Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]
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It turns out this company makes machines for lots of other fast food chains but McDonald's is the only one with this problem, and it seems to be intentional to allow Taylor to milk mcds franchisees.
It gets stranger when you realize that the majority of the problems seem to stem from the manufacturer purposely designing their machines to prevent their customers from operating them properly to inflate the need for maintenance .. even going so far as to silence an invention that allowed the machine to display human readable error messages to allow the operator to know things like if the hopper was too full to run the cleaning cycle.
And from McDonalds point of view this makes sense and is ethical. The minute you start letting the franchise people make these repairs, they will inevitably cut corners (and get away with it 99% of the time). However, at McDonalds’ scale that would likely result in dozens of people dying at a minimum and huge brand loss.
Yes, it's deadly, this is exactly the reason why we should make sure that McDonalds staff can properly operate their icecream machines by making the machine as easy to use as possible. If you have untrained staff that keep running the machine out of specs because the machine is cryptic and user hostile to them then operator errors could slip past the machine self checks because machines aren't perfectly reliable.
By instructing McDonalds franchises how to properly operate their machines and by updating the UI of the machines to properly warn of dangerous operating conditions the franchises can achieve greater safety for McDonalds customers.
As it is right now, McDonalds is actively endangering its customers with these machines.
I would say it is quite clearly the opposite. Anything which could introduce safety risks to a customer necessitates a visit from a trained service technician to investigate.
Listeriosis is rare, but if every McDonalds were serving spoiled dairy products, a one-in-a-million chance results in several deaths.
It’s clearly a McDonald’s Corporate sanctioned plan.
It's possible that someone at corporate is getting kickbacks.
On second thought, not exactly the megacorp, but the franchise owners.
When people think about “broken like a McDonalds ice cream machine”, I think McD can legitimately ask Taylor for damages at corporate level.
The two questions in my mind after watching:
1. What makes McDonald's corp okay with it?
2. What is the difference between the arrangement with McDonald's and the other franchises/chains? (Wendy's, In'n'Out, etc.)
This feels more like someone not in the know of the real problems finding a false complaint that seems worse than it is.
Sure. Which is why my default youtube playback speed is 1.5X.
Firefox, YT only: https://www.mrfdev.com/enhancer-for-youtube The improved playback speed ranges from 25% to 400% (also 800% but without audio) in adjustable increments.
For offline videos, VLC also is capable of changing playback speed.
Edit: I see some podcasts app have something similar (albeit opposite). It shortens dead space between two people talking and try to not affect the speed of their speech.
I find that most videos are understandable up to 3x. I watch most of them at 2.5-2.8x, down to 2x for people that talk fast or with a hard accent. Same for podcasts.
The machines are filled with a dairy product which makes the “ice cream”. This is boiled nightly to keep the mixture free of bacteria. If the nightly heat cycle fails to complete for one of a dozen reasons the machine locks out. Those unaware of the process usually end up calling for service even if it’s a operations error(not enough product to boil successfully)
Every two weeks the machine must be torn down and cleaned. It’s slightly complex but all well documented. Once the 14 day marker has been passed the machine is inoperable. It must be cleaned for food safety reasons. If your “cleaner” is out or you just have poor operations you’ll end up placing service calls out of confusion.
If the heat phase fails or the 14 day timer has expired the machine "locks out" and becomes inoperable. This is where the vast majority of service calls come from.
I never had an issue with a machine that was less than 20 years old. Taylor makes good equipments you just need the most basic level of operations proficiency.
1. Keeping the machine full of the right amount of product to complete it's nightly heat cycle
2. Have someone trained to fully clean the machine every 14 days
Is a burden too great for many franchisees to bear. The turnover is too high and investment in people too low to keep them operational. Nothing about them is "broken"
Did you see the video?
I guess it's a typical big company nonsense. Someone probably had an idea that daily cleaning is too time-consuming and expensive, and the task to solve that problem was introduced. Some lab made tests, and defined The Only True Way of keeping the product edible. (Side note: re-boiling a mix of fats and sugars each day for two weeks? Who would eat the result of that? Who thought it was a reliable idea?) The cleaning period could only be stretched to the maximum, for obvious business reasons. That resulted in tiny error margins (which maker can't voluntary change without spending money on new research). So presentations on clear financial gains were made, and the new option was proudly implemented. Some employee has probably been keeping eye on changes in cream composition, regulations, and related research, and issuing new checks for the machines. However, in reality this doesn't work that well (even indifferent part-time workers who don't give a damn after a shift are part of reality you can't simply rule out). But the goal of reverting or altering the process is not really important to McDonalds, as making it work is now pain in the store owner's ass.
