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Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]
- pontifier 6y agoIt's intermittent reinforcement people! It's a gamble. If you want ice cream you have to keep going back again and again to play the odds. And now I want some ice cream...
- txomon 6y agoIf someone is looking for when it starts diving into the situation... https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4?t=625 https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4?t=625
- dependsontheq 6y agoThe Taylor revenue from service looks totally reasonable in that business, restaurant equipment needs a lot of service and fails often and you often have no alternative on hand, having fast and helpful service has the same value a good machine has. The software interface looks stupid, but ... that's really more of an industry problem.
- LatteLazy 6y agoExactly. It's complex, it has to refrigerate and heat, it has to do complex things with fluids and moving parts, it has to be 100% safe and hygienic, output has to be 100% reproducible and its operated by a high school kid who's still a bit high from smoking earlier. A better question is why they don't have 2+ machines to both share the load and give some redundancy. I'm all for economic self interest, so I assume ice-cream isn't a money maker (maybe even a loss leader?) so no one actually cares if the machine is down all day as long as people buy something else.
- 1cvmask 6y agoHere is the site to see if the ice cream machine works or not: https://mcbroken.com/ https://mcbroken.com/ Here is the original HN thread on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623
- azhenley 6y agoI used mcbroken three times. Each time it said the machine was working but the workers told me otherwise. The site continued saying it was working until they closed. :(
- rashiq 6y agoUnfortunately it doesn't work if the restaurant doesn't update their pos system. There's a few false-positives but I haven't heard of any false-negatives.
- melkel 6y agothis story is so much more than mcBroken
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI find it insane someone from corporate doesn't think 10-20% downtime on a product they make heavy profits from isn't a big deal. And yes I know McDonald's is a real estate company and the franchise owners are the ones losing money etc. but still.
- boatsie 6y agoTldw: the machine throws obscure error codes (too viscous, failure to heat to proper temps, etc) and can “lock out” the operator, who has to then call an authorized service technician that bills hundreds of dollars for repair. Any attempt to self repair or hire someone else will void the warranty and is disallowed by McDonald’s corporate. The ice cream maker company, Taylor, reports 25% of their revenue is service and maintenance.
- nullsmack 6y agoThank you for saving me half an hour.
- Arnavion 6y agoEven if someone does want to watch it, do yourself a favor and skip to 09:00.
- frombody 6y agoIt's actually much more interesting than this person describes. It turns out this company makes machines for lots of other fast food chains but McDonald's is the only one with this problem, and it seems to be intentional to allow Taylor to milk mcds franchisees. It gets stranger when you realize that the majority of the problems seem to stem from the manufacturer purposely designing their machines to prevent their customers from operating them properly to inflate the need for maintenance .. even going so far as to silence an invention that allowed the machine to display human readable error messages to allow the operator to know things like if the hopper was too full to run the cleaning cycle.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> Any attempt to self repair or hire someone else will void the warranty and is disallowed by McDonald’s corporate. And from McDonalds point of view this makes sense and is ethical. The minute you start letting the franchise people make these repairs, they will inevitably cut corners (and get away with it 99% of the time). However, at McDonalds’ scale that would likely result in dozens of people dying at a minimum and huge brand loss.
- tamaharbor 6y agoYou can’t really call it ice cream (too much edible plastic). On the menu it’s named ‘cone’, ‘shake’, and ‘sundae’.
- joezydeco 6y agoCut it out. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/a-fair-shake/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/a-fair-shake/
- tamaharbor 6y agoYou are not going to change my mind. I was in Missouri in 1979 and they apparently had strict labeling laws. On the McDonalds Menu it said “Cone (contains 17% edible plastic)”.
- ryan93 6y agoWhat do Missouri’s laws in 1979 have to do with McDonald’s?
