7 ms·

You're not following the plot here. Most McDonalds are franchises. The franchisee must pay for McDonalds authorized repair resources to repair machines they'r

You're not following the plot here. Most McDonalds are franchises. The franchisee must pay for McDonalds authorized repair resources to repair machines they're mandated to operate. In other words the people that have to pay for the repairs don't have a choice in the matter. So naturally they neglect it; 'sorry, the machine is down now.'

behringer 5y ago
As a consumer, the fact that McDonald's requires the manufacturer or authorized personnel to repair machinery is the main reason I even go there. And by there I mean whichever one I'm near. Oh sure the mcflurry machine might suck. But I nearly never get a bad coke, bad coffee, undercooked food or crappy fries. It's always the same no matter where or when I go. I'm willing to pay a little extra knowing I'm not wasting time or money stopping by. This I think is what McDonald's is trying to protect.
- scrps 5y ago
  I am not trying to be snarky but I could see it coming across that way... How have we kept humanity fed for most of human history without the corporations to keep us safe?
  - behringer 5y ago
    Well for me it's not about safety, but quality. I know my drink isn't going to taste funny or my food taste off. Part of that is stringent and high quality repair and calibration. There's a reason I go to McDonald's more than, say, burger King, KFC, or wendy's for my junk food fix.
    - scrps 5y ago
      That isn't mcdonald's or taylor's argument though, they are spinning this as safety issue to scare people into believing someone sorting out their horrible engineering is going to lead to food borne illness.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Are you serious? Before health codes and competent companies the quality of food was shockingly bad all over the place, and there are still so many issues. People think covid is bad have very little idea how dangerous basic life used to be, and in no small way was this caused in part by food safety.
    - rhapsodic 5y ago
      Bullshit.
    - bserge 5y ago
      It really wasn't that bad, but people were way more self-reliant.
      - Reubachi 5y ago
        Uh..Look up food quality in antiquity. Food born illnesses (e.coli, salmonella, norovirus) have ravaged societies for hundreds of years. only very recently in the west have we been able to say "this food sucks" because of our opinion of the taste, look. It used to be "I will eat this food that sucks" because even though it tasted sour that's all there was.
        bserge 5y ago
        Yeah? I still fucking eat moldy and off tasting food because I had little when I was young. I balk at people throwing bread in the trash, that was near sacrilegious lol. Anyway, people lived. There was struggle, yes. Perhaps it was better than the meaningless waste of life millions have today.
        Reubachi 5y ago
        If our two gut biomes where examined by the same gastroenterologist, they might say mine is more bacterially mono-cultured and yours is more cultured. Who's to say that's bad? An experiment that isn't reasonable: Go to a Gastroenterologist, tell them you regularly or have no issue eating molded food/expired, and see if you carry the same heath insurance provider within a week. You would balk at the realization that those eating habits you mentioned aren't thought of as "healthy" by those analyzing healthy eating habits and adjusting insurance rates off of it.
  - ggm 5y ago
    You know the original meaning of the word "sophisticated"? You know the "slug in the bottle" case? Historically, people were not well protected, and traders took advantage of this. We survived because we're tough enough to ride out most food poisoning, but some childhood mortality probably comes down to this, as would some other shorter lifespan on the tables of mortality. So yes, for most of human history we didn't have either corporations or laws about food hygiene. Except I think you'll find some of the earliest laws are in fact, about food hygene: market regulation was about markets in the literal, tables of goods in the square sense. The right to run a market came with the requirement to run it properly for the common good. Burghers prohibited butchers from dumping waste meat.
    - scrps 5y ago
      I think our wires have been crossed. My issue isn't that food safety hasn't been an issue for humanity, it is the idea that corporations are the party that have lead the charge for stricter food safery standards (other than CYA) and that we should defer to them. If the FDA wants to audit kytch to ensure their software and hardware is compliant, by all means. I am however not going to trust mcdonalds or taylor to do that.
      - Something1234 5y ago