You have probably noticed similar cases in computing, when some high-tech solution are introduced, and their gains are shared with lots of pathos, but the resulting system looks way too complex and unstable even from a distance.
I suggest you read the Wired article that came out a few days ago, as it addresses a lot of the questions being asked here.
https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
It should be worth noting that the story in this video and the Wired article appears to have been initiated by the creators of the Kytch.
I'm not sure if you've worked at McDonalds (you've never specifically stated in any comment) and you've never specified when. Is it possible things are different now to when (or whichever franchise) you worked?
This example is covered in the video. ;) The thing is, at least according to the reporting, even these operations errors are not clearly defined by the messages given by the machine. So, according to franchisees they talked to, all roads lead to the service technician, even if the problem doesn’t need one. That obviously leads to more downtime.
It’s part of the problem because Taylor is incentivized to keep people calling in technicians, which means they deliberately update the machines with error codes even more difficult to understand. (Examples covered in the video too)
Additionally, the video covers that many other chains, such as Wendy’s, use machines from Taylor with no problems. Supposedly, this is something specifically wrong with the model given to McDonald’s, because franchises don’t have a choice to use other models.
When the video came out, about 14% of machines in the US were “broken”, which is pretty terrible for an industry application regardless of the cause!
I never worked anywhere else with a Taylor machine. Perhaps other companies have better deals or easier to use equipment. I would like to know if Wendy's and others machines operate using the same food safety standards.
Was that technician for free? Or did your franchise owner pay for it, out of (your) sight? The claim isn't that they do a poor job with technicians, just that they are perversely incentivized to profit from it.
The video also explains there was a (very limited) owner manual, while all the secrets were in the service manual. Which of those did you have access to?
I find it potentially a bit of a low blow to question Wendy's and others' food safety standards.
Did you see the video?
McDonald’s is much more political than people think. The franchise I worked for was very well connected and well represented. It’s possible that this access was something they pushed for or is not well known.
Why do they keep an item on the menu if they are not being able to make it reliably?
Now there's a ton of competition and specialty shops, but in the past this wasn't always the case. A small town might only have one other location where you can get "fresh" ice cream. If you can execute on this machine properly and you have the market to support it they can be huge profit makers.
You expect people to RTFM.... come one this is 2021 no one reads manuals any more...
//wish that as sarcasm but the number of times I have seen a solution to a problem that plagued people for weeks be found clearly laid out in the manual for a given product is far to high
I do believe this happens but I'm also "skeptical" of the ability of a high attrition place with underqualified workers working under pressure to get themselves up to date in maintenance practices and manuals.
Edit: and yes, the franchisees are the ones who get the short stick. Franchises are thorny and usually not in the favour of the franchisee.
1. The high-attrition low-skill workforce at fast food restaurants is a fact of the industry. (I am not endorsing it either.) So if a solution is failing widely when faced with the reality of its users, then the system is flawed not the users.
Of course, you might argue that it’s impossible to build a system that works with this type of users, which leads to:
2. The video argues that failure rates at competing fast food restaurants are vastly lower. While I can’t verify this myself, if we assume it’s true then it’s strong evidence that the problem here is unique to McDonalds and therefore doesn’t represent some systematic impossibility.
I don’t care much about ice cream machines, but in the broader technological sense I dislike “users are the problem” arguments. The whole point of tech is to make users’ lives easier. When other people are doing that and you’re not, there is a problem.
No other piece of equipment has the mix of complexity and niche impact on the restaurant. Even the brand new at the time espresso machines are mostly self cleaning. There's no other object that requires this(minor IMO) skill level to operate. So it's just left undone. It's widely regarded that while it's a high profit machine most of the time you can run a highly successful business without it.
McD is known for making their processes simple and repeatable and it seems the machine is failing that paradigm.
(And oh well, my comment was speculative and made before I saw the video, the users really can't do much when the company hides information from them - though we don't know exactly how the procedures are laid down in the manual and how they can be improved. it's one thing if the manual says "fill this up and press the button" another if it says "fill this up to this line and check A, B and C before pressing the button")
Which, coincidentally, is based on Frederick Taylor's theory of Scientific Management. Pretty sure Frederick Taylor and the Taylor making the ice cream machines aren't connected in any way though.