- kilburn 6y agoMissouri's laws were stricter than the norm -> McDonals had to explicitly put "(contains 17% edible plastic)” in the menu there -> the poster you are replying to saw that -> said poster states that no fact checking website is going to change his mind (given he saw edible plastic as an ingredient in official menus back in the day)
- wk_end 6y agoYour mind might be unchangeable, but if you want to change others’ minds in a world where memory is unreliable and anonymous internet posters even more so, you’ll need something more than a claim of a 40+ year old recollection of the McDonalds menu in Missouri to beat Snopes for credibility.
- ipaddr 6y ago
- simonblack 6y agoWhenever you need to know something, the answer is "Follow the Money."
- leovander 6y agoTIL Kytch[0] is a packaged up Raspiberry Pi "Built with Raspberry Pi inside.". And I was waiting to hear the words right-to-repair in the video [1]. [0]https://kytch.com https://kytch.com [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl34nW9c4wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl34nW9c4wo
- deepstack 6y agoNice. Would being better if it is build with Beagle Board, open source hard ware as well.
- tharne 6y agoThe video is half an hour long, but well worth it. Not mind blowing stuff, just a good story.
- tomerv 6y agoIt's a good 10-minute story, but it was needlessly stretched to 30. It was so long and repetitive that he didn't even have enough stock footage to fill everything and had to repeat each shot 3+ times.
- dang 6y agoSome past related threads: The Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932344 - April 2021 (3 comments) The Real Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26922378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26922378 - April 2021 (1 comment) ArsTechnica has retracted the story about McDonald's Icecream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918415 - April 2021 (8 comments) McDonalds' Secret Ice-cream Menu [censored?] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894406 - April 2021 (2 comments) They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines–and Started a Cold War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874436 - April 2021 (3 comments) I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 - Oct 2020 (420 comments)
- SoiGubz 6y agoThey're not broken, it's just that they don't want to clean and maintain them because it's such a small percentage of sales for the effort.
- maximus2001 6y agoLouis Rossmann's YouTube video "Let's talk about ice cream and why it matters" 10 minutes that nails it https://youtu.be/tl34nW9c4wo https://youtu.be/tl34nW9c4wo
- cowpig 6y agook this is better thanks (a quicker, rantier version that touches on related right-to-repair issues)
- noisy_boy 6y agoSome questions that I felt were not answered: 1. The video shows Taylor docs that have logo of Wendy's and other outlets that use their machines. So why those outlets are not facing the same issues? Do they use the same 602 model? Are the software versions same there i.e. same cryptic error codes? Any other differences compared to McDonalds? 2. One of Wendy's employees says that they wash the machine every night. Are McDonald's not doing this? Or are they prevented from doing so due to some reason like different operating instructions or model or something else? 3. Is the more user friendly software, that they mentioned that McDonald's blocked, being used by any other chain outlets? If yes, what is the experience of using that vs not using that?
- adventured 6y ago> The video shows Taylor docs that have logo of Wendy's and other outlets that use their machines. So why those outlets are not facing the same issues? The video mentions that McDonald's was/is locked into a specific machine from Taylor (which all franchisees had to buy), whereas one imagines that the other chains like In-N-Out Burger are entirely free to purchase a different machine from Taylor that doesn't have so many problems. It seems like McDonald's locked onto one machine for a very long period of time. Other fastfood chains may have moved on from that machine after they noticed problems with it (or otherwise passed on it). It was confusing that the video repeatedly mentions other chains don't have the problem despite supposedly using the same machine (but is it actually the same machine, or is it merely a similar machine). The nefarious aspect may be whether McDonald's corporate is getting a direct kickback in some (plausibly legal) manner from Taylor or its parent company, which bypasses the franchisees and McDonald's corporate calculated out that they come out better off net through the scheme of allowing high rates of downtime on the machines (compared to how much they would get from increased franchise sales of ice cream if the machines had high uptime, via the cut of gross sales that corporate gets from a franchise). It's super odd that McDonald's so tightly locked the franchisees into this specific garbage machine and for so long, even though they obviously knew how bad it was. Piles of reports would have shown up very rapidly at McDonald's HQ and yet they persisted; it suggests something shady going on at corporate that is against the interests of the franchisees. > One of Wendy's employees says that they wash the machine every night. Are McDonald's not doing this? McDonald's is doing that as well and that's where the machines are commonly failing. The employees come in the next morning after running the clean cycle overnight and find that it failed. So they have to go through a four hour process from there forward and it might fail again before that is properly completed, and so the cycle resets.
