29 ms·

Tldw: 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 author

Tldw: 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 5y ago
Thank you for saving me half an hour.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  Even if someone does want to watch it, do yourself a favor and skip to 09:00.
- frombody 5y ago
  It'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 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- valuearb 5y ago
  No one is dying from repairing a milk shake machine. McDonalds is concerned about poorly mixed shakes hurting their brand, which they regard as nearly as bad.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
    No one is dying from actually repairing a machine. However, the soft-serve mix is very conducive to bacterial growth. People messing with the sterilization or the self-checks for sterilization could easily result in bacterial food borne illness which can be deadly.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      >People messing with the sterilization or the self-checks for sterilization could easily result in bacterial food borne illness which can be deadly. Yes, it's deadly, this is exactly the reason why we should make sure that McDonalds staff can properly operate their icecream machines by making the machine as easy to use as possible. If you have untrained staff that keep running the machine out of specs because the machine is cryptic and user hostile to them then operator errors could slip past the machine self checks because machines aren't perfectly reliable. By instructing McDonalds franchises how to properly operate their machines and by updating the UI of the machines to properly warn of dangerous operating conditions the franchises can achieve greater safety for McDonalds customers. As it is right now, McDonalds is actively endangering its customers with these machines.
      - randompwd 5y ago
        > As it is right now, McDonalds is actively endangering its customers with these machines. I would say it is quite clearly the opposite. Anything which could introduce safety risks to a customer necessitates a visit from a trained service technician to investigate.
nickik 5y ago
Why don't they have a service contract so the cost of so many errors burns this 'Taylor' company?
- ianai 5y ago
  There’s no fixing operator error.
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    This is the opposite of operator error. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. If you have thousands of machines out there with reputations for always being broken, the problem is your machines.
  - addicted 5y ago
    It’s not operator error. As the video repeatedly points out, the same machines, by the same vendor, installed in other fast food restaurants (Wendy’s, etc), do not face similar breakdowns. It’s clearly a McDonald’s Corporate sanctioned plan.
    - curryst 5y ago
      McDonald's uses unique machines that have two hoppers so they can serve both milkshakes and ice cream. More parts, more complexity. They also use a pump instead of gravity, so they can serve customers more quickly. That pump is probably what necessitates all these complicated moving parts, and makes it so much more prone to failure.
    - parineum 5y ago
      It seems clear to me that McDonald's is bad at training their workers to use the machine that other fast food restaurants don't have trouble with.
    - martyvis 5y ago
      The video actually said that the Taylor machines at McDonald's were exclusive to them - the other franchises use a different model. (I'd wager the others are less automagic)
cush 5y ago
Imagine spending months 30 minutes milking that explanation?
bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago
It seems that even a megacorp like McDonald needs the right to repair... On second thought, not exactly the megacorp, but the franchise owners.
- syrrim 5y ago
  McDonald's the corp isn't hurt by this, individual franchise owners bear the cost. In particular, mcdonald's the corp mandates the particular icecream machine that is used, rather than allowing the franchise owner to pick from several machines. The video argues that this is done because mcdonald's is interested in benefiting the company that makes and services the ice cream machines.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I’ve seen franchisors collect kick backs from vendors for being an “approved vendor” the franchisee has to use.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Given the meme is already circulating among the youth with McDonalds ice cream being the bottom of the joke, and given it reached the top of HN many times already, I say this hurts McDonalds image a lot. When people think about “broken like a McDonalds ice cream machine”, I think McD can legitimately ask Taylor for damages at corporate level.
  - jfoster 5y ago
    On the face of it, McDonald's corp should also be harmed by this. It makes their customers less successful through higher costs & lower sales, and it tarnishes their brand when a customer of their customers is unable to purchase an ice cream. The two questions in my mind after watching: 1. What makes McDonald's corp okay with it? 2. What is the difference between the arrangement with McDonald's and the other franchises/chains? (Wendy's, In'n'Out, etc.)
  - bluGill 5y ago
    McDonald's Corp owns are significant number of restaurants directly. Most are franchises, but not all. Thus the company is directly hurt. This feels more like someone not in the know of the real problems finding a false complaint that seems worse than it is.
canada_dry 5y ago
Still worth watching though. The last part (@ 23 mins) looks at how an enterprising 3rd party developer decided to help franchise owners solve the problem and got shut down by head-office.
- loonster 5y ago
  Didn't make it that far. Time is too precious to waste on someone that is purposely wasting it.
  - canada_dry 5y ago
    > Time is too precious to waste Sure. Which is why my default youtube playback speed is 1.5X.
    - fastball 5y ago
      Mine has just kept getting faster and faster, thanks to this Chrome extension[1]. Right now I average 2.5x speed for most videos, and 2.2x for people that talk fast. [1] https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
      - bmn__ 5y ago
        Alternatives: Firefox, YT only: https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube The improved playback speed ranges from 25% to 400% (also 800% but without audio) in adjustable increments. For offline videos, VLC also is capable of changing playback speed.
        matsemann 5y ago
        Are there video players or plugins having "dynamic" speedup? Like, playing everything faster by a fixed amount isn't optimal. Maybe the words could be said 3x faster, the breaks between words however be kept at 1.5x faster as to not make it one big mush, and space between sentences some third amount. Edit: I see some podcasts app have something similar (albeit opposite). It shortens dead space between two people talking and try to not affect the speed of their speech.
wronglebowski 5y ago