That lends a decent amount of credence to a 'process' issue. If that many people are messing it up. Then something is wrong either in the physical or training realm or both. I usually have to have this conversation every few years when someone says 'oh we will just train the users'. Then I go 'dude I know how this should work and I am totally lost, do you expect someone who does not give much of a crap about it to pick it up?'.
One thing the vid misses though is the lockout rate could be coming from mcdonalds itself in a different way. They do not want to end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit and bad publicity. Remember the lady who spilt coffee on herself, and got 2nd/3rd degree burns. That cost them a lot of time, money and bad press. So they may have set the machines to be oversensitive.
Sure in general McDonald's is. However there are always a few people who have been around for years who know a lot more than the average worker. They are in management or maintenance. They have more training, and better wages. (not to be confused with the person who has been there forever but never advanced to such a position)
So a franchisee-specific training problem would make a lot of sense.
To give an IT analogy if an IT department staffed based on corporate's seemingly random rolls of the dice it could be painful to make sure weekly backups get done weekly, for example. Especially if the only feedback was when the restore process occasionally broke down. Whereas if some dude is always at work every Friday morning at 8am he can get in the habit of being the guy who always runs the backups. Also imagine if the only way to run backups was to flip the power switch for a half hour and hope you know how to complete the backup in less than a half hour... nobody wants to be that guy who shut off the DB server even if maint is required...
If it's the same person for 5+ years, I can guarantee there's nothing accurate written down (even in regulated industries).
Given the two problems, I've seen more dumpster fires as a result of the latter than the former.
McDonalds franchisees are always in a tug of war with the company over various issues, especially loss leader products like ice cream and the dollar menu. Thus, it mysteriously “breaks”.
In some markets, a cone is $0.29 — it’s a money loser that the franchisee doesn’t like and probably doesn’t drive traffic in many locations.
I’d look at the human element before declaring a major manufacturer of a simple product incompetent. They wouldn’t be consistently failing for their biggest customer over many years.
Remember that McD the company has nothing to loose from failing ice cream machines. That loss is taken by the franchise owners
because their machines don't self-sanitize.
In several years of working there I cannot recall any breakdowns of these machines.
Every morning the goo was put back in, and there was never a complaint, or a down day. I rang up a lot of $1.00 Softies.
(Loved my coworkers. Still think about them all the time. The greatest group of people I had ever met. Hated the private sector corporation who did everything they could to lower the percent they had to give back to the government.)
All you need is one kid that didn't wipe their ass correctly before assembling the beaters and you've got a health problem in the making. The self-sterilizing machines were designed to prevent this.
the higher frequency of machine breakdown probably should first be linked to frequency of use, rather than trying to find something nefarious going on.
"But what makes the machine special is that it has two hoppers and two barrels, each working independently with precise settings, to produce both milkshakes and soft serve simultaneously."[1]
1: https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
Do the franchise owners want that increased cost and reliability?
This seems entirely reasonable to me. I've heard horror stories about bacteria & mold growth in commercial ice machines from infrequent cleanings.
But...how high is the barrier to entry to becoming a "certified" ice cream machine cleaner? How much training is required, how much does it cost, etc?
In other words:
> Once the 14 day marker has been passed the machine is inoperable.
Who has "admin rights" to reset this "most recently cleaned" timestamp?
Is there any reason why I, if I'm a McDonald's manager, couldn't take the training myself, and be the person who does the every-two-weeks maintenance?
I'd go out on a limb and say that it's McDonalds corporate that doesn't trust the franchise owner with the machine, not the manufacturer trying to swindle franchise owners.
The question remains - what's the barrier to entry to becoming "certified" as an ice cream machine cleaner?
Is it legitimately a difficult cleaning process that requires an extremely specialized skill-set that only the High Priests of Ice Cream Machinery are able to perform?
Or, as seems likely to me, cleaning the machine is relatively simple, but the ability to reset the "time since last cleaning" setting may be artificially restricted?
If I were the manufacturer of these Taylor ice cream machines, setting them up with a "one of our certified technicians needs to touch them at least once every 14 days, or they stop working" seems like an excellent way to seek rent / generate passive income.
It's "artificially restricted" in the same way that I could give anyone a key to my house (duplication is trivial) very easily but I don't.
Suggesting the franchise owner do it or even the store manager is far off from how these operations work in my experience.
