infinite number of copies at no cost to you at all (which is what publishing through digital media means) that's your decision as a creator to make, nobody forced that on you.
I don't like your redefinition of "rent seeking" at all. If I create an original piece of art, and publish it digitally, preventing other people from freely copying that art is not rent seeking - the thing I created didn't exist in any form before I created it, and I'm not trying to "extract rent" from you by preventing you from creating any of your own works.
Now, like I said previously, there are currently issues with copyright, and this can cross into rent seeking if I try to extract money from your own original works of art (see the family of Marvin Gaye), and there are issues with the length of copyright (i.e. I believe there is a fundamental difference in protecting the right of a creator while they're alive, vs. the rights of inheritors in perpetuity). But the whole concept of rent seeking is around using the power of government to extract money from others simply because you were there first, not around allowing unlimited copying of truly original works.
Before we invented copying machines there was no concept of copyright. It is a recent invention, and not how human culture evolved. And it was ok up until the internet was invented, but people want to return from passive consumption to interactive. We now prefer games, social networks and search to books, radio and TV. AI is just the latest stage in this move away from passivity.
Why should society not have the right for its traditional interactive way of exchanging culture? Extending the duration of copyright was a perverse move, and now blocking the right to repair is another perverse move. DMCA put all publishers at the whim of agencies spamming takedowns with impunity even for no reason at all. Artists more recently would like to copyright abstractions to block generative AI from reusing their ideas.
People need their traditional ways back. We started open source, made Wikipedia, we now have open scientific publication, teachers share prep materials. Clearly there is a sign that copyright is not essential for society. Copyleft or sharing is more important.
See, even the name is misleading because it's not a right - it's really a prohibition. We can agree or disagree about definitions, but I think it is self-evident that defending and enforcing a prohibition on creating zero-cost copies of digital media requires bending over backwards to undo the very properties of the technology that make it desirable to those who want to profit off of it. To me that sure sounds like rent seeking.
I don't understand this. Copyright law does not prevent people from sharing their information freely. It gives the option for "rent seekers" to do their thing. Enforcing your rights for return is optional for people that don't want to do it. I'm not talking about right-to-repair here, but the idea of copyright in general.
A lot of information is generated by taking some financial risk with the hopes of creating something of value and recouping that investment + some profit. Copyright makes that kind of venture possible. It doesn't prevent altruistic souls from putting in the same effort without any expectation of return. We always had this, by default. Copyright framework allows pursuit, generation and dissemination of huge swaths of valuable information that would otherwise not exist.
Uhh, it's because information can be easily copied that the laws were put in place. If anyone can "steal" your work then it would be a deterrent to invention.
If I'm a business that can make money on the service contract I can sell the unit at a lower price. Now I'm forced to make the unit cost higher.
I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population
"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites"
It’s an anti-consumer stance to force copyright to nearly 100 years and allow no format swapping under a hilariously broad set of normal transmission and format-swapping techniques.
Does everyone believe that we need copyright to be the exact way that it is though?
I'm pretty sure that the reason that copyright laws are the way they are is because certain industries in the US lobby the government to strong arm other countries into adopting onerous copyright restrictions as part of free trade agreements.
Whatever you feel about the merits of intellectual property laws the idea that they're wrapped up as 'free trade' when they in fact make things that would otherwise be free cost money is downright Orwellian.
Maybe countries that don't really have a film or tv industry don't want to see copyright on those products and why would they? Why would they want to see their citizens paying American countries for something that would otherwise be free?
I'm fine going back to the old 14+14 rules copyright originally. having your creation for an entire generation seems appropriate. But opinions are all across the spectrum on this issue.
I think the primary reason the "spirit" of current copyright broke down is because it's been reduced to hoarding over protecting. the idea is that I can license out an idea if I really want to make use of it. So creations flow and the company makes their own cut out of it.
But I can't just walk up to Disney and pay 100 dollars ,1000, maybe even 1 million to grab Mickey Mouse and work with something. Depending on their products, they may not want anyone using Mickey period, even if there is no mickey product cycle. You basically need to be EA or Mattel or Warner Bros. to even begin being considered for such a thing.
That's their right but it spoils the social contract. When everything by default is locked down, there is no creation flowing. Just broken dreams for abandoned franchises everyone else would love to make use of.
There's definitely tiers of copyright to consider, which is part of the divisiveness on the issue. You wanting to protect your creation and get compensated for its IP for 10-20 years (so, a good portion of your life career) is very different from Disney wanting to delay Mickey mouse going into public ___domain. an IP its creator and studio already reaped trillions from over the century.
