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iFixit Petitions Government for Right to Hack McDonald's Ice Cream Machine

320 points by jmsflknr 3y ago

lax4ever 3y ago
I am intrigued, delighted, incredibly supportive of this measure, and finally, laughing my ass off.
iancmceachern 3y ago
There are so many of these situations in medical devices. It's just the tip of the iceberg.
- mewse-hn 3y ago
  So.. one of the smokescreens Taylor uses is that their proprietary control software is necessary to ensure the sterilization procedures happen correctly, so they can trot out the argument "if you tamper with our machine you could kill somebody". But it's a damn ice cream machine. The stakes get a bit riskier when it comes to medical devices because it's much easier to imagine the scenario where you tamper with a pacemaker, you're going to kill somebody. You tamper with a dialysis machine, you're going to kill somebody. Same problem, different stakes.
  - gruez 3y ago
    >so they can trot out the argument "if you tamper with our machine you could kill somebody". >But it's a damn ice cream machine. It's a machine holding fluids that are highly conducive to bacterial growth, and is a pain to clean because it has tons nooks and crannies. Someone dying (if there's a preexisting condition) or getting seriously sick due to subpar cleaning is very plausible. People get sick from improperly maintained ice machines[1], and those are arguably simpler and are holding less hazardous liquids (plain water rather than milk). [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29382408/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29382408/
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      And yet restaurant operators are allowed to open close their refrigerators and freezers at will, not subject to third party refrigerator maintenance company monopoly.
      - gruez 3y ago
        ...because they're not part of a franchise. Part of being a franchisee is that you're accepting the standards/regulations of the franchisor in exchange for use of their brand. I think it's very reasonable if mcdonalds had some sort of regulation like "all soda fountains must be disassembled and cleaned every 24 hours", and enforced that through hardware interlocks.
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        Exactly, it's what they're selling (consistency and management). What I don't agree with is the proprietary lock out. Franchise owners should be able to replace the pump header with generic options.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        ghostpepper 3y ago
        Who guarantees the generic replacement is up to par? McDonald’s or the franchisee? Who suffers a greater cost if it turns out not to be?
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        For medical devoces its the manufacturer, and it's notified body. It's no different than for the origami manufacturer. It's all covered in ISO 13485 (and another similar standard for the software portion if your product contains software). It's called the risk based approach. You define what's called essential performance or your device, things it must do or the patient or caregiver is harmed. You then do a FMEA to determine what failure modes exist, and what the result of each failure is. You then make sure you have mitigation in place for each of those situations. You then document that all, get it signed off internally, by the FDA, by your notified body, and by the test house (for 14485, FCC testing, etc). All that makes up the stack of documents that allows you to sell a medical product. It's no different if it's a generic product or a new novel one, same process same standards. For food machinery it's also thr FDA for things like design and materials, and it's the local health department for those items. It's a similar but different ISO standard you need to meet depending on the specific machinery.
  - rrauenza 3y ago
    https://www.npr.org/2023/08/22/1195207118/listeria-frugals-milkshakes-tacoma-three-dead https://www.npr.org/2023/08/22/1195207118/listeria-frugals-m... > Poorly cleaned ice cream machines at a Washington-based burger joint were linked to a listeria outbreak earlier this year that landed six people in the hospital, three of whom died. Two of those who were hospitalized told investigators they had milkshakes from the same restaurant before getting sick.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    You have it wrong. The stakes are actually higher for the ice cream machine. Inproper use of the ice cream machine could kill dozens. A pacemaker malfunction would just kill one at best. It's why airliners need to have triple redundant systems, doubke fault tolerant. Medical devices only need to be double redundant, single fault tolerant. I (dont) love it when people whonhave not ever designed a real medical device that's actually on the market make claims about what it's like to design a real medical device that's actually on the market.
- ska 3y ago
  Not saying it doesn't happen, but the situation in medical devices is more complicated.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    It's not really more complicated, just different. It's funny, the F in FDA stands for food, so you still need to deal with the FDA and its regulations, just different ones. Its really more of a paperwork/comiance thing than anything. I.e. genaric drugs. Source- I've designed medical devices and food processing equipment for 20 years.
    - ska 3y ago
      I shouldn't have been so terse. I didn't mean to suggest that the regulatory side didn't exist in commercial food equipment, obviously it does. OP seemed to suggest that medical devices was rife with situations parallel to McDonalds/Taylor, and that just doesn't seem to be the case; partially because the landscape is more complex in terms of who pays, how liability is distributed, and how the maintenance work is done, etc. Which isn't to say device industry doesn't have lots of its own problems, they just look different.
      - iancmceachern 3y ago
        I am OP, and the parent commenter to this comment both. I was making exactly the opposit point you are. I have actually worked directly with the manufacturer of the pumps in those machines (Watson marlow), and also designed and saw through to clinical release many similar complex medical devices with the same exact pumps. The situation is nearly identical between these two examples, it's just the names of the forms you need to fill out are different, and the division of the company that supplies your components is different, but it's all the same thing just a different name.
        ska 3y ago
        Ok, I confused myself somehow about who I was replying to, my apologies. The OP is jmsflknr though, no? However, my point was not meant to be about the pump design nor the regulatory bodies involved, so I think we are just miscommunicating. My fault for quick replies. I was responding to "There are so many of these situations in medical devices." by which I took you to mean that there are many parallel situations the the McDonalds/Taylor issue in the linked article and the franchises inability to keep them in service, or accept 3rd party help in doing it; I read this as the core point of the article. When I said "things are more complicated" I meant the relationship between the various entities and how systems get deployed, managed, maintained, etc. doesn't look the same. So is that what you meant? It's possible you just mean there are similar technical issues in the pumps, something I'm happy to accept you have direct experience in; in that case I just misread you. If you had said there are similar (identical) pumps in some medical devices I would have understood it that way. It read to me like you were making a far broader claim.
zwieback 3y ago
I'm all for right-to-repair but if they hate their machines so much why isn't McD addressing the problem?
- jandrese 3y ago
  The franchisees hate the machines, but some people at the corporate level are I'm sure very happy with the big stacks of cash Taylor provides to insure the exclusivity. Reputational brand damage from having always broken Ice Cream machines is apparently less of a concern than losing those sweet greenbacks.
  - phonon 3y ago
    There is no exclusivity. Franchisees can buy Carpigiani machines instead...but... "(McDonald’s agreement with franchisees also allows them to use an actual Italian machine, sold by Bologna-based Carpigiani, that McD Truth describes as much better designed. But given that its replacement parts can take a week to arrive from Italy, far fewer restaurants buy it.)" [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/#:~:text=McDonald%E2%80%99s%20agreement%20with%20franchisees%20also%20allows%20them%20to%20use%20an%20actual%20Italian%20machine%2C%20sold%20by%20Bologna%2Dbased%20Carpigiani%2C https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
    - netsharc 3y ago
      Seem like there's a market to be a buyer of a few thousand of the Italian machines state-side, in complete (for selling) and in parts (for repairs).
      - kyleee 3y ago
        Sounds expensive to get started but I wish someone would just to compete with the corrupt idiots at Taylor
      - phonon 3y ago
        Seems like they are pretty good! "Then there is the Carpigiani K3. Take all the issues with the Taylor C602 and fix them and then you have a K3. It's by far the better machine with tech support that anyone can call into. The only complaint is that most of the parameters are initialized before being translated from German to English." https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/jd2tbq/mcdonalds_ice_cream_machine/g981utj/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/jd2tbq/mcdonalds_ic...
hypercube33 3y ago
In case it's not discussed the ice cream machines are broken software wise. there was a big Todo about a third party who hacked it and sold a product that just made the firmware better or human friendly. McD stole it. these are so awful there is a website tracking when they are down at mcbroken
- yorwba 3y ago
  From the article: A company called Kytch built a small, third-party device that could be attached to the soft service ice cream machines that read and interpreted Taylor’s error codes. Kytch has been engaged in a lawsuit in California state court with Taylor and McDonald’s for more than two years.
_fat_santa 3y ago