Franchisees (Owners) have so much to do. They never "have" to work a single shift after they complete onboarding. While this can take around 9-12 months once most are done they never look back. Owners are tasked with running and growing the business, focusing on their local community and the people element. Any equipment work is not considered a good use of their time.
In other words: Store employees can do all of the basic stuff necessary with the machine.
Again, though, the machines have likely changed (Though they probably work similarly). And if the current machines need cleaned and sanitized less often, employees probably don't do it as often. I'm gonna guess instructions can fix this, though.
There’s no admin reset or anything like that. There is a maintenance menu and an admin menu but even in the higher level “secret” menus changing this was never an option. I’ve seen people try and short the main board with a screwdriver to get it to “reset” the date.
It’s a very intelligent machine and when it’s cleaned you need to go through the cleaning “process” in the menu. Wash, rinse, sanitize etc. it monitors the process with various sensors and it being flushed so many times. Faking it isn’t an option, I’ve seen too many people try.
Specifically McDonalds? The video states these problem aren't experienced at the same magnitude at other franchises, and alleges that McDonalds franchisees are locked into purchasing a downgraded model with indecipherable error messages.
You have pointed out that when the machine locks out, there is an actual reason behind it. I don't think anyone claimed that it's simply triggered by an RNG or a timer.
However, why are the machines this opaque and difficult to keep running? I think the point has been clearly made, that an incentive structure optimises for low reliability. Nothing you said contradicts this.
Here it is again, to save searching through the comments: https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
[edited to add link]
Any time the franchisees try and circumvent the system of corporate it brings massive amounts of force to the table. Mcdonald's 100% intolerant of any kind of franchisee revolt or action against their direction. It's got nothing to do with the mission and everything to do with it being "outside the system".
I guess it’s just way different now.
Also, other restaurants service dairy - also with a much less than 15% failure rate.
There are simple solutions for everything you just said. Taylor makes garbage equipment and is ripping off franchise owners. McDonalds corporate likely owns stock in the company and uses it as a side hustle of revenue from franchise owners.
One can easily see that YouTube (as a platform) became just a shitty television when the host unironically flips through stacks of papers exactly the same way it was done in the classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0
They want their franchisees to have as much money as possible, that's what benefits them.
The employees at most McD's are in a different class than most other franchises. This isn't universal, of course, but for the most part, McD's hires from the very bottom end. This isn't bad -- I see people with Down's, strong autism, and similar working at McDs, happily, and those folks need jobs. To do that, you want equipment which is a bit more fail-safe.
Otherwise, we'd have safety issues at McD's every week, and they're exceptionally uncommon. That's because of a robust process. Ice cream machines with more fail-safes at McD's make sense to me.
The really incriminating part of the video comes at the very end, where they locked out Kisch.
I can see how McDonald's would make a strategic choice to lower their time to serve a customer in exchange for a machine that is broken part of the time. They actually track and chastise workers based on taking more than some absurdly short amount of time to serve a customer. It seems like a corporate strategy for them, and this is in line with that.
His argument is that "big businesses protect each other", but that obviously doesn't make sense unless McDonalds owns Taylors.
Crazy to imagine that another simple non-software issue might have not been such a problem and would have been easily fixed.
I hope that one day, engineers will understand that the less electronics/software there is in a machine, the better it is. This trend should begin any time now.
It's not software, it's business processes which have ordered the software developers into a particular design.
Taylor's McDonald's-only machines are different due to special requirements that come from corporate which ostensibly come from franchise meetings. They have zero ability to push a special machine on McDonald's without McDonald's being happy with the details of it. Taylor has to staff full-time people just to keep McDonald's happy; they are demanding.
That's not to say these heat-treatment machines were well engineered or field-tested.
(I've a lot of experience with Taylor and Taylor distributors through a vendor that sells to both.)
The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. [1]
1: https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
Clearly they just need to adopt the modern computing style of error codes and just display a frowny face emoticon.
All other fast food companies who use the same machines don't have that problem.
The Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932344 - April 2021 (3 comments)
The Real Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26922378 - April 2021 (1 comment)
ArsTechnica has retracted the story about McDonald's Icecream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918415 - April 2021 (8 comments)
McDonalds' Secret Ice-cream Menu [censored?] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26894406 - April 2021 (2 comments)
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines–and Started a Cold War - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26874436 - April 2021 (3 comments)
I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24861623 - Oct 2020 (420 comments)
My understanding is that the McD one is different and tries to remove the need for disassembly and cleaning at the end of the day. I imagine McD making so many different things with so many different machines requiring all sorts of different maintenance this is a useful optimization as opposed to a Dairy Queen.
