Posted by LorenDB 10/25/2024
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Would you care to write some more about this?
I was under impression that scripted work is generally considered bad and makes people feel like cogs in a machine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
That throws up the question in my mind: What makes a people into a nation? How uniform do they have to be?
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.
That is what makes America exceptionally unique on the world stage; it is seemingly becoming more tribal anyway, but the mix is unusual.
It's a private member's bill (from a member of the governing party, supported unanimously by votes from every party)
McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken and now the feds are involved - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40832988 - June 2024 (2 comments)
FTC and DOJ want to free McDonald's ice cream machines from DMCA repair rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39717558 - March 2024 (177 comments)
McDonald's ice cream machine hackers say they found 'smoking gun' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657192 - Dec 2023 (230 comments)
The Real Reason McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232983 - Nov 2023 (2 comments)
iFixit tears down a McDonald’s ice cream machine, demands DMCA exemption for it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37325200 - Aug 2023 (6 comments)
Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How to Fix Them - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37319841 - Aug 2023 (3 comments)
iFixit Petitions Government for Right to Hack McDonald's Ice Cream Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37311239 - Aug 2023 (301 comments)
Ice cream machine hackers sue McDonald's - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527939 - March 2022 (154 comments)
New emails released in the McDonald’s ice cream machine lawsuit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29325507 - Nov 2021 (138 comments)
Ask HN: Are McFlurries suddenly back now that lawsuit is pending? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28581906 - Sept 2021 (14 comments)
McDonald’s unreliable ice cream machines reportedly under FTC investigation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28407525 - Sept 2021 (41 comments)
Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26936774 - April 2021 (234 comments)
The Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932344 - April 2021 (3 comments)
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines–and Started a Cold War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874436 - April 2021 (4 comments)
I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 - Oct 2020 (420 comments)
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.
In this case iFixit's business is selling tools and materials to fix things. So, there is an incentive for them to invest in solving the problem.
What exactly do you mean by this?
> 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.
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.
Just like smart airlines always reboot the plane regularly instead of learning the 787 has to be rebooted every 56 day.
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...
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.
Source?
https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] A strong argument for keeping kids around.
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.
Yeah, I don't envy your knowledge or experience.
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.”
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.
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)
> Video Game Accessibility:
> 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.
At some point they'll probably have their main contracts expire and stop dealing with the mess altogether.
"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
Maybe it’s low margin.
Maybe cleaning is expensive.
Maybe it helps having the promise of cheap ice cream but “sorry not right now” leading customers to buy other (more expensive) items.
It’s not an incompetent organisation.
If they wanted the machines to work, they would work.
They don’t.
So… if anything changes out of this, it will be to keep the status quo; people coming in and not buying cheap ice creams.
If anything, ice cream products represent a very profitable item that often serves as an upsell helping drive the APV (average purchase value) higher.
Milkshakes in particular have a unique "job to be done" in the drive-thru fast food industry: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/clay-christensens-milkshake-marke...
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.
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.
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.
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?
This is never going to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bwahahah!
Not only you give data about you but now you are actively prefer to eat at McD instead of any other option and you are not even thinking about it.
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?
They are and it doesn't matter. You don't go to McD for the ice cream. It's been a running joke for decades how they're always broken.
Yeah. 'cause they don't have any 'cause the machine's broken.
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.
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.
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:
Quite a few places where softserve ice cream is not that widespread, McDonalds is one of the most reliable places to be able to find it.
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.
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.
It doesn't prevent _all_ bacteria, as I said. But it prevents most of pathogenic bacteria.
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.
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!
As habit or policy, can we all agree to get rid of the tracking information in Youtube links?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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