- Fezzik 6y agoThis seems crazy... I worked at Dairy Queen for 4 (5?) years through high school and beyond, often 6 days a week, and our soft-serve machine never once broke. This was between 97 - 2001+, so 20 years ago soft-serve machines were a solved problem. It seems insane that McDs franchisors would tolerate this sort of nonsense.
- alpb 6y agoThat was my reaction to the video: Aren't there franchisors with many stores in a large metro area that can actually carry a lawsuit or get together with other franchisors to start a class-action lawsuit?
- viztor 6y agoWhy would they? As long as their business is profitable, there is no reason to launch a lawsuit that could cost them their business just for some repair cost.
- alpb 6y agoImagine you have 50 EC2 instances and each of them suffers 15% downtime monthly. Amazon is asking money to reboot them and get them up and running.
- viztor 5y agoThat's different isn't it? Those McDonalds aren't completely shut down, but suffers 'performance' issues where they still have most of their revenue, just not all of what they would regularly have. And your business don't depend on AWS, while most McDonalds restaurants do depend on McDonald to have a business to begin with.
- scyzoryk_xyz 6y agoI too, like, apparently many others here, have worked a soft-serve machine. My understanding is that the McD one is different and tries to remove the need for disassembly and cleaning at the end of the day. I imagine McD making so many different things with so many different machines requiring all sorts of different maintenance this is a useful optimization as opposed to a Dairy Queen.
- nomilk 6y agoWhat a brilliant and intelligent expose. I look forward to hearing the collective response of the 16000 US McDonald Franchisees owners :) Afterthought: since franchisees are locked into the C602's I wonder if they could do anything about this even if they tried. Sigh.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 6y agoI would really like to know how profitable it is to be a McD franchisee today, my guess is not too much. So maybe this is the straw that breaks the camels back, who knows.
- smcl 6y agoIs this "the ice cream machine is always broken" meme has always puzzled me. I don't go often to mcdonalds but with my ex-gf we would stop by if we're on a trip somewhere and she'd usually get an ice cream. I don't think we ever encountered the ice cream machine being out of service. Is it more of an issue in the US or did we just have extremely good luck?
- fireattack 6y agoI always thought the meme/joke is more about McFlurry than your standard ice cream. I personally never encounter ice cream machine broken either.
- smcl 6y agoSorry to clarify, I'm talking about the McFlurry :)
- emsy 6y agoGerman here, I encountered a broken ice machine maybe once but it was actually broken, not out for maintenance or something.
- ChrisRR 6y agoWell statistically, every 7/8 of the times it would be broken. If you go often enough, I would think 1/8 feels like it's all the time.
- smcl 6y agoAh but what I meant was in the ~50 or so visits in the last 5 years this has never happened to me. So I was wondering whether I was just lucky or if it’s an entirely different situation in Europe
- phkamp 6y agoI wonder if more civilized jurisdictions allow these machine to ferment for two full weeks without cleaning ? Does anybody know the situation in any EU countries ?
- 02020202 6y agotl;dr i read about this some time ago and essentially is just boiled down to the operators not letting the machines get into maintenance mode which it often needs to do...i think even daily. i think defrosting takes place as well so obviously this takes way too long to be out of service so they just ignore it and keep using it until sit breaks or it lock itself for maintenance.
- Xelbair 6y agoI never encountered a broken ice cream machine in McD, nor i know anyone who did. I do live in Europe though.
- monkey_monkey 6y agoThis Wired article is highly relevant, and discusses some of the reasons these machines are often broken, and McDonald's fight to stop a startup from helping diagnose/mitigate these problems. https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
- gambiting 6y agoQuestion - I keep hearing about this frequently as a meme on the internet, but I have never ever been to a McDonalds that didn't have a working ice cream machine(here in UK). Is this unique to US for some reason?