As someone who worked in stores for years, this isn’t entirely accurate. The machine isn’t just being an asshole to drive up service calls. The machines are filled with a dairy product which makes the “ice cream”. This is boiled nightly to keep the mixture free of bacteria. If the nightly heat cycle fails to complete for one of a dozen reasons the machine locks out. Those unaware of the process usually end up calling for service even if it’s a operations error(not enough product to boil successfully) Every two weeks the machine must be torn down and cleaned. It’s slightly complex but all well documented. Once the 14 day marker has been passed the machine is inoperable. It must be cleaned for food safety reasons. If your “cleaner” is out or you just have poor operations you’ll end up placing service calls out of confusion. If the heat phase fails or the 14 day timer has expired the machine "locks out" and becomes inoperable. This is where the vast majority of service calls come from. I never had an issue with a machine that was less than 20 years old. Taylor makes good equipments you just need the most basic level of operations proficiency.
- miked85 5y ago
  Do you have any insight into why the machines are broken so often then?
  - wronglebowski 5y ago
    They aren't "broken". It's operations failures. The basic fact of 1. Keeping the machine full of the right amount of product to complete it's nightly heat cycle 2. Have someone trained to fully clean the machine every 14 days Is a burden too great for many franchisees to bear. The turnover is too high and investment in people too low to keep them operational. Nothing about them is "broken"
    - sverhagen 5y ago
      Poor UI is also a bug. And why do other fast food chains not have this problem then? I appreciate that McDonalds tries to safe money on training of new staff, but I just can't imagine that they do so much of a worse job at it than the competition. Did you see the video?
ogurechny 5y ago
Add to this a lot of overacting, and video clips repeating 20 times, and you'll have a half an hour program mostly about nothing. One can easily see that YouTube (as a platform) became just a shitty television when the host unironically flips through stacks of papers exactly the same way it was done in the classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  Yeah, this was at most a 10-minute video stretched with typical YouTuber bullshit to be nearly half an hour long. So much repetition. Need those "engagement" numbers to be high!
dandare 5y ago
Thank you. That video was pain to watch, I hate this low-information-density bs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Grustaf 5y ago
The real question is why McDonalds would go along with this. Presumably they have the leverage, why would they be incentivised to let even a cent of franchisee money going to another company if they can help it? They want their franchisees to have as much money as possible, that's what benefits them.
- mrob 5y ago
  Because losing 14% of ice cream sales beats getting sued for poisoning people and losing their reputation for good food safety. If you can't trust McDonalds to be a safe choice, why would you go there at all?
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Did you watch the film? The idea is that McDonalds are knowingly letting another company overcharge their franchisees, it's not about safety. Supposedly other fast food chains use the same machines without these problems.
    - curryst 5y ago
      Someone above posted a Wired article you should check out. Basically, McDonald's uses the same machine to make both ice cream cones and milkshakes, meaning it has 2 hoppers. In addition, it uses a pump instead of gravity, which allows them to serve more ice cream cones per minute but makes it vastly more complicated. I can see how McDonald's would make a strategic choice to lower their time to serve a customer in exchange for a machine that is broken part of the time. They actually track and chastise workers based on taking more than some absurdly short amount of time to serve a customer. It seems like a corporate strategy for them, and this is in line with that.
    - blagie 5y ago
      I agree about the first part, but I'm not sure about the argument about other franchises. The employees at most McD's are in a different class than most other franchises. This isn't universal, of course, but for the most part, McD's hires from the very bottom end. This isn't bad -- I see people with Down's, strong autism, and similar working at McDs, happily, and those folks need jobs. To do that, you want equipment which is a bit more fail-safe. Otherwise, we'd have safety issues at McD's every week, and they're exceptionally uncommon. That's because of a robust process. Ice cream machines with more fail-safes at McD's make sense to me. The really incriminating part of the video comes at the very end, where they locked out Kisch.
jokoon 5y ago
Wooow, I would never have thought the issue would be software. So ironic. As a developer I just feel bad, it's like I'm working for the industry that is part of the problem. Crazy to imagine that another simple non-software issue might have not been such a problem and would have been easily fixed. I hope that one day, engineers will understand that the less electronics/software there is in a machine, the better it is. This trend should begin any time now.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Wooow, I would never have thought the issue would be software. It's not software, it's business processes which have ordered the software developers into a particular design.
  - ddevault 5y ago
    It's both. The software doesn't get written unless the programmers do it. You are accountable to the code you write.
1123581321 5y ago
Independent Taylor distributors come out and get the service revenue, not Taylor corporate. Taylor corporate makes money from the parts that the distributors use, but new parts aren't required to work with the software. Taylor isn't internally structured to incentivize driving distributor revenue. Taylor's McDonald's-only machines are different due to special requirements that come from corporate which ostensibly come from franchise meetings. They have zero ability to push a special machine on McDonald's without McDonald's being happy with the details of it. Taylor has to staff full-time people just to keep McDonald's happy; they are demanding. That's not to say these heat-treatment machines were well engineered or field-tested. (I've a lot of experience with Taylor and Taylor distributors through a vendor that sells to both.)
- slantyyz 5y ago
  In the Wired article, the Kytch founder alleges that Taylor takes a cut of the distributor's profit from the repairs: The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. [1] 1: https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    The article is wrong about that as far as charging hourly for service. The profit share comes from OEM parts and from selling the original machine wholesale to the distributor. There is some shared sales & marketing expense between corporate and the distributors’ group as well, including marketing the benefits of the service network.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> the machine throws obscure error codes (too viscous, failure to heat to proper temps, etc) Clearly they just need to adopt the modern computing style of error codes and just display a frowny face emoticon.
Black101 5y ago
You forgot an important part, the one about Kytch... and it's about 1/4th of the video.
frankfrankfrank 5y ago
You clearly did not even watch the first 5 minutes of the video lol All other fast food companies who use the same machines don't have that problem.

