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Why the McFlurry machine company just got hit with a restraining order
- bfors 5y agoThe McDonalds ice cream machine story is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
- runlevel1 5y agoThe Kytch device is discussed and demoed at 22:37 -- the whole video is very interesting, though!
- generj 5y agoThis seems rather an odd argument to me. Kythc gets to reverse engineer Taylor machines but Taylor cannot reverse engineer Kytch? I’m all on the side of right to repair but surely reverse engineering ought to be permissible for all sides?
- postalrat 5y agoBoth sides are lying about the intentions.
- stopnamingnuts 5y ago+1 for beautifully summing up in seven words the key takeaway of the vast majority of public discourse.
- InvaderFizz 5y agoI'm in agreement, but what is painfully unsaid throughout the article are the why. It seems pretty apparent to me that Taylor is getting their hands on the Kytch device for the purpose of developing countermeasures to Kytch devices functioning at all.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoScummy as it may be, they have that right.
- kuraudo 5y agoFor now; new laws should be created to take away that right.
- enragedcacti 5y agoProbably not: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/07/ftc-ramp-law-enforcement-against-illegal-repair-restrictions https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/07/ftc-r...
- dhimes 5y agoIt will be interesting to see if Taylor counter-sues, claiming "trade secrets."
- Ashanmaril 5y agoI thought I read from a McDonald's employee at some point that most of the time you go at night and they say the ice cream machine isn't working, it's actually some automatic cleaning process that the machine performs on itself every night.
- ehutch79 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 Supposedly the whole operation of the machines is obtuse and error prone on purpose.
- blensor 5y agoI saw a documentary about that once. It's not actually the regular cleaning process but the machine has very finnicky way of determining if the cleaning process worked (it has to do with the temperatures that are reached during the cleaning). And if one step during that process does "fail" the whole cleaning process has to be restarted which the staff will do in the morning when they come back (not sure how that works with 24h restaurants). Blocking the machine from use for hours
- keneda7 5y agoIts also worth noting the cleaning process for McDonald seems to be different than other companies that use the similar machines. The documentary I watched (youtube) pretty much accuses them of purposely making the McDonalds machines fail cleaning by setting unrealistic requirements.
- underseacables 5y agoThis is classic market protectionism. Lock the consumer into a product ecosystem, charge them every time something goes wrong, and make it very hard to fix things on your own. What if there was a law that banned exclusive repair contract? For example it says here that Taylor requires that you call out a service technician. What is the company could not make that demand? What if by law you could call any technician you wanted to to come and work on your machine (accepting liability for damage of course). Would that help?
- colechristensen 5y agoRemember here the discussion is about mcdonalds. They absolutely do not need legal protection from a supplier and are freely able to dictate terms. If their ice cream machines don’t work reliably enough it is entirely on them for not making it a priority. What seems like is going on is that unskilled employees are interacting with a machine which isn’t particularly robust which fails on the side of food safety and management/corporate who do not see the situation as particularly important.
- underseacables 5y agoSo what’s in it for McDonalds? I didn’t think of your point because I wedded Taylor to McDonalds. If I were the CEO of McDonalds I would be rather angry at rolling McFlurry Blackouts. Curious why they haven’t brought the process in house, and simplified it.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe reasonable inference is that corporate is getting kickbacks from Taylor for all the service calls.
- colechristensen 5y agoThey look at how much it is actually happening and the impact to revenue, image, etc. and just don't care to fix the problem, or have identified that fixing the problem isn't worth the cost to fix the problem and decided how things are is fine by them. Machines already have downtime for maintenance + extra downtime for brokenness, reducing the brokenness rate perhaps just doesn't make sense for them or they have other priorities. Nothing is free and everything goes down from time to time. Perhaps the downtime coincides with very low sales so they just don't care.
- dna_polymerase 5y agoKytch was also mentioned in this excellent mini-documentary about the whole topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 Worth watching, IMHO.
- boboche 5y agoIf companies don’t like right to repair, how about no rights to fail instead? SLA exists for that reason and when you are working with that goal in mind, you (usually) get better output at higher cost, yes, but surely less than several breakdowns. So, outside planned maintenance, the 2$ question is why is McDonald accepting this in the first place? Anyone has more knowledge? There are so many McDo POS maybe the number is high but the ratio on par with other similar equipment?
- RicoElectrico 5y agoYeah, if I were McD, I'd want to throw this failure of a company under the bus - the issue no longer merely a meme, it's gotten attention of the press. Mcdonald's in other countries have no problems with ice cream outages of this scale.