- grishka 6y agoSame in Russia. Anyway, US McDonalds is worse than the ones in literally every other country I've ever been to.
- garmaine 6y agoThey’ve improved significantly in the last 10 years or so. Still attract a certain sort of trashy clientele though. The Walmart of fast food.
- grishka 6y agoI visited the US twice, in 2014 and in 2016. So are you saying it was even worse 10 years ago? The most surprising thing I remember about US McDonalds is that a "small" drink was something like 500 ml. This is madness.
- atdrummond 6y agoIt happened all the time at the McDonalds next to Charing Cross. Never really happens here at the Isle of Man McDonalds. The main difference between those two is that the former is open 24 hours a day, while the latter is closed 12a - 5pm, a window which just happens to be perfect for running the Taylor’s daily cleansing cycle. (It can’t be solely a function of increased customer throughput, which is the other variable I considered, as the Manx McDonalds has way more people visit it during the TT than the Charing Cross restaurant ever has. Yet the machine was up the entire TT for at least the last three years the race was held.)
- unixhero 6y agoJust watch the video :)
- CryptoPunk 6y agoThis is a well-produced video. Great to see this level of skill and work ethic present in Youtube video creators. The only thing I disagreed with the journalist with is the story lens, or the moral of the story, that this is about big corporations helping each other. That's the easy anti-capitalist narrative that finds a wide audience, but it's not accurate. McDonalds' actions are against the interests of the capitalists in this case, which are the shareholders. It's in the latter's best interest to partner with an ice cream maker that proves cost-effective for franchisees. So this is really just a case of rent-seeking by an insider; maybe someone in the McDonalds corporate hierarchy with personal relationships or investments linking them with the ice cream maker Taylor, in which case it would be a worker acting against the best interests of McDonalds workers at large, the capitalists (McDonalds shareholders), and consumers. This doesn't provide the story with a sexy moral that fits in with some neat and tidy grand narrative, but it's more likely to be true.
- jeromenerf 6y agoThe most distasteful thing in this video (and there is a lot) are probably the actual ice creams. I would worry more if the failure rate was going down.
- Viker 6y agoPeople might not be aware but this is standard operation for any kind of integrated OEM ( other equipment manifacture) You sell units at break even, hoping you make profit from service and support.
- GiveOver 6y agoThe video repeatedly quoted that 25% revenue stat for Taylor, but that didn't sound so high to me. I'd have preferred to see a comparison with similar companies
- punnerud 6y agoCan this interface be seen as an API, and interaction is fair use and should not void the warranty? An extension of Google vs. Oracle, and LinkedIn vs. HiQ.
- tedk-42 6y agoMust be a US thing because I don't recall ever being denied a soft serve cone in Australia. It's probably happened before, but it's so infrequent that it's not a memorable trend/pattern.
- Tepix 6y agoI haven't been to McDonald's much in the last years but i remember the ice cream machines often being out of service here in Germany, too.
- fedreserved 6y agoTin foil hat. Mcd wants to like taylors pockets and keep them in a dominant position to keep them in a position where they know about all of their competitors ice cream habits.
- dreen 6y ago"I am blown away that a software this cryptic and hard to use can exist in 2020" A common misconception. Most software is bad. There is more software now than any time before. Therefore, the amount of bad software increases with time.
- LatteLazy 6y agoAnyone know what the markup on ice cream is? It can't be much, maybe it's even a loss leader, hence franchises owners don't care. Otherwise this would be a much bigger deal.
- colour 6y agoThe only thing lacking is a link to the technician's manual, but I imagine that might unfortunately provoke some legal trouble.
- thrower123 6y agoSomehow the local ice cream shops that are run by 14-year old girls never manage to break their soft serve machines.