nullsmack 5y ago

Thank you for saving me half an hour.

Arnavion 5y ago
Even if someone does want to watch it, do yourself a favor and skip to 09:00.
frombody 5y ago
It'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 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
valuearb 5y ago
No one is dying from repairing a milk shake machine. McDonalds is concerned about poorly mixed shakes hurting their brand, which they regard as nearly as bad.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  No one is dying from actually repairing a machine. However, the soft-serve mix is very conducive to bacterial growth. People messing with the sterilization or the self-checks for sterilization could easily result in bacterial food borne illness which can be deadly.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >People messing with the sterilization or the self-checks for sterilization could easily result in bacterial food borne illness which can be deadly. Yes, it's deadly, this is exactly the reason why we should make sure that McDonalds staff can properly operate their icecream machines by making the machine as easy to use as possible. If you have untrained staff that keep running the machine out of specs because the machine is cryptic and user hostile to them then operator errors could slip past the machine self checks because machines aren't perfectly reliable. By instructing McDonalds franchises how to properly operate their machines and by updating the UI of the machines to properly warn of dangerous operating conditions the franchises can achieve greater safety for McDonalds customers. As it is right now, McDonalds is actively endangering its customers with these machines.
    - randompwd 5y ago
      > As it is right now, McDonalds is actively endangering its customers with these machines. I would say it is quite clearly the opposite. Anything which could introduce safety risks to a customer necessitates a visit from a trained service technician to investigate.

nickik 5y ago

Why don't they have a service contract so the cost of so many errors burns this 'Taylor' company?

ianai 5y ago
There’s no fixing operator error.
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  This is the opposite of operator error. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. If you have thousands of machines out there with reputations for always being broken, the problem is your machines.
- addicted 5y ago
  It’s not operator error. As the video repeatedly points out, the same machines, by the same vendor, installed in other fast food restaurants (Wendy’s, etc), do not face similar breakdowns. It’s clearly a McDonald’s Corporate sanctioned plan.
  - curryst 5y ago
    McDonald's uses unique machines that have two hoppers so they can serve both milkshakes and ice cream. More parts, more complexity. They also use a pump instead of gravity, so they can serve customers more quickly. That pump is probably what necessitates all these complicated moving parts, and makes it so much more prone to failure.
  - parineum 5y ago
    It seems clear to me that McDonald's is bad at training their workers to use the machine that other fast food restaurants don't have trouble with.
  - martyvis 5y ago
    The video actually said that the Taylor machines at McDonald's were exclusive to them - the other franchises use a different model. (I'd wager the others are less automagic)

cush 5y ago

Imagine spending months 30 minutes milking that explanation?