- jjkaczor 5y agoTaylor provides alot of other equipment within McD's - and IIRC from reading the Wired article and discussion a few months back, it (or comments) alluded that McD's corporate specifies which equipment that franchisees are allowed to use - and therefore there could be some sort of financial aggrangement between McD corp and Taylor...
- joezydeco 5y agoThat's correct. McD approves vendors to supply equipment to the franchisees. But they always approve at least two vendors per device for supply chain reliability and price competition. Financial agreements sometimes come into play when McD needs a new system developed (say, a new type of smoothie maker or a new kind of grill) and the vendors need R&D funding to get a machine going.
- throwawayboise 5y agoMcDonalds corporate absolutely must be complicit in this. They have the purchasing power to dictate specifictions to Taylor for any piece of equipment. Many other restaurants have soft-serv ice cream and don't have these issues with the machines. And many of them use Taylor machines, they just have to be cleaned manually which adds labor costs to the restaurant. When I worked at McDonalds, one crew member on the closing shift had the responsibility of cleaning the soft-serv and milkshake machines. Every part of the machine that contacted the dairy product was disassembled, washed, and sanitized. It took the better part of an hour. This was done every day. The next morning it was put back together by the opening shift. That was another labor cost. McDonalds is trying to save between 1.5 and 2 hours a day of labor with the machines that do the automatic heating/sterilization. That's the only reason any of this is happening.
- LegitGandalf 5y agoI'm just over here thinking of the health benefits provided by broken McFlurry machines!
- sithlord 5y agoI am for sure pro-Kytch in this, but seems a little backwards that Kytch has obviously acquired Taylor machines to build there devices, but now Taylor has to turnover all there Kytch devices.
- whatshisface 5y agoI think it's alleged that Taylor acquired Kytch's devices them under the table whereas Kytch acquired them outright and in a way Taylor isn't disputing.
- phkahler 5y agoTaylor probably didnt sign an NDA with Kytch, and neither did thousands of McDonalds employees (probably).
- fragmede 5y agoMcDonald's employees probably agree to a large number of clauses in their employment contract with the restaurant and so are likely covered by some sort of NDA. Just like a random employee at a SaaS company doesn't have an NDA with Amazon personally, but AWS are covered under their NDA with the company, and the employees' contract with the company.
- phkahler 5y agoDoes anyone see the blatant hypocrisy in this case? "We reverse engineered your product and made something to help maintain it. You better not so much as look at our product. We have a right to repair, but you don't."
- brokentone 5y agoI agree that it does feel a bit paradoxical, but reversing a product for repair purposes verses reversing it for duplication are treated fundamentally differently by reasonable people. One is "right to repair" the other is "counterfeiting" or violating patents. To your statement, "We have a right to repair, but you don't" -- this clearly is not what is intended by Taylor, to repair these Kytch diagnostic tools. If that were the case, I think that would carry.
- s_dev 5y ago>reversing a product for repair purposes verses reversing it for duplication What about reverse engineering for curiosity or even posterity repair? Also how is intent of reverse engineering determined?
- whatshisface 5y agoIt's determined by what you do next - start making a competing product, or start making a complementary product.
- fragmede 5y agoOr in this case, sue the company producing the device and (further) threaten your franchisees with (both litigious and economic) harm if they use the product.
- phkahler 5y agoIANAL but I believe reverse engineering for duplication is legal. You can't violate a patent, but trade secrets are called "secrets" because once they are out they are out. You protect secrets with NDAs so they don't get out. You're supposed to protect things that the public will see with patents if you want to protect them.
- fallingfrog 5y agoI don’t know why Taylor didn’t just tell the truth, which is, we want to figure out how the Kitsch works so we can update the firmware on the flurry machines so the kitsch will be useless.
- fallingfrog 5y agoMcDonald’s deserves to go bankrupt, and will probably do so at some point if they run their business this way.
- Someone1234 5y ago> McDonald’s deserves to go bankrupt, and will probably do so at some point if they run their business this way. McDonald's isn't directly involved in this legal action. McDonald's is the client/money two third party service providers are fighting over (Taylor Vs. Kytch). I'd point you to the linked article for a better understanding of what is going on.
- Someone1234 5y agoLet's talk about these quotes from the article/Taylor COO: > According to the court document, Taylor's COO admits that it sought to obtain a Kytch device "in order to evaluate and assess its potential technology-related impacts upon our Soft Serve Machine—such as whether the radio frequency of the Kytch device would interfere with our software signal, or whether the Kytch device would drain the power source of our software and/or cause it malfunction," but denied that Taylor mined it for trade secrets or even "need such information." Drain the power source of their software..?