        What are you talking about corporations leading the charge? They couldn't care less until the publication of "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. He talked about how they would do whatever was necessary to make spoiled food saleable. If that meant adding talc or bleaching it then so be it. If that meant turning hot dogs into the most amazing use of waste they would. In fact I would argue it is against corporations best interest in ancient time to ensure food safety, because it would increase waste
        heavyset_go 5y ago
        I think you might be reading a sarcastic comment as if it's serious.
  - em500 5y ago
    Non snarky: survival probability was a lot lower for most of human history.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    With 420,000 deaths per year? https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-foodborne-diseases https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-food...
  - Dove 5y ago
    All of human history has been much more dangerous in general than the current time, and dangerous food has always been one of the risks, at levels we would currently find shocking and unacceptable. The tradeoff is that starvation and malnutrition have also been serious concerns for all of human history, too. Your grocery store, full of safe and abundant food, is the historical exception, not the norm. For example, as recently as a century or two ago, milk routinely killed people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness The problems the UK dealt with in the 1800s sound horrifying. https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulteration/2020253.article https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulterat... And adulturated food in general was a serious problem in the US, in times still within living memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regulation_in_the_United_States#The_Pure_Foods_Movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regula... In some ways, it still is. A lot of people advocate avoiding processed food entirely, as a way to dodge these sorts of bullets.
- echelon 5y ago
  > Oh sure the mcflurry machine might suck. But I nearly never get a bad coke, bad coffee, undercooked food or crappy fries. It's always the same no matter where or when I go. I haven't done fast food in awhile because it's terrible, but this is a far cry from my experiences. I've had undercooked chicken nuggets that were slimey, coffee that had sat in the pot so long it became sludge, and almost half of the time get flat coke or a different beverage than I ordered (diet instead of zero, or with strong hints of orange). These aren't one-off experiences, but easily a quarter to a third of my past visits. To several stores. McDonald's has shit quality control in every dimension. It's astonishing to me that they produced the breakout success that was Chipotle. Or that they maintain their present market cap.
prepend 5y ago
McDonalds makes more off the ice cream ingredients than fixing the machine. That argument doesn’t make sense. The whole franchise model is having franchisees but ice cream mix or whatever. They won’t buy the mix if the machine is down. I think it’s just hard to clean and people don’t like doing it. And everyone is short staffed. Googling cryptic codes is easy. Cleaning the machine is hard.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > McDonalds makes more off the ice cream ingredients than fixing the machine. That argument doesn’t make sense. McDonald's doesn't make more off the ingredients of a day's sales of ice cream as it does off a service call, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. I'm not sure why you think it would. It would be most profitable for McDonald's if the machine went down every single day. The problem with that is the franchises would stop selling ice cream, not that they'd have to trade $25 of ice cream ingredient profit for the profit off a high priced service call that you can respond to with a low-paid, minimally trained tech with a computer that just decodes a mundane error that can be fixed in seconds. A tech can probably do 15 of those a day.
  - thelittleone 5y ago
    Probably by a couple of orders of magnitude? So say they sell 1000 mcflurries in a day at $1 each for $1000. A couple of orders of magnitude would mean a service cost of $100,000 or am I missing something. Even if they only sold 100 which seems like absurdly low, then it would suggest a service cost of $10k.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      They definitely don't sell 1,000 McFlurries a day. Assuming they fulfill one order every 30 seconds, and McFlurries are reasonably purchased between noon and midnight (never heard of a breakfast McFlurry). That's 1,440 orders per day. McFlurries are not going to have a 70% attach rate.
      - 5y ago