bcaa7f3a8bbc 5y ago

It seems that even a megacorp like McDonald needs the right to repair... On second thought, not exactly the megacorp, but the franchise owners.

syrrim 5y ago
McDonald's the corp isn't hurt by this, individual franchise owners bear the cost. In particular, mcdonald's the corp mandates the particular icecream machine that is used, rather than allowing the franchise owner to pick from several machines. The video argues that this is done because mcdonald's is interested in benefiting the company that makes and services the ice cream machines.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I’ve seen franchisors collect kick backs from vendors for being an “approved vendor” the franchisee has to use.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Given the meme is already circulating among the youth with McDonalds ice cream being the bottom of the joke, and given it reached the top of HN many times already, I say this hurts McDonalds image a lot. When people think about “broken like a McDonalds ice cream machine”, I think McD can legitimately ask Taylor for damages at corporate level.
- jfoster 5y ago
  On the face of it, McDonald's corp should also be harmed by this. It makes their customers less successful through higher costs & lower sales, and it tarnishes their brand when a customer of their customers is unable to purchase an ice cream. The two questions in my mind after watching: 1. What makes McDonald's corp okay with it? 2. What is the difference between the arrangement with McDonald's and the other franchises/chains? (Wendy's, In'n'Out, etc.)
- bluGill 5y ago
  McDonald's Corp owns are significant number of restaurants directly. Most are franchises, but not all. Thus the company is directly hurt. This feels more like someone not in the know of the real problems finding a false complaint that seems worse than it is.

canada_dry 5y ago

Still worth watching though. The last part (@ 23 mins) looks at how an enterprising 3rd party developer decided to help franchise owners solve the problem and got shut down by head-office.

loonster 5y ago
Didn't make it that far. Time is too precious to waste on someone that is purposely wasting it.
- canada_dry 5y ago
  > Time is too precious to waste Sure. Which is why my default youtube playback speed is 1.5X.
  - fastball 5y ago
    Mine has just kept getting faster and faster, thanks to this Chrome extension[1]. Right now I average 2.5x speed for most videos, and 2.2x for people that talk fast. [1] https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
    - bmn__ 5y ago
      Alternatives: Firefox, YT only: https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube The improved playback speed ranges from 25% to 400% (also 800% but without audio) in adjustable increments. For offline videos, VLC also is capable of changing playback speed.
      - matsemann 5y ago
        Are there video players or plugins having "dynamic" speedup? Like, playing everything faster by a fixed amount isn't optimal. Maybe the words could be said 3x faster, the breaks between words however be kept at 1.5x faster as to not make it one big mush, and space between sentences some third amount. Edit: I see some podcasts app have something similar (albeit opposite). It shortens dead space between two people talking and try to not affect the speed of their speech.

wronglebowski 5y ago

As someone who worked in stores for years, this isn’t entirely accurate. The machine isn’t just being an asshole to drive up service calls. The machines are filled with a dairy product which makes the “ice cream”. This is boiled nightly to keep the mixture free of bacteria. If the nightly heat cycle fails to complete for one of a dozen reasons the machine locks out. Those unaware of the process usually end up calling for service even if it’s a operations error(not enough product to boil successfully) Every two weeks the machine must be torn down and cleaned. It’s slightly complex but all well documented. Once the 14 day marker has been passed the machine is inoperable. It must be cleaned for food safety reasons. If your “cleaner” is out or you just have poor operations you’ll end up placing service calls out of confusion. If the heat phase fails or the 14 day timer has expired the machine "locks out" and becomes inoperable. This is where the vast majority of service calls come from. I never had an issue with a machine that was less than 20 years old. Taylor makes good equipments you just need the most basic level of operations proficiency.

miked85 5y ago
Do you have any insight into why the machines are broken so often then?
- wronglebowski 5y ago
  They aren't "broken". It's operations failures. The basic fact of 1. Keeping the machine full of the right amount of product to complete it's nightly heat cycle 2. Have someone trained to fully clean the machine every 14 days Is a burden too great for many franchisees to bear. The turnover is too high and investment in people too low to keep them operational. Nothing about them is "broken"
  - sverhagen 5y ago
    Poor UI is also a bug. And why do other fast food chains not have this problem then? I appreciate that McDonalds tries to safe money on training of new staff, but I just can't imagine that they do so much of a worse job at it than the competition. Did you see the video?