A absolutely despise what companies like Taylor do. Rather than innovating their product, they realized its cheaper if they have their lawyers engineer a way to lock in their customers to their product over their competitors'. And you seem to see this more and more. It seems that these days the product quality itself doesn't matter, it's all about the contracts that your legal team setup in the background. I have to ask the engineers that work at these companies: does it bother you that the only reason people use your product is that they would get sued if they tried using another product? How does it make you feel that your product is so bad the only thing keeping your customers in the door is the contracts your legal team drew up.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  When deals are bad enough, a always suspect bribery. Unless it is public procurements, then I blame too strict lowest bidder rules.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    No, in public procurement it's still bribery. You just carefully tailor the tender to the company that the fix is already in for. When I worked in state government, every vendor of products was simply a middleman who marked a bunch of stuff up that you could easily buy from standard wholesale sources. Their catalogs would be three-hole binders of photocopies from other people's catalogs and printouts from ecommerce webpages with the prices whited out, and a pricelist typed up in word at the back. Every vendor of services was connected to an insider who tipped them off that purchases were about to be made. The lowest bidder was selected from the people who could jump through the hoops required to submit bids, and who also fit the carefully written RFP.
  - Tangurena2 3y ago
    In the case of Quiznos, it was kickbacks from the service company. Even when your soda machine was still under warranty, the franchise agreement required the store owner to use only one "authorized" company to repair the machines and pay them $75 per visit. https://www.westword.com/news/youre-toast-5092405?showFullText=true https://www.westword.com/news/youre-toast-5092405?showFullTe... Westword is Denver's alternative weekly newspaper. Quiznos started in Denver.
abeppu 3y ago
> The Superior Court of Alameda County is charging roughly $1 per page to get legal filings. To download the entirety of the court proceedings to date, the court wants $2,999. I was surprised by this, b/c I've been able to view court documents for SF Superior Court without paying anything. AC even charges per search query! https://eportal.alameda.courts.ca.gov/?q=node/388 https://eportal.alameda.courts.ca.gov/?q=node/388
- 1123581321 3y ago
  Are these allowed to be posted on RECAP? If so, the cost could at least be shared by multiple interested parties. (You can see some other Kytch legal proceedings there for free. https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=kytch%20vs%20gamble&type=r&order_by=score%20desc https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=kytch%20vs%20gamble&type=r&... )
- manquer 3y ago
  I don’t understand how is in well functioning democracy we can have secret courts and paywall for court documents They should be free and readily accessible even if they cost a lot to produce and host (which they don’t) - for civil litigation the claimants can pay any costs as part of filing fees - for criminal government can bear the cost as part of prosecution.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Probably left over from times when it all wasn't digital. You don't really want 10 people one after other to go and request all papers from all trials since the court started...
    - delfinom 3y ago
      Part of it is holdover from the paper era, part of it is because these court document systems are run by third parties that need to get paid. Court systems are underfunded nationwide to run their own IT/software dev and just pay for third parties outright to cover costs fully.
cheeseomlit 3y ago
>More than 480 documents have been filed with the court in that lawsuit, and a trial is scheduled for this fall. Even reading documents from this lawsuit is a costly nightmare of an affair. The Superior Court of Alameda County is charging roughly $1 per page to get legal filings. To download the entirety of the court proceedings to date, the court wants $2,999. That's absurd and should not be legal
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Yes. Why not $10K per page?
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Why not? If price has no relation to cost, why not raise the price until we don't have to worry about people looking at public records anymore?
JohnDeHope 3y ago
I bet they have already hacked the machine. They just need legal cover to release their smooth findings. Once the judge okays it, the details will be published in 3 days. I hope.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  As the article explains, the machines were hacked years ago.
Aaronstotle 3y ago
For anyone interested in a good video about this, there is YT video that details how the Ice Cream Machine's being broken is essentially a scheme that McDonald's corporate runs on their franchisees. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
- voisin 3y ago
  I am surprised the franchisees haven’t launched a class action. No other fast food chain has these issues.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Surely the franchise agreement would prohibit such an action?
    - voisin 3y ago
      I am not sure such a clause would be upheld in a scenario where the franchisor blatantly acts in bad faith outside of industry norms to fleece the franchisee. There is a reasonable expectation of good faith.
      - liveoneggs 3y ago
        https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchisees.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchise...
    - krisoft 3y ago
      It's probably not even that. As a franchise you are under the thumb of the big corporation. They have a lot more money, and a lot more leverage to break you if you start suing them. They can probably inspect your premises, find 200 violations normally overlooked and then suspend your right to use their branding or suppliers. Sure you might win eventually, maybe in court. And then maybe you can sue them that the inspection happened in retaliation, but do you really want to risk that?
neilv 3y ago
I'm sympathetic to right-to-repair, in general, but this argument bothers me: > “The current barriers to these works include service passwords and digital locks,” the petition reads. “Commercial ice cream machines, such as the Taylor manufactured ice cream machines used by McDonald’s, frequently fall into disrepair when its daily pasteurization cycle fails. Circumventing the digital lock on the software would enable owners and repair professionals to diagnose and perform the necessary repairs to get these devices back up and running.” They're talking about a safety-sensitive process failing and consequently locking out use... mere syllables before asking for the ability to circumvent locks. Which prompts the concern that some fast food employees, their managers or small business owners, sketchier repairpeople, and Aliexpress gadgets are going to effectively use that lock circumvention ability to circumvent a safety feature, eventually killing children whose parents treated them to ice cream cones.
- Benanov 3y ago
  You're conflating "I can't get the diagnostic repair codes that Taylor can" with "Kids are going to get hurt because the machine is malfunctioning" Please stop doing that.
  - neilv 3y ago
    See, you can casually whip out a more persuasive (or less self-defeating) argument than they did, in their presumably carefully crafted petition.
  - gruez 3y ago
    > You're conflating "I can't get the diagnostic repair codes that Taylor can" with "Kids are going to get hurt because the machine is malfunctioning" But the article and the linked vice.com article suggests that the device isn't just decoding error codes, it's also providing a hardware bypass for safety features like lockouts.
    - spiderxxxx 3y ago
      no, the article says "groups seek permission from the government to break arbitrary software locks and passwords that keep consumers and repair professionals from diagnosing and repairing equipment they own or are authorized by the owner to work on." It doesn't mention "lockouts", or bypassing safety features. It's about access to the machine, and the diagnostics that a repair person has access to, but the owner does not.
rtbathula 3y ago
It's a violation of patent laws. And I can summarize it in one expression from the novel Atlas Shrugged "Why Rearden could only have Rearden Metal?"
- Clent 3y ago
  In which direction?
  - rtbathula 3y ago
    In which direction it's not? McDonald has a copyright of their machine — others shouldn't reproduce it. It's like saying some movie has bad scenes and I want the right to fix it by violating the copyright.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Ok, so first off, you can't copyright a whole machine. Patents cover ideas, copyright covers creative expression, which legally includes software. And the specific part of the law iFixit is worried about is DMCA 1201 which covers software that is designed to prevent copying of copyrighted works. In the specific case of Kytch, they built another machine that reads error codes off the electronics on a machine that deliberately attempts to hide the error codes from McDonalds franchisees. This doesn't modify the software on those electronics, so there isn't a copyright violation. And Taylor doesn't have a patent on usable error codes or reading them off a machine deliberately designed to obscure them. This shouldn't be covered by any reading of DMCA 1201, but they want the Copyright Office to say, "yes, this is legal" anyway. I'm not entirely sure why you're invoking Ayn Rand in your grandparent comment.
      - rtbathula 3y ago
        Although different items can come together to form a product, it is McDonald's who brought them together as a WHOLE. This is strictly their property, and they have the right to keep their trade secrets, regardless of how bad they are. If customers have problems with the machines, they should not buy them or use them. They have the freedom to choose. Additionally, if McDonald's has defrauded them in any way, they should sue McDonald's. There is a free choice. iFixit may be great engineers who can perform magic, but they are literally asking Congress for an exemption to violate copyright law. This will not end with McDonald's; others will follow suit. As for Ayn Rand's argument, because it provides the right expression in one line.
mig39 3y ago
Capitalism always trends towards lock-in and monopoly rather than the free market. Once upon a time, governments would step in and ensure a free market.
EMIRELADERO 3y ago
I may be wrong, but I thought this "exemption" wasn't required in the first place. DMCA 1201 applies to copyrighted material, and even then, only to measures that control access to the work. The Chamberlain v. Skylink case in the court of appeals for the Federal Circuit (which is binding in all other federal courts) established that the prohibitions can't apply to software the user is already entitled to use. The Court put it this way: "Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software."
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
For anyone who wants full details on this story, there is an 82-page complaint by Kytch against McDonalds for false/misleading descriptions under the Lanham Act, including a number of other state law claims. A must-read for anyone who finds this dispute entertaining. https://ia902502.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.ded.78199/gov.uscourts.ded.78199.1.0.pdf https://ia902502.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.ded.781...
mcpackieh 3y ago