Their hands are bound. The situation arises from the contract whose terms are dictated by McD HQ. The relationship is entirely asymmetric.
The only working remedy in form of the Kytch add-on got nuked from orbit.
Here is the original HN thread on this subject:
Anyway, US McDonalds is worse than the ones in literally every other country I've ever been to.
The main difference between those two is that the former is open 24 hours a day, while the latter is closed 12a - 5pm, a window which just happens to be perfect for running the Taylor’s daily cleansing cycle. (It can’t be solely a function of increased customer throughput, which is the other variable I considered, as the Manx McDonalds has way more people visit it during the TT than the Charing Cross restaurant ever has. Yet the machine was up the entire TT for at least the last three years the race was held.)
My guess is that the national subsidiaries (McDonalds UK/McDonalds Germany) might have different approved vendors for their equipment than the US mothership. From glancing at Taylor's website they seem to only operate in the US.
AFAIK the difference is that the other restaurants machines don't self sanitize.
>The Taylor-made machine for McDonald's is deliberately designed to have a secret menu that only “authorized service personnel” are allowed to use
While I can see this being nefarious, I can also understand why they did it: they don't want franchisees to mess with the machine in a way that could compromise the sanitation cycle. For instance, one reason why cleaning fails is that because the target temperature hasn't been reached. If there was a temperature calibration in the secret menu, you could add a +20F degree offset to the thermometer, which would almost guarantee the target is met, but would introduce risk of food poisoning if the temperature is actually too low.
Where was this mentioned? The part about the secret menu is around 19:47 (from skimming the transcript), and it only mentions "critical operating parameters".
"(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]
https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
Even though the clear conflict of interest with Kytch is addressed, what is not addressed is that if owners simply buy the Italian machine or McD is sued for the clear corruption and conspiracy to commit fraud, the whole startup essentially becomes worthless over night; so the video does not address that other machines can be bought or that the clear conspiracy to commit fraud should be investigated and prosecuted, or at the very least the owners should join forces to sue McD for fraud.
I wish the McBroken site kept track of performance metrics, i.e., which specific machines were down the most. The dataset would surely clearly show proof of the difference in the machines? This is conspiracy to commit fraud if I have ever heard of one; especially with McD coming out guns blazing to scare owners about adding a totally unobtrusive device to the machine that in no way tampers with anything? That alone could bury McD in court as it shows clear collusion and conspiracy.
10 minutes that nails it
A common misconception. Most software is bad. There is more software now than any time before. Therefore, the amount of bad software increases with time.
https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...
I personally never encounter ice cream machine broken either.
Afterthought: since franchisees are locked into the C602's I wonder if they could do anything about this even if they tried. Sigh.
So maybe this is the straw that breaks the camels back, who knows.
I do live in Europe though.
I asked my wife, who goes to Maverick every day, if my perception that the shake machine is always broken was accurate and she said "yes. I've never seen it working. I've always wondered why they keep them because they just take up space."
Fwiw
If the sales are mediocre it becomes a vending machine that requires work and the local management won't bother as it's not critical for the business - just like the ice cream machine isn't critical for McDonalds but I guarantee if they had the same problem with the soda machine they'd fix it somehow.
The software interface looks stupid, but ... that's really more of an industry problem.
A better question is why they don't have 2+ machines to both share the load and give some redundancy. I'm all for economic self interest, so I assume ice-cream isn't a money maker (maybe even a loss leader?) so no one actually cares if the machine is down all day as long as people buy something else.
The only thing I disagreed with the journalist with is the story lens, or the moral of the story, that this is about big corporations helping each other. That's the easy anti-capitalist narrative that finds a wide audience, but it's not accurate.
McDonalds' actions are against the interests of the capitalists in this case, which are the shareholders. It's in the latter's best interest to partner with an ice cream maker that proves cost-effective for franchisees.
So this is really just a case of rent-seeking by an insider; maybe someone in the McDonalds corporate hierarchy with personal relationships or investments linking them with the ice cream maker Taylor, in which case it would be a worker acting against the best interests of McDonalds workers at large, the capitalists (McDonalds shareholders), and consumers. This doesn't provide the story with a sexy moral that fits in with some neat and tidy grand narrative, but it's more likely to be true.