- vgeek 5y agoThese ice cream machines are very delicate and require 1.21 gigawatts of power to operate correctly.
- rasz 5y agosap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAHJCPoWCC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAHJCPoWCC8
- snypher 5y agoIf your software is running on some micro, then another device being powered from the same supply may cause low-power problems on the micro. It seems fair to want to assess anything being connected to your hardware to see if it would cause a problem with your software.
- comeonseriously 5y agoWhat I don't understand is, this (broken McFlurry machines) hurts McDonald's reputation. Why one Earth do they put up with this? They are large enough they should not have to.
- abfan1127 5y agoI've seen this once before. A company was using a travel agency to book corporate travel. Only, the "special pricing" was 2x that of Expedia. With only some basic digging, one of the Exec VPs was married to the owner of the travel agency. I wonder who in the McDonalds corporate tree is related to Taylor or the parent company.
- raverbashing 5y ago> I wonder who in the McDonalds corporate tree is related to Taylor or the parent company. This would be a very nice question to be raised at a McD board meeting
- ncmncm 5y agoYou imagine that people working for McDonalds act in the interest of McDonalds as a company. But instead, within a big corporation there are fiefdoms and factions. People at McD mostly act within those. Higher management plays favorites. McD's "reputation" generates no revenue, so has no voice unless the CEO worries about it. But the CEO is probably focused on revenue targets and personal bonuses instead. In this case, somebody influential at corporate seems to feel they are not getting enough tax revenue from franchisees, and that the kickbacks they get from Taylor are worth the damage to McD's reputation.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe real problem is that McDonalds corporate forces franchisees to buy a crappy version of the machine that generates huge income for Taylor, and (most likely) for McD corporate via kickbacks, from weekly service calls. Taylor makes almost-identical machines for other joints that work fine, but franchisees are contractually obligated to buy the crappy one, and to have it "fixed" all the damn time by Taylor techs. It is a racket. I don't know what would happen if a franchisee bought one of each and put the crappy one in a closet. Probably corporate would notice the lack of kickback revenue and force the issue somehow. Really, attorneys general should be investigating McD corporate for anti-competitive behavior, and getting restraining orders against corporate taking the kickbacks. (Maybe even prosecute it?) Somehow, enforcement of anti-trust law has been neutered so that it takes extraordinary measures to get even the most basic sort of action against abuse. Racketeering law might be more effective. Without the kickbacks, corporate will have no incentive to force franchisees to spend thousands of dollars every week on unnecessary "service" work. But corporate should be forced to pay all the franchisees' accumulated service costs that exceed the norm for similar machines. With interest. Of course, without the machines failing all the time, Kytch won't have a market. So, they actually want McD to keep getting the kickbacks for repairs on the crappy machines, and continue forcing franchisees to depend on them, and just leave Kytch to collect their own piece of the action. None of Taylor's, Kytch's, or corporates' hands are especially clean, but Kytch is making things uncomfortable for entrenched racketeers, so we like to cheer them on.
- gizmo686 5y agoI'm not opposed to regulating the relationship between franchiser and franchisee, but anti trust does not strike me as a good fit. The market here seems to be something like 'franchise rights to a fast service food brand'. McDonalds is far from the only company offering such a thing.
- qeternity 5y agoA Franchisor’s job is to mandate things exactly like this. A McFlurry tastes the same everywhere because it’s the same ingredients prepared the same way on the same machine. There may be some issue, and there may even be fraud as you seem confident of, but this isn’t an anti-trust issue. The fast food biz is incredibly competitive, and franchisees have a number of other options.
- phendrenad2 5y agoHow is this a win for right to repair? It sounds like the company making the original equipment has been barred from obtaining the modification device, so they can't even verify that it's safe. Is this what we want? If I make a medical x-ray machine, and someone makes a device that modifies it, is barring me from obtaining said device to check it's safety a win for right to repair? It just sounds like the company making the modification is latching on to the right to repair movement to win their case.
- rasz 5y agoTaylor's COO: "in order to evaluate and assess its potential technology-related impacts upon our Soft Serve Machine— such as whether the radio frequency of the Kytch device would interfere with our software signal or whether the Kytch device would drain the power source of our software C level suits, gotta love em
- effingwewt 5y agoI have to wonder just how big the kickbacks must be to not only be worth the shitstorm for years now about the ice-cream machines never working, but the actual lost sales of the ice-cream itself. So not only is Taylor getting paid, but the machines stay broke so no ice-cream or mcflurries are ever sold, I legit forgot about mcflurries and I used to love them. Someone, surely, is getting rich enough off this non-sensical deal to be noticed?