ogurechny 5y ago

Add to this a lot of overacting, and video clips repeating 20 times, and you'll have a half an hour program mostly about nothing. One can easily see that YouTube (as a platform) became just a shitty television when the host unironically flips through stacks of papers exactly the same way it was done in the classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0

LordAtlas 5y ago
Yeah, this was at most a 10-minute video stretched with typical YouTuber bullshit to be nearly half an hour long. So much repetition. Need those "engagement" numbers to be high!

dandare 5y ago

Thank you. That video was pain to watch, I hate this low-information-density bs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Grustaf 5y ago

The real question is why McDonalds would go along with this. Presumably they have the leverage, why would they be incentivised to let even a cent of franchisee money going to another company if they can help it? They want their franchisees to have as much money as possible, that's what benefits them.

mrob 5y ago
Because losing 14% of ice cream sales beats getting sued for poisoning people and losing their reputation for good food safety. If you can't trust McDonalds to be a safe choice, why would you go there at all?
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Did you watch the film? The idea is that McDonalds are knowingly letting another company overcharge their franchisees, it's not about safety. Supposedly other fast food chains use the same machines without these problems.
  - curryst 5y ago
    Someone above posted a Wired article you should check out. Basically, McDonald's uses the same machine to make both ice cream cones and milkshakes, meaning it has 2 hoppers. In addition, it uses a pump instead of gravity, which allows them to serve more ice cream cones per minute but makes it vastly more complicated. I can see how McDonald's would make a strategic choice to lower their time to serve a customer in exchange for a machine that is broken part of the time. They actually track and chastise workers based on taking more than some absurdly short amount of time to serve a customer. It seems like a corporate strategy for them, and this is in line with that.
  - blagie 5y ago
    I agree about the first part, but I'm not sure about the argument about other franchises. The employees at most McD's are in a different class than most other franchises. This isn't universal, of course, but for the most part, McD's hires from the very bottom end. This isn't bad -- I see people with Down's, strong autism, and similar working at McDs, happily, and those folks need jobs. To do that, you want equipment which is a bit more fail-safe. Otherwise, we'd have safety issues at McD's every week, and they're exceptionally uncommon. That's because of a robust process. Ice cream machines with more fail-safes at McD's make sense to me. The really incriminating part of the video comes at the very end, where they locked out Kisch.

jokoon 5y ago

Wooow, I would never have thought the issue would be software. So ironic. As a developer I just feel bad, it's like I'm working for the industry that is part of the problem. Crazy to imagine that another simple non-software issue might have not been such a problem and would have been easily fixed. I hope that one day, engineers will understand that the less electronics/software there is in a machine, the better it is. This trend should begin any time now.

throw0101a 5y ago
> Wooow, I would never have thought the issue would be software. It's not software, it's business processes which have ordered the software developers into a particular design.
- ddevault 5y ago
  It's both. The software doesn't get written unless the programmers do it. You are accountable to the code you write.

1123581321 5y ago

Independent Taylor distributors come out and get the service revenue, not Taylor corporate. Taylor corporate makes money from the parts that the distributors use, but new parts aren't required to work with the software. Taylor isn't internally structured to incentivize driving distributor revenue. Taylor's McDonald's-only machines are different due to special requirements that come from corporate which ostensibly come from franchise meetings. They have zero ability to push a special machine on McDonald's without McDonald's being happy with the details of it. Taylor has to staff full-time people just to keep McDonald's happy; they are demanding. That's not to say these heat-treatment machines were well engineered or field-tested. (I've a lot of experience with Taylor and Taylor distributors through a vendor that sells to both.)

slantyyz 5y ago
In the Wired article, the Kytch founder alleges that Taylor takes a cut of the distributor's profit from the repairs: The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. [1] 1: https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
- 1123581321 5y ago
  The article is wrong about that as far as charging hourly for service. The profit share comes from OEM parts and from selling the original machine wholesale to the distributor. There is some shared sales & marketing expense between corporate and the distributors’ group as well, including marketing the benefits of the service network.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> the machine throws obscure error codes (too viscous, failure to heat to proper temps, etc) Clearly they just need to adopt the modern computing style of error codes and just display a frowny face emoticon.

Black101 5y ago

You forgot an important part, the one about Kytch... and it's about 1/4th of the video.

frankfrankfrank 5y ago

You clearly did not even watch the first 5 minutes of the video lol All other fast food companies who use the same machines don't have that problem.