Why the McFlurry machine company just got hit with a restraining order
vice.com
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I don't know what would happen if a franchisee bought one of each and put the crappy one in a closet. Probably corporate would notice the lack of kickback revenue and force the issue somehow.
Really, attorneys general should be investigating McD corporate for anti-competitive behavior, and getting restraining orders against corporate taking the kickbacks. (Maybe even prosecute it?) Somehow, enforcement of anti-trust law has been neutered so that it takes extraordinary measures to get even the most basic sort of action against abuse. Racketeering law might be more effective.
Without the kickbacks, corporate will have no incentive to force franchisees to spend thousands of dollars every week on unnecessary "service" work. But corporate should be forced to pay all the franchisees' accumulated service costs that exceed the norm for similar machines. With interest.
Of course, without the machines failing all the time, Kytch won't have a market. So, they actually want McD to keep getting the kickbacks for repairs on the crappy machines, and continue forcing franchisees to depend on them, and just leave Kytch to collect their own piece of the action. None of Taylor's, Kytch's, or corporates' hands are especially clean, but Kytch is making things uncomfortable for entrenched racketeers, so we like to cheer them on.
The market here seems to be something like 'franchise rights to a fast service food brand'. McDonalds is far from the only company offering such a thing.
Wendys also uses the same vendor with a better machine, which is where this starts to look malicious rather than incompetent. The broken machine is one specifically made for McDonalds.
In general, this is anti-consumer in two different ways - you don't give me ice-cream with the apple pie and whenever it breaks, you throw away a couple of gallons of the mixture to be safe.
There was a deep-dive into this from Johnny Harris[1], which dug through the manuals for the machine, sales projections from Taylor and why McD franchisees are easier marks for this than others (the revenue volume is huge).
> According to the court document, Taylor's COO admits that it sought to obtain a Kytch device "in order to evaluate and assess its potential technology-related impacts upon our Soft Serve Machine—such as whether the radio frequency of the Kytch device would interfere with our software signal, or whether the Kytch device would drain the power source of our software and/or cause it malfunction," but denied that Taylor mined it for trade secrets or even "need such information."
Drain the power source of their software..?
"We reverse engineered your product and made something to help maintain it. You better not so much as look at our product. We have a right to repair, but you don't."
What about reverse engineering for curiosity or even posterity repair?
Also how is intent of reverse engineering determined?
I’m all on the side of right to repair but surely reverse engineering ought to be permissible for all sides?
It seems pretty apparent to me that Taylor is getting their hands on the Kytch device for the purpose of developing countermeasures to Kytch devices functioning at all.
Supposedly the whole operation of the machines is obtuse and error prone on purpose.
So, outside planned maintenance, the 2$ question is why is McDonald accepting this in the first place? Anyone has more knowledge? There are so many McDo POS maybe the number is high but the ratio on par with other similar equipment?
Mcdonald's in other countries have no problems with ice cream outages of this scale.
Financial agreements sometimes come into play when McD needs a new system developed (say, a new type of smoothie maker or a new kind of grill) and the vendors need R&D funding to get a machine going.
Many other restaurants have soft-serv ice cream and don't have these issues with the machines. And many of them use Taylor machines, they just have to be cleaned manually which adds labor costs to the restaurant.
When I worked at McDonalds, one crew member on the closing shift had the responsibility of cleaning the soft-serv and milkshake machines. Every part of the machine that contacted the dairy product was disassembled, washed, and sanitized. It took the better part of an hour. This was done every day. The next morning it was put back together by the opening shift. That was another labor cost.
McDonalds is trying to save between 1.5 and 2 hours a day of labor with the machines that do the automatic heating/sterilization. That's the only reason any of this is happening.
Or, you can't 100% guarantee staff will perform the sterilization, and that's the only way to guarantee people won't die, regardless of the reason it didn't get done.
What was different at the franchisees, to my horror I might add, that some of them did it only every other day, or about 2 times a week.
The question now is, was there ever a case where someone got 'Montezumas Revenge' from spoiled shakes, or something like that? Would we even know it, with the resources corporate has to suppress such news?
But this is about fixing a machine, so I would have expected "franchise" or "restaurants" in that place, and there is (apparently) something called "Point-of-Service"— so I was truly hoping parent would clarify.
But thanks for responding instead of simply down-voting. I appreciate it.
such as whether the radio frequency of the Kytch device would interfere with our software signal
or whether the Kytch device would drain the power source of our software
Worth watching, IMHO.
What if there was a law that banned exclusive repair contract? For example it says here that Taylor requires that you call out a service technician. What is the company could not make that demand? What if by law you could call any technician you wanted to to come and work on your machine (accepting liability for damage of course).
Would that help?
What seems like is going on is that unskilled employees are interacting with a machine which isn’t particularly robust which fails on the side of food safety and management/corporate who do not see the situation as particularly important.
I kind of want one right now.
Broken machines as marketing tools.
Nightclubs sit empty and make huge lines of people wait outside, because scarcity is marketing. Maybe broken ice cream machines mean people buy something and come back later to get their ice cream and buy more cheeseburgers.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/mcdonalds-customers-scream-and-...
https://www.carpigiani.com/en/news/mcdonaldsaward2017
https://coolersinc.com/2020/02/21/mcdonalds-shake-machines/
Somewhat ironically though, Carpigiani just hired a Taylor executive to handle their McDonalds account:
https://www.foodserviceequipmentjournal.com/carpigiani-scoop...
For new franchisees I assume that they have more flexibility, but existing ones would have to weigh the cost of upgrade vs the cost of having the Taylor machines down all the time.
Taylor does not supply McDonald's the giant corporation: it supplies the individual franchisees, who are closer in negotiating power to any small restaurant (except that they also have terms dictated to them by McDonald's itself).
So not only is Taylor getting paid, but the machines stay broke so no ice-cream or mcflurries are ever sold, I legit forgot about mcflurries and I used to love them.
Someone, surely, is getting rich enough off this non-sensical deal to be noticed?
I wonder who in the McDonalds corporate tree is related to Taylor or the parent company.
This would be a very nice question to be raised at a McD board meeting
In this case, somebody influential at corporate seems to feel they are not getting enough tax revenue from franchisees, and that the kickbacks they get from Taylor are worth the damage to McD's reputation.
McDonald's isn't directly involved in this legal action. McDonald's is the client/money two third party service providers are fighting over (Taylor Vs. Kytch).
I'd point you to the linked article for a better understanding of what is going on.