It's a minor but important part of the profitability picture. While this is much less true today, one of the core concepts was always that McDonald's could exec

It's a minor but important part of the profitability picture. While this is much less true today, one of the core concepts was always that McDonald's could execute things at scale no one else could. Now there's a ton of competition and specialty shops, but in the past this wasn't always the case. A small town might only have one other location where you can get "fresh" ice cream. If you can execute on this machine properly and you have the market to support it they can be huge profit makers.