- fighterpilot 6y agoI initially thought the motive was that soft-serve cones were a loss-leader and this was a clever attempt at a bait & switch. However, the kickback hypothesis seems more likely, with corporate & Taylor both benefiting at the expense of franchisees.
- dboreham 6y agoSame reason as the credit card machine is always broken in restaurants in Greece?
- fouc 6y agosummary: McDonalds only allows their franchisees to use one specific machine for ice cream, from one supplier. Most of their other equipment they have more than one choice for suppliers but not for the ice cream machine. The supplier is Taylor, which supplies ice cream machines to many other restaurants which do not suffer from the same problem. The Taylor-made machine for McDonald's is deliberately designed to have a secret menu that only “authorized service personnel” are allowed to use and the main menu only throws obscure & unhelpful error messages and the Owner manual is not helpful at all. This forces franchisee owners to pay thousands of dollars a year these service people to come and “fix” the issue with the machine.
- m00dy 6y agoIs this automated ?
- fouc 6y agoSorry, is what automated? The machine doesn't call for a service technician automatically if that's what you meant.
- gruez 6y ago> The supplier is Taylor, which supplies ice cream machines to many other restaurants which do not suffer from the same problem. AFAIK the difference is that the other restaurants machines don't self sanitize. >The Taylor-made machine for McDonald's is deliberately designed to have a secret menu that only “authorized service personnel” are allowed to use While I can see this being nefarious, I can also understand why they did it: they don't want franchisees to mess with the machine in a way that could compromise the sanitation cycle. For instance, one reason why cleaning fails is that because the target temperature hasn't been reached. If there was a temperature calibration in the secret menu, you could add a +20F degree offset to the thermometer, which would almost guarantee the target is met, but would introduce risk of food poisoning if the temperature is actually too low.
- janee 6y agoInteresting piece, wonder if it's some ancient vendor lock-in agreement...can't imagine that, but guess it's possible. What would be interesting is a comparison of Taylor revenue from C602 service & repair vs McDonald's lost revenue / reputational cost from ice cream sales....I'm guessing franchisee extortion is more lucrative?
- bkirkby 6y agoAs I read the comments (not watched the video yet) where people are discussing the misaligned incentives of both the ice cream machine vendor (Taylor makes money on maintenance) and the McD franchisee (ice cream is a loss leader), I was reminded that a convenience store chain here in Utah has a self-serve shake machine (I forget the brand name) that has always been broken when I thought I'd try it out. I asked my wife, who goes to Maverick every day, if my perception that the shake machine is always broken was accurate and she said "yes. I've never seen it working. I've always wondered why they keep them because they just take up space." Fwiw
- bombcar 6y agoThose complex machines are often bought by corporate and require lots of hand-holding (I've seen the employees at Kwik Trip cleaning theirs multiple times which must mean it takes a decent amount of time to do, or I'd rarely see it). If the sales are mediocre it becomes a vending machine that requires work and the local management won't bother as it's not critical for the business - just like the ice cream machine isn't critical for McDonalds but I guarantee if they had the same problem with the soda machine they'd fix it somehow.
- divs1210 6y agoWeird that this is never the case in India - the ice cream machines always seem to be working.
- captn3m0 6y agoI doubt if they are using the same manufacturer or a self-sanitizing machine. With low labor costs in India, there isn't much reason to pick a self-sanitizing machine.
- tsudonym 6y agoPlease switch to Nissei ice cream machines. Anyone who's been a tourist to Japan to attest to how good fast food soft serve is over there. This is why. https://www.nissei.nl/en/products/soft-serve-machines https://www.nissei.nl/en/products/soft-serve-machines
- csours 6y agoI am not a fish. https://youtu.be/nZiDS-4Xd2k?t=797 https://youtu.be/nZiDS-4Xd2k?t=797 and https://youtu.be/nZiDS-4Xd2k?t=925 https://youtu.be/nZiDS-4Xd2k?t=925 User Experience isn't just selling ads or 'driving engagement'
- shrubble 6y agoSo can you use it as a 'filter' for how well run a McDonald's is, in that better run places might have working machines?