No one should have to. If we're talking about putting/maintaining restrictions on people, the onus should be on the proponents to put forth a good argument why we need it.
Not when you are the one trying to change the status quo. Regardless of what you believe, if you want to change the default you need to explain to people why it should change. A self-righteous stance like yours will change nothing.
Well the argument is that the status quo is bad for all but a select few, so moving past it would be beneficial for basically nearly everybody.
Rent seeking limits innovation, needlessly drives up costs, creates barriers where there shouldn't be any, encourages predatory economic behaviors, suppresses competition, and ultimately leads to monopolistic and or oligopolic wealth and power structures.
It's universally bad practice that results in bad outcomes for society and we should move away from enabling and indeed incentivizing that kind of economic behavior.
Sure, but the anti-circumvention provisions in particular just inconvenience everyone. It's not like DVDs being "protected" prevented them from being ripped.
I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s pretty clear that piracy is not illegal because of the DMCA; it’s illegal because it violates normal copyright laws. Repealing the DMCA would not change the legal status of piracy.
Repealing the DMCA also wouldn’t make DRM illegal, but DRM would still be exactly as (in)effective as it has already proven to be countless times. DRM has done nothing to restrict piracy, as far as I can tell.
Repealing the DMCA would simply allow people to more freely break DRM in pursuit of lawful purposes, which are currently restricted unfairly, including activities that would fall strictly under Fair Use. I would argue the DMCA is infringing my legal rights for no benefit to society.
Distributing copies of copyrighted content without authorization was unlawful long before the DMCA, outside of Fair Use scenarios.
It’s a simple question. I know it’s illegal. Should regular people face consequences or not? The status quo is “no,” which is the first step to understanding why making consequences for circumventing DRM is a bitter compromise that is maybe the best option.
(not op) I think DMCA specifically should be repealed. We can still have DRM/Copyright/etc if enough people want it, we could look at other systems, but DMCA itself is awful. Repealing it doesn't make any statement about piracy.
All of this was unnecessary on the old ice cream machines. The downside was they had to be cleaned and sanitized every night and that meant you needed one more person on the closing team. It was all about saving labor costs.
Agreed, and with these new machines, they should have two of them (for several reasons). I worked there for a couple years in high school and summertime was just order after order of ice cream. The lost profit from the only machine being broken, or during it's downtime to chill the soft serve liquid after a refill, would pay back the investment in one summer, not to mention the customer service improvement.
The ad campaign for resolving this problem writes itself too. It's easily worth it. Worst case scenario, put the second machine where the pizza oven used to be.
I think that the opportunity costs are just too high.
Since the reliability of these machines seem very low, even having 2 machines doesn't guarantee that you're always able to serve ice cream.
And if you're able to serve all your customers with one machine, in times when both are functioning, the second machine doesn't really enable more sales. But you do have to power it, have a dedicated space for it, have someone clean it daily, and pay for the maintenance contract.
It's probably more beneficial to dedicate the space for an extra ice-cream machine to storage, frying station or something else that is more useful.
Another point is that I don't think not being able to sell ice cream reduces sales that much. Because by the time you find out the machine is broken, you're already in the store or drive through anyway
They're not that unreliable, but it seems like they're more unreliable than they actually are because they sometimes lie to customers -- it's easier to say it's broken than explain what is actually happening.
You see, demand for ice cream is very weather driven and that means nearly everyone wants ice cream at the same time. But each machine has a throughput limit. So, a lot of the time when they say the machine is broken, it's really just that the demand has exceeded the machine's capacity, and it takes awhile for the machine to freeze the ice cream mixture when it is refilled. If you had a second machine, that's when you switch to the second machine and by the time that one's capacity is reached, then the other machine will be ready to go again.
The machines also do what modern refrigerators do and they run a defrost/heating cycle to prevent ice from building up on the cooling equipment inside. If a defrost cycle happens at the same time as a freeze cycle, it extends the downtime because it then takes longer to freeze the ice cream mixture.
> to storage, frying station or something else that is more useful.
Storage and frying capacity is not at problem at most McDonald's. Two things they do really well is frying and just-in-time delivery.
> by the time you find out the machine is broken, you're already in the store or drive through anyway
A lot of people come with a car full of kids just for ice cream, they go to your competitor when you don't have it. If they didn't want the expense of an extra ice cream machine, they could keep ice cream sandwiches in the freezer and offer those as a substitute when the ice cream machine is locked out in a freeze or defrost cycle.