McDonalds employees pretty consistently can't even get "no pickles" right. Does it really surprise people if McDonalds corp wants all dairy machine maintenance done by actual professionals instead of overworked/disinterested/whatever/etc teenagers? If Taylor were scamming McDonalds, or were bribing somebody in McDonalds corp to go along with it, McDonalds corp lawyers would be crawling all over them. That evidently isn't happening, so it seems safe to assume that Taylor is doing exactly what McDonalds corp thinks they should be doing. If a burger shop proprietor doesn't like this, they're free to open their own burger shop without a McDonalds franchise. It shouldn't be hard for them to sell a superior product, but they'd lose access to McDonald's reputation. And protecting that reputation is probably the entire point of this ice-cream machine drama.
- greedo 3y ago
  Exactly! I remember one night closing our store. I was 16, and the dude in charge of cleaning the shake machine and the sundae machine was a bit of a stoner. Back in the day all the cleaning was manual (1982). So the dude would pull out all of the frozen shake mix, then run a soapy water mix through it, then a sanitizer rinse. Took some time, and closing was always a rush. So he either forgot or decided to skip the sanitizer rinse. Now if you put soap in dairy products, you end up giving people diarrhea. So a few days later we got a lot of complaints and the guy ended up being fired. He was dumb enough to joke about it. It's not like it was his career; he was 18 and headed to college somewhere. For $2.10/hour, that's what you got. If the manager didn't doublecheck everything, stuff like this happened. McDonalds tech is designed around the following principle; "Imagine how stupid the average person is, then realize half of all people are stupider than that."
  - manquer 3y ago
    By your logic we shouldn’t allow kids at all near food preparation and treat it like medical devices and require years of training to operate let alone fix them ? There is a middle ground between let 15 year old kids fix it and only allow company technician who is billed at hundreds of dollars a hour to fix a common and trivial problem which a third party technician could do it for much less and much faster
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The meta point I heard the other day was that property law used to givern how we use things, but that computing has changed all interactions into contract law. Instead of having broad governance by government of how we relate to property, each company is free to create it's own set of laws governing use (free to ensnare us as it will). What a wretched abomination! This imposes against the spirit of man the toolmaker, man the creator, man the scientist to let each company prohibit exploration & understanding & fiddling with the things they have released unto the world. Black boxes are against the Enlightenment spirit that has given rise to society. Ah, it was a point in Web scraping for me but not for thee, and cited in this comment, citing a 20 year old Mark Lemley observation in Terms of Use, https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-for-me-but-not-for-thee-guest-blog-post.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970
listenallyall 3y ago
Is everyone 100% sure it's McDonald's machines that are faulty? Couldn't it be that McDonald's specific ice cream mix or blend is just a little bit thicker, or stickier, or whatever, and that would increase the failure rate of any brand or model of soft-serve machine?
Waterluvian 3y ago
I’ve never ever come across a broken McDonald’s soft serve machine in Canada. Is there something fundamentally different going on up here or is this an outlier? Any other Canadians able to chime in?
rascul 3y ago
Some decades back I had worked at several different McDonald's and the ice cream machines were a major thing because so much revenue came from them. The machines were cleaned on schedule and the rare times they broke there was someone out the next day to get it working again. As a customer, I can only recall one time when I wanted McDonald's ice cream that the machine wasn't working. I'm curious to know if my experience is an outlier or maybe things have changed. Or perhaps some franchises don't put as high a priority on the ice cream, or perhaps even the claims are a bit exaggerated. Or maybe something else that I'm not considering.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  I feel like I live in an alternate universe. I have never once tried to get ice cream at McDonald’s and been denied. Meanwhile, it seems like everyone else only talks about how they can never get ice cream at a McDonald’s.
iancmceachern 3y ago
In case you want to fix your own machine Ifixit just posted this on youtube: https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA?si=3QKEVGyt3hYsbGng https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA?si=3QKEVGyt3hYsbGng
not_your_vase 3y ago
I wish they'd rather petition for real right to repair, instead of selling screwdrivers and full PS4 Slim Optical Drive assemblies, but not a single sheet of schematics. I guess that would look very differently in the eyes of the companies who recently became their BFFs.
vitalurk 3y ago
This is a well documented thing. McDs is colluding with their buddies to artificially make money via bogus broken machines. They make way more money with this scam rather than selling their legally not even called ice cream, simply due to the sheer magnitude of the contract to repair. What a boring dystopia.
mk_stjames 3y ago
Something that I don't see discussed in the comments yesterday: There seems to be this other company that made a device to read error codes, and then theres legal trouble surrounding that and the copyright on the firmware of the original controller board. But all this seems like not the best approach- The electronics on the original boards themselves do not appear that complicated. This machine itself, mechanically, cannot have all that sophisticated of mechatronic interface. Why not just circumvent everything with a completely new 3rd party control board that replaces the OE electronics completely and runs the machines? People design and develop systems every day for fun even that are an order of magnitude more complicated than the control system of this ice cream machine. Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system. At some point if they are leased, breaking the lease and buying the machines outright and then upgrading the controls would potentially be the way forward for the franchises. Unless in the lease there is a clause that breaking the lease requires repossession of the hardware from the premises. At which point franchises need to stand up to McDonalds corporate and demand a new supplier of machines of a new design.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  To latch onto your comment: What about competition? Ice cream machines are not complicated, relatively speaking. Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation? They could build their own - high efficiency, high quality, high reliability, low maintenance cost - line of ice cream machines and distribute them to the... over 40.000 McD's franchises worldwide.
  - ilovetux 3y ago
    The company that they purchase ice cream machines from make reliable, efficient machines for other resteraunts. McDonalds corporate has a stipulation that franchisees mist purchase the same, old ice cream machines. The major problem with them, as I understand it, is that any sort of malfunction leads to the machine shutting down and displaying an archaic, nonsensical error code. When you look the code up and how to resolve it almost always says that you need to call a licensed maintenance tech. It is all about propping up the service division of the machine's OEM.
trhow234898 3y ago
Ice cream machines are not printers with cartridges. If you allow unqualified labor do "refills", there will be food contamination and people will die! But we let worse things slide, so who cares. Enjoy your ice cream! :)
- bushbaba 3y ago
  I think it’s more franchise owners sign an agreement. The device should be legal if you or I buy this machine. However installing it at McDonalds by a non “certified tech” might be in violation of the franchise contract
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. So the only people smart enough to repair them safely are the manufacturers? So only take your car to the dealership for a service?
  - trhow234898 3y ago
    I would not let typical McDonald worker anywhere near my car. Meat is cooked just before the use, it does not get poisonous very easily. Ice cream is very different. How would you ensure that managers throw away "good enough" batches of ice cream every evening?
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      The franchisee should be able to use any qualified repair person who can use any suitable parts. That is what right to repair is about. Not the right to break health and safety laws.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        The thing is, there are few industries that are as cut-throat as fast food. Wherever franchisees see an opportunity to save even a couple dozen bucks, they will take it, laws don't matter. And enforcement is pretty lacking in itself. Most people won't report it to the authorities that they got the runs from some ice cream, the authorities will only hear about it when dozens of people arrive at the hospital with the same symptoms, and even then most public health departments have already been understaffed prior to COVID to follow up on the hospital reports and conduct inspections. What McD/Taylor are doing here is, as fucked up as it is, the only meaningful way they can make sure they're not labeled a public health risk.
assimpleaspossi 3y ago
It needs to be said that this is not "ice cream" and McDonald's doesn't call it that. In fact, there is very little cream in this soft serve product.
- code_duck 3y ago
  Ice cream has a legal definition in the US, and it doesn’t require cream as an ingredient. >Ice cream shall contain at least 1.6 pounds of total solids to the gallon, weigh not less than 4.5 pounds to the gallon, and contain not less than 20 percent total milk solids, constitued of not less than 10 percent milkfat. In no case shall the content of milk solids not fat be less than 6 percent. Whey shall not, by weight, be more than 25 percent of the milk solids not fat. Whether McDonald’s product meets that standard, I am not sure.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    They just call it "creamy vanilla soft serve" so they don't have to worry about whether or not it can be called ice cream. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/mcflurry-with-oreo-cookies.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/mcflurry-with-ore...
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Whenever I read government definitions of food, I find myself no longer hungry for "food".
  - assimpleaspossi 3y ago