behringer 5y ago

As a consumer, the fact that McDonald's requires the manufacturer or authorized personnel to repair machinery is the main reason I even go there. And by there I mean whichever one I'm near. Oh sure the mcflurry machine might suck. But I nearly never get a bad coke, bad coffee, undercooked food or crappy fries. It's always the same no matter where or when I go. I'm willing to pay a little extra knowing I'm not wasting time or money stopping by. This I think is what McDonald's is trying to protect.

scrps 5y ago
I am not trying to be snarky but I could see it coming across that way... How have we kept humanity fed for most of human history without the corporations to keep us safe?
- behringer 5y ago
  Well for me it's not about safety, but quality. I know my drink isn't going to taste funny or my food taste off. Part of that is stringent and high quality repair and calibration. There's a reason I go to McDonald's more than, say, burger King, KFC, or wendy's for my junk food fix.
  - scrps 5y ago
    That isn't mcdonald's or taylor's argument though, they are spinning this as safety issue to scare people into believing someone sorting out their horrible engineering is going to lead to food borne illness.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Are you serious? Before health codes and competent companies the quality of food was shockingly bad all over the place, and there are still so many issues. People think covid is bad have very little idea how dangerous basic life used to be, and in no small way was this caused in part by food safety.
  - rhapsodic 5y ago
    Bullshit.
  - bserge 5y ago
    It really wasn't that bad, but people were way more self-reliant.
    - Reubachi 5y ago
      Uh..Look up food quality in antiquity. Food born illnesses (e.coli, salmonella, norovirus) have ravaged societies for hundreds of years. only very recently in the west have we been able to say "this food sucks" because of our opinion of the taste, look. It used to be "I will eat this food that sucks" because even though it tasted sour that's all there was.
      - bserge 5y ago
        Yeah? I still fucking eat moldy and off tasting food because I had little when I was young. I balk at people throwing bread in the trash, that was near sacrilegious lol. Anyway, people lived. There was struggle, yes. Perhaps it was better than the meaningless waste of life millions have today.
        Reubachi 5y ago
        If our two gut biomes where examined by the same gastroenterologist, they might say mine is more bacterially mono-cultured and yours is more cultured. Who's to say that's bad? An experiment that isn't reasonable: Go to a Gastroenterologist, tell them you regularly or have no issue eating molded food/expired, and see if you carry the same heath insurance provider within a week. You would balk at the realization that those eating habits you mentioned aren't thought of as "healthy" by those analyzing healthy eating habits and adjusting insurance rates off of it.
- ggm 5y ago
  You know the original meaning of the word "sophisticated"? You know the "slug in the bottle" case? Historically, people were not well protected, and traders took advantage of this. We survived because we're tough enough to ride out most food poisoning, but some childhood mortality probably comes down to this, as would some other shorter lifespan on the tables of mortality. So yes, for most of human history we didn't have either corporations or laws about food hygiene. Except I think you'll find some of the earliest laws are in fact, about food hygene: market regulation was about markets in the literal, tables of goods in the square sense. The right to run a market came with the requirement to run it properly for the common good. Burghers prohibited butchers from dumping waste meat.
  - scrps 5y ago
    I think our wires have been crossed. My issue isn't that food safety hasn't been an issue for humanity, it is the idea that corporations are the party that have lead the charge for stricter food safery standards (other than CYA) and that we should defer to them. If the FDA wants to audit kytch to ensure their software and hardware is compliant, by all means. I am however not going to trust mcdonalds or taylor to do that.
    - Something1234 5y ago
      What are you talking about corporations leading the charge? They couldn't care less until the publication of "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. He talked about how they would do whatever was necessary to make spoiled food saleable. If that meant adding talc or bleaching it then so be it. If that meant turning hot dogs into the most amazing use of waste they would. In fact I would argue it is against corporations best interest in ancient time to ensure food safety, because it would increase waste
      - heavyset_go 5y ago
        I think you might be reading a sarcastic comment as if it's serious.
- em500 5y ago
  Non snarky: survival probability was a lot lower for most of human history.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spoonjim 5y ago
  With 420,000 deaths per year? https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-foodborne-diseases https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-food...
- Dove 5y ago
  All of human history has been much more dangerous in general than the current time, and dangerous food has always been one of the risks, at levels we would currently find shocking and unacceptable. The tradeoff is that starvation and malnutrition have also been serious concerns for all of human history, too. Your grocery store, full of safe and abundant food, is the historical exception, not the norm. For example, as recently as a century or two ago, milk routinely killed people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness The problems the UK dealt with in the 1800s sound horrifying. https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulteration/2020253.article https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulterat... And adulturated food in general was a serious problem in the US, in times still within living memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regulation_in_the_United_States#The_Pure_Foods_Movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regula... In some ways, it still is. A lot of people advocate avoiding processed food entirely, as a way to dodge these sorts of bullets.
echelon 5y ago
> Oh sure the mcflurry machine might suck. But I nearly never get a bad coke, bad coffee, undercooked food or crappy fries. It's always the same no matter where or when I go. I haven't done fast food in awhile because it's terrible, but this is a far cry from my experiences. I've had undercooked chicken nuggets that were slimey, coffee that had sat in the pot so long it became sludge, and almost half of the time get flat coke or a different beverage than I ordered (diet instead of zero, or with strong hints of orange). These aren't one-off experiences, but easily a quarter to a third of my past visits. To several stores. McDonald's has shit quality control in every dimension. It's astonishing to me that they produced the breakout success that was Chipotle. Or that they maintain their present market cap.

prepend 5y ago

McDonalds makes more off the ice cream ingredients than fixing the machine. That argument doesn’t make sense. The whole franchise model is having franchisees but ice cream mix or whatever. They won’t buy the mix if the machine is down. I think it’s just hard to clean and people don’t like doing it. And everyone is short staffed. Googling cryptic codes is easy. Cleaning the machine is hard.

pessimizer 5y ago
> McDonalds makes more off the ice cream ingredients than fixing the machine. That argument doesn’t make sense. McDonald's doesn't make more off the ingredients of a day's sales of ice cream as it does off a service call, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. I'm not sure why you think it would. It would be most profitable for McDonald's if the machine went down every single day. The problem with that is the franchises would stop selling ice cream, not that they'd have to trade $25 of ice cream ingredient profit for the profit off a high priced service call that you can respond to with a low-paid, minimally trained tech with a computer that just decodes a mundane error that can be fixed in seconds. A tech can probably do 15 of those a day.
- thelittleone 5y ago
  Probably by a couple of orders of magnitude? So say they sell 1000 mcflurries in a day at $1 each for $1000. A couple of orders of magnitude would mean a service cost of $100,000 or am I missing something. Even if they only sold 100 which seems like absurdly low, then it would suggest a service cost of $10k.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    They definitely don't sell 1,000 McFlurries a day. Assuming they fulfill one order every 30 seconds, and McFlurries are reasonably purchased between noon and midnight (never heard of a breakfast McFlurry). That's 1,440 orders per day. McFlurries are not going to have a 70% attach rate.
    - 5y ago