Most of the sales at a McDonalds are via the drive-thru. Inside sales have dropped so low that many stores don't even staff the front counter, you have to enter your own order at a kiosk in the lobby or use their mobile app.
I think your conjecture was correct 20 years ago but not at store with the latest remodels. Counter sales and inside dining are an afterthought.
The ice cream machines (all restaurant equipment, really) is very expensive and you generally don't buy more than you will actually use.
An ice cream machine costs less than $3,000. The whole McDonald's costs $1.5m - $2.5m. They could buy a second ice cream machine with 2-3 day's profit.
Of course they do. The cost of the ingredients is on the order of cents, the marginal cost of labor negligible, and the cost of the machines can be amortized over many thousands of servings.
But even if they didn't, it's a cheap way to get people to show up and potentially order other, higher margin items. If your machine is broken, you lose that funnel and your customers go elsewhere.
You don’t lose many customers - because they’re not required to light a huge “ice cream machine broke” before you get in the drive thru. And once you’re in line and ordering you’re unlikely to cancel just because the machine broke.
I’ve even had the app be wrong and let you order an ice cream when it doesn’t exist - then they lose money giving you a more expensive substitute.
We have 1 ___location in my area. I go maybe once a month hoping for a decent experience, but every single time they are out of key ingredients (no chicken, no beans, no chips, etc).
I really don’t understand how that can even happen at Chipotle where the entire menu consists of a grand total of (maybe) 10-15 core ingredients?
I would go way more often if they simply weren’t out or ingredients 90% of the time I go.
But he’s right about not canceling the order. I think last chipotle visit I subbed black beans for pinto, and tofu instead of chicken. The “sorry no chips today” was icing on the cake at checkout.
That’s interesting. I’ve gone to chipotle around once or twice a month for two decades now, and with the exception of their lemonades I’ve only had something unavailable maybe 3-4 times. Regional variation I guess.
Check out r/chipotle - maybe it’s an echo chamber there but it’s a major problem with mobile orders where you don't have an opportunity to sub an ingredient that’s out of stock. Depending on the store, chipotle mobile orders are a “fun” gamble - chipotle needs to fix quality standards across stores at least in my region!
Chipotle is one of the very few businesses I have ever left a google review for because the complaint seems extremely simple to fix. Just stock your store and hire enough people to prep the food!
True - it every time I’ve considered ice cream as an important part of the meal I’ve already disqualified McDonald’s (Dairy Queen or Culver’s is a step above).
Eh. Taylor doesn't fix the machines. You actually get a contract with an independent certified technician - quite often provided through the reseller who sold the machine.
> It's also all about Taylor's exclusivity on repairing the machines.
In context, it doesn’t matter whether Taylor is getting paid or Santa Claus is. The problem is that McDonald’s franchises were not able to fix them due to software locks.
If Taylor accredits the technician, supplies the technician with proprietary tools for servicing Taylor devices, and furnishes them with replacement parts that can otherwise not be bought by consumers off the shelf - they are a Taylor employee. That is not independent repair, it is a racket.
What is a franchising fee or other franchising requirements? The shop is paying them money for the ability to get money for the repairs. Don't be intellectually dishonest.
And a lot of workplaces in fact don't trust the devs with a laptop. Instead they get a text editor and compiler machine controlled by some sweaty guy in a cellar somewhere with a sign on the door that says "IT".
I think this is getting more and more common. I had a job where I had to work remotely through citrix, because the company didn't trust developers to have their own computers. I have also heard stories from others having to do the same. It's the most brain wrecking way to work due to the latency when typing.
True, though it was not complicated. Just took a person about 45 minutes. That was to do the milkshake and the soft serve machine. Did it many, many times when I worked there.
Maybe a good idea to work for a short stint in a commercial kitchen?
Not a snark.. it's quite eye opening to see (and actually use) how much food a piece of commercial kitchen equipment processeses in a day and then how much effort it takes to clean them.
Each part is washed in detergent, rinsed, and sanitized. Rings and gaskets are relubricated with food safe petroleum jelly, then everything is reassembled.
Forget one ring or misalign one gasket and the machine will shoot dairy everywhere when repressurized. Cleanup and rework after that is messy, and probably wasted a lot of other nearby product and disposables. So don't do that.
After reassembly the machine is flushed with sanitizer then clear water then primed with the mix you saved from the beginning. Let's hope you stored it properly in the cooler before it started to spoil. It's expensive. If nothing has exploded it's ready for use after an hour of cooling down.