    In order to meet that standard, cream must be introduced to get that amount of fat and solids. So, no, it doesn't meet that standard. If it did, McD would advertise it as such and they don't. In addition, real ice cream purveryors would be up in arms over it. And they have in the past.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  In UK they're called "McFlurry", in the desserts menu, but the description is "Soft dairy ice cream, swirled with ...". The ice-cream ingredients are: "Ice Cream Ingredients: EITHER: Allergen Ingredient: Skimmed MILK, Sugar, Cream (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Whey Powder (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Glucose Syrup, Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Carrageenan), Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Flavouring. OR: Allergen Ingredient: Reconstituted Skimmed MILK, Cream (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Sugar, Whey Powder (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Glucose Syrup, Allergen Ingredient: Skimmed MILK Powder, Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Carrageenan), Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Flavouring." Source: https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/galaxy-salted-caramel-mcflurry.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/galaxy-salted-car...
lucidguppy 3y ago
I think there's some pretty good podcasts about this. Essentially - this should be a fight between franchisees and McD's. It's also a bad look for McD - yes let's get a lot of bad PR about how we screw over franchisees. If they do that to their partners - what do you think they're doing to the food? Who are we kidding - we know what they do to the food. The less you deal with the arches the better.
- Loughla 3y ago
  McDonald's used to hit a sweet spot. For most people, food needs to be fast, cheap, and/or good. My theory is that it needs to be two of the three of those. Until about 2 years ago, it used to be cheap and fast. Now it's neither of those things. My bellwether is my youngest. He's 10 and would rather just eat at home if McDonald's is the only option. Last week he chose peanut butter sandwiches instead of chicken nuggets when we knew we'd be actively on the road during supper. So that's something.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The food around here hasn’t changed much, but price increases have removed and real discounts compared to “high end fast food” and there’s not a real major reason to still choose the McDs.
  - conductr 3y ago
    My kid is price agnostic but has had a couple bad experiences that turned him off. I think more due to labor/staffing issues than anything else. But they slipped a pickle in his burger once (very unappreciated) and the nuggets came under cooked once (also very unappreciated) so he’d actively boycotting although he doesn’t really know it
Simulacra 3y ago
It almost makes you wonder if there's some sort of McDonald's kickback scheme here. They make the franchisees take the machine, knowing it's going to break down, which makes the franchise owners have to pay through the nose to get it fixed, and then which McDonald's gets a kickback. When you have a machine that fails that often, and has become that much of a publicity problem, you would think a company like McDonald's would say OK enough is enough, we're changing the machines.
- gruez 3y ago
  >It almost makes you wonder if there's some sort of McDonald's kickback scheme here. Given that there's been a lawsuit between the OEM and the startup making mods for the machine for 2 years and no such documents have been found in discovery, my guess is no.
  - orangepurple 3y ago
    The conspiracy is a proven fact, no longer merely a theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXwD_HeC8Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXwD_HeC8Ms
    - gruez 3y ago
      >58:42 video There's no way I'm sitting through all that, and the chapter headings aren't very helpful either. Can you link to a specific timestamp?
thomasfl 3y ago
McDonald's ice cream machines, is the holy grail of the right to repair movement.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Yeah, can't believe that in 2023 the quest to find a sympathetic defendant for basic consumer protections laws is when the lack of protections harms corporate profits. This is bad for the people you are elected to represent -- snooze. This is bad for your stock portfolio -- we have to act now!
  - Mountain_Skies 3y ago
    The issues with the ice cream machines at McDonald's go far beyond anyone's desire for profit and has become a cultural meme that anyone who has desired a frozen dairy products from McDonald's in the past decade can relate to.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      >anyone who has desired a frozen dairy products from McDonald's That's a sentence I wasn't expecting to read, ever. There are only two types of people that I have ever met that would fall into that category: kids, who don't know any better about what food stuff they eat, and addicts.
      - lukas099 3y ago
        Believe it or not, it is possible to be healthy and occasionally have an ice cream cone.
        dylan604 3y ago
        As stated plenty of times elsewhere in these comments, the white cold squishy substance coming out of a McDonald's machine is NOT ice cream.
Hippocrates 3y ago
I didn't catch any explanation of why McDonalds is still using these machines if it is such an issue. I've had plenty of soft serve from other machines that tastes just the same, or better. Also, what reasoning did McDonalds corporate have for telling franchisees not to use the device? This must be some bizarre and long contractual agreement between McD and Taylor
- ethbr1 3y ago
  McDonald's corporate and restaurants interests aren't always financially aligned. They seem to be moreso than the abuser that is Subway, but I expect this is a situation where what's good for McD corporate isn't what's good for franchisees.
  - DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
    I’m fact restaurant franchisees and the franchiser are typically in a state of near-conflict. They have very different incentives and methods of making money. The notable exception is Denny’s, who go to great lengths to foster good relations with their franchisees and let them have an actual say in how corporate runs.
  - hypercube33 3y ago
    when the machines are properly maintained they work. source - worked at a mom and pop franchise of mcd way back. Corporate franchisees cut corners a lot and cause the machines to error out. onus is on them to pay for repairs and suffer down time and lost sales. customers like ice cream and MCD corporate are partners with the company making the machines so they gain and it's technically not their own issue.
- synchronizing 3y ago
  Johnny Harris (filmmaker journalist) made a great video on topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 In short, McDonald's continues to use these frequently malfunctioning ice cream machines due to their long-standing exclusive partnership with Taylor. The cost of repairs fall on the local franchise owners, not McD Corp.
listenallyall 3y ago
Have you considered the possibility that McDonald's proprietary soft-serve mix is the source of the problem, and not the machines themselves?
notjonheyman 3y ago
What a situation to be in when you're in the business of real estate first, big macs second.
deleted 3y ago
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hayst4ck 3y ago
Johnny Harris did some pretty quality journalism on this which provides some great context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 It is much more interesting than I expected. Namely, that McDonald's franchises agree to only use repair labor from a contractually enforced monopoly. McDonalds and the ice cream machine company collude to extract money from franchises. He also compares McDonald's ice cream machines to Wendy's, which are the same brand under a different contract scheme and finds that Wendy's does not have the same problems.
- smearth 3y ago
  I see it slightly differently although his research is great. I think this could be one of those carrot problems. I think there’s a possibility Mcdonald’s hates that they need to sell Ice-cream. There’s a probability Icecream’s an inescapaable loss leader and their lowest margin item and that it is a poor loss leader due to it’s substitution effect with probably their highest margin product - soft-drinks. Because neighbouring restaurants offer ice-cream - Mcdonald’s also needs to - because people often feel like an ice-cream. If they don’t provide ice-cream while BurgerKing does then they lose high margin Fries and Softdrink sales. By offering icecreams with the minimal tolerable 85% reliability (ice cream isn’t a deal breaker - few people cancel an order when they can’t get a sunday with it - but it is an enticer - they remember Mcdonald’s ice-cream is nicer than Burger King’s when they get it - it’s the equivalent of Wendy’s ice-cream but cheaper). So there’s a possibility they’ve figured out that 85% reliability maximises high margin sales and minimises low margin ones. Maybe they’ve figured out how to offer low cost high-quality ice-cream just enough of the time to maximise gross profit. A second order effect of 15% reliability - is the lack of reliability also discourages ice-cream orders - because - people try to avoid disappointment and decision making in group situations under time pressure. Markup on soft-drinks and fries are massive compared to ice-cream. As you mentioned Free flow ice-cream probably has the highest food safety management cost on top of the low gross margins. It also gives staff cold hands and melts quickly in summer. It’s not a great loss leader but an inescapable one. Their other option would be to raise ice-cream prices but wendy’s grade ice-cream is an enticer. It would possibly cost more profit than 85% reliability. There’s potential for profiting from co-operation on the lack of machine reliability but the franchisees will also be maximising profits by offering the minimal amount of ice-cream possible to not cost big-mac + frys + soft-drink sales. Mcdonald’s could possibly be paying high machine fees for exclusivity so Burger King doesn’t get an option of higher quality Ice-cream. The only person really missing out is someone wanting an ice-cream 15% of the time - who like the franchisee - may be disappointed in the reliability of the ice cream machine - but is also better off financially - even if they don’t realise it. A possible third order effect is it breaks food addictions to things like ordering thick shakes on the way to work - regular consumption of sugar + saturated fat is not a healthy combination. Health management is a large concern for Mcdonald’s. I’m happy with low-cost high quality ice-cream 85% of the time. I prefer that option to more expensive Ice-cream. I think this is part of the magic of the market economy. The invisible hand. Are carrot problems killed by their public disclosure? I hope not, I like the 85% probability of cheap delicious ice-cream. An amazing thing would be if there was tech in the machines making failure rates non random. I wonder if they fail more in winter than summer for instance which would educate the consumer about the lack of reliability so when summer comes less ice-cream is ordered. This just my 3 minute thought experiment (brain fart) but could be a great topic for a behavioural economist such as the freakonomics blog to cover.
deleted 3y ago
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320 points by jmsflknr 3y ago