1. The video shows Taylor docs that have logo of Wendy's and other outlets that use their machines. So why those outlets are not facing the same issues? Do they use the same 602 model? Are the software versions same there i.e. same cryptic error codes? Any other differences compared to McDonalds?
2. One of Wendy's employees says that they wash the machine every night. Are McDonald's not doing this? Or are they prevented from doing so due to some reason like different operating instructions or model or something else?
3. Is the more user friendly software, that they mentioned that McDonald's blocked, being used by any other chain outlets? If yes, what is the experience of using that vs not using that?
The video mentions that McDonald's was/is locked into a specific machine from Taylor (which all franchisees had to buy), whereas one imagines that the other chains like In-N-Out Burger are entirely free to purchase a different machine from Taylor that doesn't have so many problems.
It seems like McDonald's locked onto one machine for a very long period of time. Other fastfood chains may have moved on from that machine after they noticed problems with it (or otherwise passed on it). It was confusing that the video repeatedly mentions other chains don't have the problem despite supposedly using the same machine (but is it actually the same machine, or is it merely a similar machine).
The nefarious aspect may be whether McDonald's corporate is getting a direct kickback in some (plausibly legal) manner from Taylor or its parent company, which bypasses the franchisees and McDonald's corporate calculated out that they come out better off net through the scheme of allowing high rates of downtime on the machines (compared to how much they would get from increased franchise sales of ice cream if the machines had high uptime, via the cut of gross sales that corporate gets from a franchise). It's super odd that McDonald's so tightly locked the franchisees into this specific garbage machine and for so long, even though they obviously knew how bad it was. Piles of reports would have shown up very rapidly at McDonald's HQ and yet they persisted; it suggests something shady going on at corporate that is against the interests of the franchisees.
> One of Wendy's employees says that they wash the machine every night. Are McDonald's not doing this?
McDonald's is doing that as well and that's where the machines are commonly failing. The employees come in the next morning after running the clean cycle overnight and find that it failed. So they have to go through a four hour process from there forward and it might fail again before that is properly completed, and so the cycle resets.
Personal relationships with key decision makers, vegas trips, the old boys club etc. Two companies with that kind of old relationship.
Indeed - considering how much effort they spent on the details, they could have tried to obtain what the rival outlets were doing different considering they also use the same manufacturer and don't have same issues E.g. the model details on rival outlets to see if this issue was not affecting other Taylor models.
>> One of Wendy's employees says that they wash the machine every night. Are McDonald's not doing this?
> McDonald's is doing that as well and that's where the machines are commonly failing. The employees come in the next morning after running the clean cycle overnight and find that it failed. So they have to go through a four hour process from there forward and it might fail again before that is properly completed, and so the cycle resets.
Again, this is the same point - if both outlets are doing the washing, then why is it not affecting Wendy's? Difference in model or process of washing is not same or Wendy's have added additional instructions to deal with such issues e.g. not overfill the mixture etc?
Basically, the missing comparison is an obvious omission from, what is otherwise, a great video.
In other words Wendy's and In-N-Out have more details procedures that the employees have to do (and "wash the machine" may include dumping all extra product, cleaning the insides and the dispensers) whereas the McDonald's "wash the machine" may be just clean the dispensers and load with product and let the machine do it's thing (and only every 14 days do a full clean).
But since the simpler machines trust the humans they can be made to run even if steps were missed.
It's probably happened before, but it's so infrequent that it's not a memorable trend/pattern.
What would be interesting is a comparison of Taylor revenue from C602 service & repair vs McDonald's lost revenue / reputational cost from ice cream sales....I'm guessing franchisee extortion is more lucrative?
User Experience isn't just selling ads or 'driving engagement'
However, the kickback hypothesis seems more likely, with corporate & Taylor both benefiting at the expense of franchisees.
You sell units at break even, hoping you make profit from service and support.
And now I want some ice cream...
An extension of Google vs. Oracle, and LinkedIn vs. HiQ.
I would worry more if the failure rate was going down.
Does anybody know the situation in any EU countries ?
-> McDonals had to explicitly put "(contains 17% edible plastic)” in the menu there
-> the poster you are replying to saw that
-> said poster states that no fact checking website is going to change his mind (given he saw edible plastic as an ingredient in official menus back in the day)
I never discount a person or a users memory. They are usually right over my assumption. When I look closer I see more reasonable answers that I never considered before.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...
And no, there is no plastic in McDonald's ice cream.