To do this in 45 minutes with no catastrophic errors is pro-level. And this is why McD went to a self-sanitizing machine.
Basically right, where I worked the parts were set in trays to air-dry overnight. There was a spot on the tray for each part, o-ring, and gasket so you could easily see if any were missing.
The machines were reassembled the next morning. So the closers only had to break them down, wash, and sanitize.
Once a week any dairy mix left in the machine was discarded, this "breaks the cycle" of any bacteria in the mix. So on that night, you tried to let the machines run very low to minimize waste.
It's sort of complicated the first few times but it becomes very routine. Like everything at McDonalds, there is a detailed step-by-step written procedure on how to do it.
Yeah, I was thinking more about the grandparent above that said it took 45 minutes and that had to mean breakdown/cleaning/reassembly in one step. I was there in 1985-86 and we did like you said, one crew member did the cleaning at close and let it air dry for the morning crew. But that was also because shakes/ice cream wasn't served during the breakfast shift. Someone had time in the morning to assemble and prime the machine before 10:30am (me).
I'm guessing 24/7 operation changed when and how the cleaning was done, leading to more contamination instead of less.
The machine from 30+ years ago that I regularly took apart and put back together had about 35 user-cleanable parts for the milkshake side and 12 for the ice cream side. The worst part of the ordeal was removing the rubber o-rings They went on easily enough, but removing took quite a bit of patience. The whole process took about 30 minutes, start-to-finish, including soaking the washed parts in bleach -- no dishwasher as the blades used to cut the frozen ice cream base from the inside of the machine would dull and ding causing damage to the machine.
The new machines came in long after I moved on to other jobs. In ideal situations, they re-pasteurize the mix overnight, leading to a drop in 1-2 person-hours of labor.
Certainly blew the mind of the people writing the techdirt article if the opening paragraph is any indication: "Well here’s a surprise for you / This is… flabbergasting." It's almost like they thought they had good reasons to expect something else from TFG's adminstration.
Why were the results different?
DOJ composition running up through 2018 was pretty strongly influenced by a decade of liberal-leaning but cross-partisan staffing, and this was a legal theory that obviously emerged from within staff rather than coming down from the top.
And psychology of liberal or conservative but principled lawyers is likely to be conscientious enough when it comes to their legal theorizing that except where it serves particular organized power plays, you'll see some principled arguments come out, like this one, because obviously the DMCA exists to protect copyright rather than stymie repair.
Also, right-to-repair has an appeal that crosses partisan boundaries very well, especially among voters themselves. Sure, businesses and social influencers who'd sacrifice right-to-repair for pro-capital / power-play positions are probably highly represented and influential in the right-wing party, what with the investment in social philosophies oriented around hierarchies of status. But going against right-to-repair is still unpopular enough and likely to piss off conservative-identifying libertarians that there was bound to be some discomfort, even with the usual Republican enthusiasm for being a pro-capital / pro-business capture party.
And finally, while it's obvious that the 2018 POTUS is only capable seeing the issue in terms of friends/opportunities and enemies/liabilites rather than principled legal or social theories, it's also obvious that right-to-repair is one of the things that benefited from his shall we say limited range/depth of interest when it comes to policy. Inattention can allow any number of things to thrive. At least until someone offers to buy right-to-repair off of him. Elections matter.
I don’t think the surprise was based on the head of the executive, rather it was based on the DOJ taking a stance in favor of exemptions.
I just get tired of the idea that the president/executive completely colors every single government action. Let’s stop pretending that every election will completely rewrite the MO and agendas for every agency.
The comment I replied to was based on exactly those kinds of assumptions (“couldn’t possibly imagine this happening under Trump”) and was wrong. Now you’re just doing a no-true-Scotsman (“oh, it only happened because he wasn’t paying attention”).
I’ve personally seen no evidence that right-to-repair is a partisan issue in the way you’ve suggested, and I’ve seen plenty of evidence that the cronyism charges you’re levying are also not limited to a single party. You can hate the guy for lots of reasons, but the idea that Trump is uniquely capable of being bought on this issue seems very strange to me.
Assuming you know more about what people need than they do is also unwise. For starters, “MyParty(TM) is better for you, you’re just too dumb to realize it” is not a particularly effective campaign strategy. Both major US parties have tried it.
I didn't see the OP campaigning, just stating fact. People vote against their personal interests when convinced to do so. I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement.