lax4ever 3y ago

I am intrigued, delighted, incredibly supportive of this measure, and finally, laughing my ass off.

iancmceachern 3y ago

There are so many of these situations in medical devices. It's just the tip of the iceberg.

mewse-hn 3y ago
So.. one of the smokescreens Taylor uses is that their proprietary control software is necessary to ensure the sterilization procedures happen correctly, so they can trot out the argument "if you tamper with our machine you could kill somebody". But it's a damn ice cream machine. The stakes get a bit riskier when it comes to medical devices because it's much easier to imagine the scenario where you tamper with a pacemaker, you're going to kill somebody. You tamper with a dialysis machine, you're going to kill somebody. Same problem, different stakes.
- gruez 3y ago
  >so they can trot out the argument "if you tamper with our machine you could kill somebody". >But it's a damn ice cream machine. It's a machine holding fluids that are highly conducive to bacterial growth, and is a pain to clean because it has tons nooks and crannies. Someone dying (if there's a preexisting condition) or getting seriously sick due to subpar cleaning is very plausible. People get sick from improperly maintained ice machines[1], and those are arguably simpler and are holding less hazardous liquids (plain water rather than milk). [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29382408/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29382408/
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    And yet restaurant operators are allowed to open close their refrigerators and freezers at will, not subject to third party refrigerator maintenance company monopoly.
    - gruez 3y ago
      ...because they're not part of a franchise. Part of being a franchisee is that you're accepting the standards/regulations of the franchisor in exchange for use of their brand. I think it's very reasonable if mcdonalds had some sort of regulation like "all soda fountains must be disassembled and cleaned every 24 hours", and enforced that through hardware interlocks.
      - iancmceachern 3y ago
        Exactly, it's what they're selling (consistency and management). What I don't agree with is the proprietary lock out. Franchise owners should be able to replace the pump header with generic options.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        ghostpepper 3y ago
        Who guarantees the generic replacement is up to par? McDonald’s or the franchisee? Who suffers a greater cost if it turns out not to be?
        iancmceachern 3y ago
        For medical devoces its the manufacturer, and it's notified body. It's no different than for the origami manufacturer. It's all covered in ISO 13485 (and another similar standard for the software portion if your product contains software). It's called the risk based approach. You define what's called essential performance or your device, things it must do or the patient or caregiver is harmed. You then do a FMEA to determine what failure modes exist, and what the result of each failure is. You then make sure you have mitigation in place for each of those situations. You then document that all, get it signed off internally, by the FDA, by your notified body, and by the test house (for 14485, FCC testing, etc). All that makes up the stack of documents that allows you to sell a medical product. It's no different if it's a generic product or a new novel one, same process same standards. For food machinery it's also thr FDA for things like design and materials, and it's the local health department for those items. It's a similar but different ISO standard you need to meet depending on the specific machinery.
- rrauenza 3y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2023/08/22/1195207118/listeria-frugals-milkshakes-tacoma-three-dead https://www.npr.org/2023/08/22/1195207118/listeria-frugals-m... > Poorly cleaned ice cream machines at a Washington-based burger joint were linked to a listeria outbreak earlier this year that landed six people in the hospital, three of whom died. Two of those who were hospitalized told investigators they had milkshakes from the same restaurant before getting sick.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  You have it wrong. The stakes are actually higher for the ice cream machine. Inproper use of the ice cream machine could kill dozens. A pacemaker malfunction would just kill one at best. It's why airliners need to have triple redundant systems, doubke fault tolerant. Medical devices only need to be double redundant, single fault tolerant. I (dont) love it when people whonhave not ever designed a real medical device that's actually on the market make claims about what it's like to design a real medical device that's actually on the market.
ska 3y ago
Not saying it doesn't happen, but the situation in medical devices is more complicated.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  It's not really more complicated, just different. It's funny, the F in FDA stands for food, so you still need to deal with the FDA and its regulations, just different ones. Its really more of a paperwork/comiance thing than anything. I.e. genaric drugs. Source- I've designed medical devices and food processing equipment for 20 years.
  - ska 3y ago
    I shouldn't have been so terse. I didn't mean to suggest that the regulatory side didn't exist in commercial food equipment, obviously it does. OP seemed to suggest that medical devices was rife with situations parallel to McDonalds/Taylor, and that just doesn't seem to be the case; partially because the landscape is more complex in terms of who pays, how liability is distributed, and how the maintenance work is done, etc. Which isn't to say device industry doesn't have lots of its own problems, they just look different.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      I am OP, and the parent commenter to this comment both. I was making exactly the opposit point you are. I have actually worked directly with the manufacturer of the pumps in those machines (Watson marlow), and also designed and saw through to clinical release many similar complex medical devices with the same exact pumps. The situation is nearly identical between these two examples, it's just the names of the forms you need to fill out are different, and the division of the company that supplies your components is different, but it's all the same thing just a different name.
      - ska 3y ago
        Ok, I confused myself somehow about who I was replying to, my apologies. The OP is jmsflknr though, no? However, my point was not meant to be about the pump design nor the regulatory bodies involved, so I think we are just miscommunicating. My fault for quick replies. I was responding to "There are so many of these situations in medical devices." by which I took you to mean that there are many parallel situations the the McDonalds/Taylor issue in the linked article and the franchises inability to keep them in service, or accept 3rd party help in doing it; I read this as the core point of the article. When I said "things are more complicated" I meant the relationship between the various entities and how systems get deployed, managed, maintained, etc. doesn't look the same. So is that what you meant? It's possible you just mean there are similar technical issues in the pumps, something I'm happy to accept you have direct experience in; in that case I just misread you. If you had said there are similar (identical) pumps in some medical devices I would have understood it that way. It read to me like you were making a far broader claim.

zwieback 3y ago

I'm all for right-to-repair but if they hate their machines so much why isn't McD addressing the problem?

jandrese 3y ago
The franchisees hate the machines, but some people at the corporate level are I'm sure very happy with the big stacks of cash Taylor provides to insure the exclusivity. Reputational brand damage from having always broken Ice Cream machines is apparently less of a concern than losing those sweet greenbacks.
- phonon 3y ago
  There is no exclusivity. Franchisees can buy Carpigiani machines instead...but... "(McDonald’s agreement with franchisees also allows them to use an actual Italian machine, sold by Bologna-based Carpigiani, that McD Truth describes as much better designed. But given that its replacement parts can take a week to arrive from Italy, far fewer restaurants buy it.)" [1] [1] https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/#:~:text=McDonald%E2%80%99s%20agreement%20with%20franchisees%20also%20allows%20them%20to%20use%20an%20actual%20Italian%20machine%2C%20sold%20by%20Bologna%2Dbased%20Carpigiani%2C https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
  - netsharc 3y ago
    Seem like there's a market to be a buyer of a few thousand of the Italian machines state-side, in complete (for selling) and in parts (for repairs).
    - kyleee 3y ago
      Sounds expensive to get started but I wish someone would just to compete with the corrupt idiots at Taylor
    - phonon 3y ago
      Seems like they are pretty good! "Then there is the Carpigiani K3. Take all the issues with the Taylor C602 and fix them and then you have a K3. It's by far the better machine with tech support that anyone can call into. The only complaint is that most of the parameters are initialized before being translated from German to English." https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/jd2tbq/mcdonalds_ice_cream_machine/g981utj/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/jd2tbq/mcdonalds_ic...

hypercube33 3y ago

In case it's not discussed the ice cream machines are broken software wise. there was a big Todo about a third party who hacked it and sold a product that just made the firmware better or human friendly. McD stole it. these are so awful there is a website tracking when they are down at mcbroken

yorwba 3y ago
From the article: A company called Kytch built a small, third-party device that could be attached to the soft service ice cream machines that read and interpreted Taylor’s error codes. Kytch has been engaged in a lawsuit in California state court with Taylor and McDonald’s for more than two years.