It is the height of arrogance to assume that someone is so dumb that they don't even know what their interests are.
I have my interests. Some are satisfied by the Democrats. Some are satisfied by the Republicans. Some are satisfied by both. Some are satisfied by neither. My vote goes to the person who best satisfies my most important interests at the time. Sometimes I have to eat shit in doing so, but that's politics for you.
> It is the height of arrogance to assume that someone is so dumb that they don't even know what their interests are.
It’s also true. Call it arrogant all you want but it remains fact that people vote against their interests when persuaded to do so. If the retort is that it’s somehow rude to say this… so be it.
Tell me more about arrogance, like it's not arrogance and maybe even hubris for someone to assert they just naturally know their interests and how they interact with various policies (much less how parties are going to show up to support them).
It's not that someone is dumb if they sometimes don't know their own interests. It's that it's a hard problem that even smart people can fail at. Maybe especially smart people who don't appreciate that it's a hard problem and perhaps even are prone to confuse failure with stupidity.
Those who appreciate the complexity of the various problem domains for social policy or even of the information environment wouldn't be the least surprised if they personally accidentally voted against their own interest.
And it's far from controversial that many people are much more likely to vote by connecting their values to impressions/symbols invoked by campaigns and parties than to dig in even at the policy white paper level and arrive at a carefully calculated cost/benefit analysis for each candidate.
Maybe you're an exception. Probably not, but maybe. What about most people? Well, if it's true in a 2024 presidential race "about their policies, Harris would win handily... because voters — whether they know it or not — overwhelmingly prefer the vice president’s agenda to the former president’s"[0] but also true that the race is a coin flip, that suggests some significant margin of people who are doing something else other than policy-interest calculations.
Meanwhile, back at the specific topic, almost nobody is campaigning on right to repair, so even among people who happen to be detailed interest calculators (whoever that may be), it'd be little surprise if as an issue it didn't figure strongly into how they considered their interests and cast their vote.
If this issue matters to you, consider that right-to-repair friendly interpretations of the law are where the civil servant / professional administrative / "deep state" has arrived at under the direction and staffing priorities of prevailing liberal order. Which, is, uh, not really the energy/vibe of one of the current candidates (and it's fairer to speak of energy/vibes than policies when it comes to him given how obvious it is that this is a guy who doesn't do homework and knows little policy other than personal advantage).
> Well, if it's true in a 2024 presidential race "about their policies, Harris would win handily... because voters — whether they know it or not — overwhelmingly prefer the vice president’s agenda to the former president’s"[0] but also true that the race is a coin flip, that suggests some significant margin of people who are doing something else other than policy-interest calculations.
I looked at that article. Distinctly missing from the methodology is "and how much do you actually care about this issue?". I might agree with Candidate A on dogs, mom's apple pie, and a thousand other issues, but Candidate B only on Hot Button Issue A and Hot Button Issue B - but if my concern is about Hot Button Issues A and B, then agreeing with a greater number of positions from Candidate A is really beside the point.
I can imagine it, because broken ice cream machines only affect millionaire McDonald's franchise owners negatively.
Also the leader of the Republican Party happens to be a loyal McDonald's customer. I mean, the guy bought the Clemson Tigers McDonald's instead of using the White House's in-house catering.
Bad headline. No, they can't. They are now allowed to, but they don't have the actual ability to do so.
Clickbait of the weirdest kind - the totally unnecessary one. They could have gone with more truthful "We're now allowed to" with the same amount of impact... right?
Yeah this was weird. You usually expect this from a newspaper where the editor chooses an inaccurate headline, but this is iFixit? The actual text of the article points out that just about every McDonalds franchise will be unaffected and have equally broken ice cream machines, which is why it's so weird that they contradict that in the headline.
Having worked at a fast food join (not McDonalds) much earlier in my life, any lacking maintenance and proper cleaning, especially if there has been a power outage will turn the the machine into a rapid incubator for bacteria that will make you ill.
Since shifts change and not everyone keeps on the machine, a power outrage can quickly be lost to the workers.
Getting angry if an employee tells you the machine is broken and demanding ice-cream is an exceedingly bad idea. Take that as a blessing. The employee may have saved you from running to the bathroom a lot.
I personally stay away from softicecream entirely. But if you must, try to find a place where a lot of people are buying so the machine is in frequent use. That doesn't mean its safe but it makes it a lot more likely.
Of course not being used frequently is not an automatic reason for the machine to be in incubator mode, it may will be well cared for, well cleaned, great maintenance.