_fat_santa 3y ago

A absolutely despise what companies like Taylor do. Rather than innovating their product, they realized its cheaper if they have their lawyers engineer a way to lock in their customers to their product over their competitors'. And you seem to see this more and more. It seems that these days the product quality itself doesn't matter, it's all about the contracts that your legal team setup in the background. I have to ask the engineers that work at these companies: does it bother you that the only reason people use your product is that they would get sued if they tried using another product? How does it make you feel that your product is so bad the only thing keeping your customers in the door is the contracts your legal team drew up.

rightbyte 3y ago
When deals are bad enough, a always suspect bribery. Unless it is public procurements, then I blame too strict lowest bidder rules.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  No, in public procurement it's still bribery. You just carefully tailor the tender to the company that the fix is already in for. When I worked in state government, every vendor of products was simply a middleman who marked a bunch of stuff up that you could easily buy from standard wholesale sources. Their catalogs would be three-hole binders of photocopies from other people's catalogs and printouts from ecommerce webpages with the prices whited out, and a pricelist typed up in word at the back. Every vendor of services was connected to an insider who tipped them off that purchases were about to be made. The lowest bidder was selected from the people who could jump through the hoops required to submit bids, and who also fit the carefully written RFP.
- Tangurena2 3y ago
  In the case of Quiznos, it was kickbacks from the service company. Even when your soda machine was still under warranty, the franchise agreement required the store owner to use only one "authorized" company to repair the machines and pay them $75 per visit. https://www.westword.com/news/youre-toast-5092405?showFullText=true https://www.westword.com/news/youre-toast-5092405?showFullTe... Westword is Denver's alternative weekly newspaper. Quiznos started in Denver.

abeppu 3y ago

> The Superior Court of Alameda County is charging roughly $1 per page to get legal filings. To download the entirety of the court proceedings to date, the court wants $2,999. I was surprised by this, b/c I've been able to view court documents for SF Superior Court without paying anything. AC even charges per search query! https://eportal.alameda.courts.ca.gov/?q=node/388 https://eportal.alameda.courts.ca.gov/?q=node/388

1123581321 3y ago
Are these allowed to be posted on RECAP? If so, the cost could at least be shared by multiple interested parties. (You can see some other Kytch legal proceedings there for free. https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=kytch%20vs%20gamble&type=r&order_by=score%20desc https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=kytch%20vs%20gamble&type=r&... )
manquer 3y ago
I don’t understand how is in well functioning democracy we can have secret courts and paywall for court documents They should be free and readily accessible even if they cost a lot to produce and host (which they don’t) - for civil litigation the claimants can pay any costs as part of filing fees - for criminal government can bear the cost as part of prosecution.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Probably left over from times when it all wasn't digital. You don't really want 10 people one after other to go and request all papers from all trials since the court started...
  - delfinom 3y ago
    Part of it is holdover from the paper era, part of it is because these court document systems are run by third parties that need to get paid. Court systems are underfunded nationwide to run their own IT/software dev and just pay for third parties outright to cover costs fully.

cheeseomlit 3y ago

>More than 480 documents have been filed with the court in that lawsuit, and a trial is scheduled for this fall. Even reading documents from this lawsuit is a costly nightmare of an affair. The Superior Court of Alameda County is charging roughly $1 per page to get legal filings. To download the entirety of the court proceedings to date, the court wants $2,999. That's absurd and should not be legal

pessimizer 3y ago
Yes. Why not $10K per page?
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Why not? If price has no relation to cost, why not raise the price until we don't have to worry about people looking at public records anymore?

JohnDeHope 3y ago

I bet they have already hacked the machine. They just need legal cover to release their smooth findings. Once the judge okays it, the details will be published in 3 days. I hope.

hgsgm 3y ago
As the article explains, the machines were hacked years ago.

Aaronstotle 3y ago

For anyone interested in a good video about this, there is YT video that details how the Ice Cream Machine's being broken is essentially a scheme that McDonald's corporate runs on their franchisees. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

voisin 3y ago
I am surprised the franchisees haven’t launched a class action. No other fast food chain has these issues.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Surely the franchise agreement would prohibit such an action?
  - voisin 3y ago
    I am not sure such a clause would be upheld in a scenario where the franchisor blatantly acts in bad faith outside of industry norms to fleece the franchisee. There is a reasonable expectation of good faith.
    - liveoneggs 3y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchisees.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/business/subway-franchise...
  - krisoft 3y ago
    It's probably not even that. As a franchise you are under the thumb of the big corporation. They have a lot more money, and a lot more leverage to break you if you start suing them. They can probably inspect your premises, find 200 violations normally overlooked and then suspend your right to use their branding or suppliers. Sure you might win eventually, maybe in court. And then maybe you can sue them that the inspection happened in retaliation, but do you really want to risk that?

neilv 3y ago

I'm sympathetic to right-to-repair, in general, but this argument bothers me: > “The current barriers to these works include service passwords and digital locks,” the petition reads. “Commercial ice cream machines, such as the Taylor manufactured ice cream machines used by McDonald’s, frequently fall into disrepair when its daily pasteurization cycle fails. Circumventing the digital lock on the software would enable owners and repair professionals to diagnose and perform the necessary repairs to get these devices back up and running.” They're talking about a safety-sensitive process failing and consequently locking out use... mere syllables before asking for the ability to circumvent locks. Which prompts the concern that some fast food employees, their managers or small business owners, sketchier repairpeople, and Aliexpress gadgets are going to effectively use that lock circumvention ability to circumvent a safety feature, eventually killing children whose parents treated them to ice cream cones.

Benanov 3y ago
You're conflating "I can't get the diagnostic repair codes that Taylor can" with "Kids are going to get hurt because the machine is malfunctioning" Please stop doing that.
- neilv 3y ago
  See, you can casually whip out a more persuasive (or less self-defeating) argument than they did, in their presumably carefully crafted petition.
- gruez 3y ago
  > You're conflating "I can't get the diagnostic repair codes that Taylor can" with "Kids are going to get hurt because the machine is malfunctioning" But the article and the linked vice.com article suggests that the device isn't just decoding error codes, it's also providing a hardware bypass for safety features like lockouts.
  - spiderxxxx 3y ago
    no, the article says "groups seek permission from the government to break arbitrary software locks and passwords that keep consumers and repair professionals from diagnosing and repairing equipment they own or are authorized by the owner to work on." It doesn't mention "lockouts", or bypassing safety features. It's about access to the machine, and the diagnostics that a repair person has access to, but the owner does not.

rtbathula 3y ago

It's a violation of patent laws. And I can summarize it in one expression from the novel Atlas Shrugged "Why Rearden could only have Rearden Metal?"

Clent 3y ago
In which direction?
- rtbathula 3y ago
  In which direction it's not? McDonald has a copyright of their machine — others shouldn't reproduce it. It's like saying some movie has bad scenes and I want the right to fix it by violating the copyright.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Ok, so first off, you can't copyright a whole machine. Patents cover ideas, copyright covers creative expression, which legally includes software. And the specific part of the law iFixit is worried about is DMCA 1201 which covers software that is designed to prevent copying of copyrighted works. In the specific case of Kytch, they built another machine that reads error codes off the electronics on a machine that deliberately attempts to hide the error codes from McDonalds franchisees. This doesn't modify the software on those electronics, so there isn't a copyright violation. And Taylor doesn't have a patent on usable error codes or reading them off a machine deliberately designed to obscure them. This shouldn't be covered by any reading of DMCA 1201, but they want the Copyright Office to say, "yes, this is legal" anyway. I'm not entirely sure why you're invoking Ayn Rand in your grandparent comment.
    - rtbathula 3y ago
      Although different items can come together to form a product, it is McDonald's who brought them together as a WHOLE. This is strictly their property, and they have the right to keep their trade secrets, regardless of how bad they are. If customers have problems with the machines, they should not buy them or use them. They have the freedom to choose. Additionally, if McDonald's has defrauded them in any way, they should sue McDonald's. There is a free choice. iFixit may be great engineers who can perform magic, but they are literally asking Congress for an exemption to violate copyright law. This will not end with McDonald's; others will follow suit. As for Ayn Rand's argument, because it provides the right expression in one line.

mig39 3y ago

Capitalism always trends towards lock-in and monopoly rather than the free market. Once upon a time, governments would step in and ensure a free market.

EMIRELADERO 3y ago

I may be wrong, but I thought this "exemption" wasn't required in the first place. DMCA 1201 applies to copyrighted material, and even then, only to measures that control access to the work. The Chamberlain v. Skylink case in the court of appeals for the Federal Circuit (which is binding in all other federal courts) established that the prohibitions can't apply to software the user is already entitled to use. The Court put it this way: "Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software."

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

For anyone who wants full details on this story, there is an 82-page complaint by Kytch against McDonalds for false/misleading descriptions under the Lanham Act, including a number of other state law claims. A must-read for anyone who finds this dispute entertaining. https://ia902502.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.ded.78199/gov.uscourts.ded.78199.1.0.pdf https://ia902502.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.ded.781...

mcpackieh 3y ago

McDonalds employees pretty consistently can't even get "no pickles" right. Does it really surprise people if McDonalds corp wants all dairy machine maintenance done by actual professionals instead of overworked/disinterested/whatever/etc teenagers? If Taylor were scamming McDonalds, or were bribing somebody in McDonalds corp to go along with it, McDonalds corp lawyers would be crawling all over them. That evidently isn't happening, so it seems safe to assume that Taylor is doing exactly what McDonalds corp thinks they should be doing. If a burger shop proprietor doesn't like this, they're free to open their own burger shop without a McDonalds franchise. It shouldn't be hard for them to sell a superior product, but they'd lose access to McDonald's reputation. And protecting that reputation is probably the entire point of this ice-cream machine drama.

greedo 3y ago
Exactly! I remember one night closing our store. I was 16, and the dude in charge of cleaning the shake machine and the sundae machine was a bit of a stoner. Back in the day all the cleaning was manual (1982). So the dude would pull out all of the frozen shake mix, then run a soapy water mix through it, then a sanitizer rinse. Took some time, and closing was always a rush. So he either forgot or decided to skip the sanitizer rinse. Now if you put soap in dairy products, you end up giving people diarrhea. So a few days later we got a lot of complaints and the guy ended up being fired. He was dumb enough to joke about it. It's not like it was his career; he was 18 and headed to college somewhere. For $2.10/hour, that's what you got. If the manager didn't doublecheck everything, stuff like this happened. McDonalds tech is designed around the following principle; "Imagine how stupid the average person is, then realize half of all people are stupider than that."
- manquer 3y ago
  By your logic we shouldn’t allow kids at all near food preparation and treat it like medical devices and require years of training to operate let alone fix them ? There is a middle ground between let 15 year old kids fix it and only allow company technician who is billed at hundreds of dollars a hour to fix a common and trivial problem which a third party technician could do it for much less and much faster

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The meta point I heard the other day was that property law used to givern how we use things, but that computing has changed all interactions into contract law. Instead of having broad governance by government of how we relate to property, each company is free to create it's own set of laws governing use (free to ensnare us as it will). What a wretched abomination! This imposes against the spirit of man the toolmaker, man the creator, man the scientist to let each company prohibit exploration & understanding & fiddling with the things they have released unto the world. Black boxes are against the Enlightenment spirit that has given rise to society. Ah, it was a point in Web scraping for me but not for thee, and cited in this comment, citing a 20 year old Mark Lemley observation in Terms of Use, https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-for-me-but-not-for-thee-guest-blog-post.htm https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/08/web-scraping-f... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37264970

listenallyall 3y ago

Is everyone 100% sure it's McDonald's machines that are faulty? Couldn't it be that McDonald's specific ice cream mix or blend is just a little bit thicker, or stickier, or whatever, and that would increase the failure rate of any brand or model of soft-serve machine?

Waterluvian 3y ago

I’ve never ever come across a broken McDonald’s soft serve machine in Canada. Is there something fundamentally different going on up here or is this an outlier? Any other Canadians able to chime in?

rascul 3y ago

Some decades back I had worked at several different McDonald's and the ice cream machines were a major thing because so much revenue came from them. The machines were cleaned on schedule and the rare times they broke there was someone out the next day to get it working again. As a customer, I can only recall one time when I wanted McDonald's ice cream that the machine wasn't working. I'm curious to know if my experience is an outlier or maybe things have changed. Or perhaps some franchises don't put as high a priority on the ice cream, or perhaps even the claims are a bit exaggerated. Or maybe something else that I'm not considering.

dghlsakjg 3y ago
I feel like I live in an alternate universe. I have never once tried to get ice cream at McDonald’s and been denied. Meanwhile, it seems like everyone else only talks about how they can never get ice cream at a McDonald’s.

iancmceachern 3y ago

In case you want to fix your own machine Ifixit just posted this on youtube: https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA?si=3QKEVGyt3hYsbGng https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA?si=3QKEVGyt3hYsbGng

not_your_vase 3y ago

I wish they'd rather petition for real right to repair, instead of selling screwdrivers and full PS4 Slim Optical Drive assemblies, but not a single sheet of schematics. I guess that would look very differently in the eyes of the companies who recently became their BFFs.

vitalurk 3y ago

This is a well documented thing. McDs is colluding with their buddies to artificially make money via bogus broken machines. They make way more money with this scam rather than selling their legally not even called ice cream, simply due to the sheer magnitude of the contract to repair. What a boring dystopia.

mk_stjames 3y ago

Something that I don't see discussed in the comments yesterday: There seems to be this other company that made a device to read error codes, and then theres legal trouble surrounding that and the copyright on the firmware of the original controller board. But all this seems like not the best approach- The electronics on the original boards themselves do not appear that complicated. This machine itself, mechanically, cannot have all that sophisticated of mechatronic interface. Why not just circumvent everything with a completely new 3rd party control board that replaces the OE electronics completely and runs the machines? People design and develop systems every day for fun even that are an order of magnitude more complicated than the control system of this ice cream machine. Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system. At some point if they are leased, breaking the lease and buying the machines outright and then upgrading the controls would potentially be the way forward for the franchises. Unless in the lease there is a clause that breaking the lease requires repossession of the hardware from the premises. At which point franchises need to stand up to McDonalds corporate and demand a new supplier of machines of a new design.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
To latch onto your comment: What about competition? Ice cream machines are not complicated, relatively speaking. Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation? They could build their own - high efficiency, high quality, high reliability, low maintenance cost - line of ice cream machines and distribute them to the... over 40.000 McD's franchises worldwide.
- ilovetux 3y ago
  The company that they purchase ice cream machines from make reliable, efficient machines for other resteraunts. McDonalds corporate has a stipulation that franchisees mist purchase the same, old ice cream machines. The major problem with them, as I understand it, is that any sort of malfunction leads to the machine shutting down and displaying an archaic, nonsensical error code. When you look the code up and how to resolve it almost always says that you need to call a licensed maintenance tech. It is all about propping up the service division of the machine's OEM.

trhow234898 3y ago

Ice cream machines are not printers with cartridges. If you allow unqualified labor do "refills", there will be food contamination and people will die! But we let worse things slide, so who cares. Enjoy your ice cream! :)

bushbaba 3y ago
I think it’s more franchise owners sign an agreement. The device should be legal if you or I buy this machine. However installing it at McDonalds by a non “certified tech” might be in violation of the franchise contract
quickthrower2 3y ago
Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. So the only people smart enough to repair them safely are the manufacturers? So only take your car to the dealership for a service?
- trhow234898 3y ago
  I would not let typical McDonald worker anywhere near my car. Meat is cooked just before the use, it does not get poisonous very easily. Ice cream is very different. How would you ensure that managers throw away "good enough" batches of ice cream every evening?
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The franchisee should be able to use any qualified repair person who can use any suitable parts. That is what right to repair is about. Not the right to break health and safety laws.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      The thing is, there are few industries that are as cut-throat as fast food. Wherever franchisees see an opportunity to save even a couple dozen bucks, they will take it, laws don't matter. And enforcement is pretty lacking in itself. Most people won't report it to the authorities that they got the runs from some ice cream, the authorities will only hear about it when dozens of people arrive at the hospital with the same symptoms, and even then most public health departments have already been understaffed prior to COVID to follow up on the hospital reports and conduct inspections. What McD/Taylor are doing here is, as fucked up as it is, the only meaningful way they can make sure they're not labeled a public health risk.

assimpleaspossi 3y ago

It needs to be said that this is not "ice cream" and McDonald's doesn't call it that. In fact, there is very little cream in this soft serve product.

code_duck 3y ago
Ice cream has a legal definition in the US, and it doesn’t require cream as an ingredient. >Ice cream shall contain at least 1.6 pounds of total solids to the gallon, weigh not less than 4.5 pounds to the gallon, and contain not less than 20 percent total milk solids, constitued of not less than 10 percent milkfat. In no case shall the content of milk solids not fat be less than 6 percent. Whey shall not, by weight, be more than 25 percent of the milk solids not fat. Whether McDonald’s product meets that standard, I am not sure.
- judge2020 3y ago
  They just call it "creamy vanilla soft serve" so they don't have to worry about whether or not it can be called ice cream. https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/mcflurry-with-oreo-cookies.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/mcflurry-with-ore...
- dylan604 3y ago
  Whenever I read government definitions of food, I find myself no longer hungry for "food".
- assimpleaspossi 3y ago
  In order to meet that standard, cream must be introduced to get that amount of fat and solids. So, no, it doesn't meet that standard. If it did, McD would advertise it as such and they don't. In addition, real ice cream purveryors would be up in arms over it. And they have in the past.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
In UK they're called "McFlurry", in the desserts menu, but the description is "Soft dairy ice cream, swirled with ...". The ice-cream ingredients are: "Ice Cream Ingredients: EITHER: Allergen Ingredient: Skimmed MILK, Sugar, Cream (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Whey Powder (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Glucose Syrup, Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Carrageenan), Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Flavouring. OR: Allergen Ingredient: Reconstituted Skimmed MILK, Cream (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Sugar, Whey Powder (Allergen Ingredient: MILK), Glucose Syrup, Allergen Ingredient: Skimmed MILK Powder, Stabilisers (Guar Gum, Carrageenan), Emulsifier (Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Flavouring." Source: https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/galaxy-salted-caramel-mcflurry.html https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/product/galaxy-salted-car...

lucidguppy 3y ago

I think there's some pretty good podcasts about this. Essentially - this should be a fight between franchisees and McD's. It's also a bad look for McD - yes let's get a lot of bad PR about how we screw over franchisees. If they do that to their partners - what do you think they're doing to the food? Who are we kidding - we know what they do to the food. The less you deal with the arches the better.

Loughla 3y ago
McDonald's used to hit a sweet spot. For most people, food needs to be fast, cheap, and/or good. My theory is that it needs to be two of the three of those. Until about 2 years ago, it used to be cheap and fast. Now it's neither of those things. My bellwether is my youngest. He's 10 and would rather just eat at home if McDonald's is the only option. Last week he chose peanut butter sandwiches instead of chicken nuggets when we knew we'd be actively on the road during supper. So that's something.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The food around here hasn’t changed much, but price increases have removed and real discounts compared to “high end fast food” and there’s not a real major reason to still choose the McDs.
- conductr 3y ago
  My kid is price agnostic but has had a couple bad experiences that turned him off. I think more due to labor/staffing issues than anything else. But they slipped a pickle in his burger once (very unappreciated) and the nuggets came under cooked once (also very unappreciated) so he’d actively boycotting although he doesn’t really know it

Simulacra 3y ago

It almost makes you wonder if there's some sort of McDonald's kickback scheme here. They make the franchisees take the machine, knowing it's going to break down, which makes the franchise owners have to pay through the nose to get it fixed, and then which McDonald's gets a kickback. When you have a machine that fails that often, and has become that much of a publicity problem, you would think a company like McDonald's would say OK enough is enough, we're changing the machines.

gruez 3y ago
>It almost makes you wonder if there's some sort of McDonald's kickback scheme here. Given that there's been a lawsuit between the OEM and the startup making mods for the machine for 2 years and no such documents have been found in discovery, my guess is no.
- orangepurple 3y ago
  The conspiracy is a proven fact, no longer merely a theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXwD_HeC8Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXwD_HeC8Ms
  - gruez 3y ago
    >58:42 video There's no way I'm sitting through all that, and the chapter headings aren't very helpful either. Can you link to a specific timestamp?

thomasfl 3y ago

McDonald's ice cream machines, is the holy grail of the right to repair movement.

Spivak 3y ago
Yeah, can't believe that in 2023 the quest to find a sympathetic defendant for basic consumer protections laws is when the lack of protections harms corporate profits. This is bad for the people you are elected to represent -- snooze. This is bad for your stock portfolio -- we have to act now!
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  The issues with the ice cream machines at McDonald's go far beyond anyone's desire for profit and has become a cultural meme that anyone who has desired a frozen dairy products from McDonald's in the past decade can relate to.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >anyone who has desired a frozen dairy products from McDonald's That's a sentence I wasn't expecting to read, ever. There are only two types of people that I have ever met that would fall into that category: kids, who don't know any better about what food stuff they eat, and addicts.
    - lukas099 3y ago
      Believe it or not, it is possible to be healthy and occasionally have an ice cream cone.
      - dylan604 3y ago
        As stated plenty of times elsewhere in these comments, the white cold squishy substance coming out of a McDonald's machine is NOT ice cream.

Hippocrates 3y ago

I didn't catch any explanation of why McDonalds is still using these machines if it is such an issue. I've had plenty of soft serve from other machines that tastes just the same, or better. Also, what reasoning did McDonalds corporate have for telling franchisees not to use the device? This must be some bizarre and long contractual agreement between McD and Taylor

ethbr1 3y ago
McDonald's corporate and restaurants interests aren't always financially aligned. They seem to be moreso than the abuser that is Subway, but I expect this is a situation where what's good for McD corporate isn't what's good for franchisees.
- DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
  I’m fact restaurant franchisees and the franchiser are typically in a state of near-conflict. They have very different incentives and methods of making money. The notable exception is Denny’s, who go to great lengths to foster good relations with their franchisees and let them have an actual say in how corporate runs.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  when the machines are properly maintained they work. source - worked at a mom and pop franchise of mcd way back. Corporate franchisees cut corners a lot and cause the machines to error out. onus is on them to pay for repairs and suffer down time and lost sales. customers like ice cream and MCD corporate are partners with the company making the machines so they gain and it's technically not their own issue.
synchronizing 3y ago
Johnny Harris (filmmaker journalist) made a great video on topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 In short, McDonald's continues to use these frequently malfunctioning ice cream machines due to their long-standing exclusive partnership with Taylor. The cost of repairs fall on the local franchise owners, not McD Corp.

listenallyall 3y ago

Have you considered the possibility that McDonald's proprietary soft-serve mix is the source of the problem, and not the machines themselves?

notjonheyman 3y ago

What a situation to be in when you're in the business of real estate first, big macs second.

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hayst4ck 3y ago

Johnny Harris did some pretty quality journalism on this which provides some great context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 It is much more interesting than I expected. Namely, that McDonald's franchises agree to only use repair labor from a contractually enforced monopoly. McDonalds and the ice cream machine company collude to extract money from franchises. He also compares McDonald's ice cream machines to Wendy's, which are the same brand under a different contract scheme and finds that Wendy's does not have the same problems.

smearth 3y ago
I see it slightly differently although his research is great. I think this could be one of those carrot problems. I think there’s a possibility Mcdonald’s hates that they need to sell Ice-cream. There’s a probability Icecream’s an inescapaable loss leader and their lowest margin item and that it is a poor loss leader due to it’s substitution effect with probably their highest margin product - soft-drinks. Because neighbouring restaurants offer ice-cream - Mcdonald’s also needs to - because people often feel like an ice-cream. If they don’t provide ice-cream while BurgerKing does then they lose high margin Fries and Softdrink sales. By offering icecreams with the minimal tolerable 85% reliability (ice cream isn’t a deal breaker - few people cancel an order when they can’t get a sunday with it - but it is an enticer - they remember Mcdonald’s ice-cream is nicer than Burger King’s when they get it - it’s the equivalent of Wendy’s ice-cream but cheaper). So there’s a possibility they’ve figured out that 85% reliability maximises high margin sales and minimises low margin ones. Maybe they’ve figured out how to offer low cost high-quality ice-cream just enough of the time to maximise gross profit. A second order effect of 15% reliability - is the lack of reliability also discourages ice-cream orders - because - people try to avoid disappointment and decision making in group situations under time pressure. Markup on soft-drinks and fries are massive compared to ice-cream. As you mentioned Free flow ice-cream probably has the highest food safety management cost on top of the low gross margins. It also gives staff cold hands and melts quickly in summer. It’s not a great loss leader but an inescapable one. Their other option would be to raise ice-cream prices but wendy’s grade ice-cream is an enticer. It would possibly cost more profit than 85% reliability. There’s potential for profiting from co-operation on the lack of machine reliability but the franchisees will also be maximising profits by offering the minimal amount of ice-cream possible to not cost big-mac + frys + soft-drink sales. Mcdonald’s could possibly be paying high machine fees for exclusivity so Burger King doesn’t get an option of higher quality Ice-cream. The only person really missing out is someone wanting an ice-cream 15% of the time - who like the franchisee - may be disappointed in the reliability of the ice cream machine - but is also better off financially - even if they don’t realise it. A possible third order effect is it breaks food addictions to things like ordering thick shakes on the way to work - regular consumption of sugar + saturated fat is not a healthy combination. Health management is a large concern for Mcdonald’s. I’m happy with low-cost high quality ice-cream 85% of the time. I prefer that option to more expensive Ice-cream. I think this is part of the magic of the market economy. The invisible hand. Are carrot problems killed by their public disclosure? I hope not, I like the 85% probability of cheap delicious ice-cream. An amazing thing would be if there was tech in the machines making failure rates non random. I wonder if they fail more in winter than summer for instance which would educate the consumer about the lack of reliability so when summer comes less ice-cream is ordered. This just my 3 minute thought experiment (brain fart) but could be a great topic for a behavioural economist such as the freakonomics blog to cover.

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