Hacker News Reader

Comment by boboche | Hacker News Reader

If companies don’t like right to repair, how about no rights to fail instead? SLA exists for that reason and when you are working with that goal in mind, you (usually) get better output at higher cost, yes, but surely less than several breakdowns.

So, outside planned maintenance, the 2$ question is why is McDonald accepting this in the first place? Anyone has more knowledge? There are so many McDo POS maybe the number is high but the ratio on par with other similar equipment?

View on HN

Yeah, if I were McD, I'd want to throw this failure of a company under the bus - the issue no longer merely a meme, it's gotten attention of the press.

Mcdonald's in other countries have no problems with ice cream outages of this scale.

Taylor provides alot of other equipment within McD's - and IIRC from reading the Wired article and discussion a few months back, it (or comments) alluded that McD's corporate specifies which equipment that franchisees are allowed to use - and therefore there could be some sort of financial aggrangement between McD corp and Taylor...

That's correct. McD approves vendors to supply equipment to the franchisees. But they always approve at least two vendors per device for supply chain reliability and price competition.

Financial agreements sometimes come into play when McD needs a new system developed (say, a new type of smoothie maker or a new kind of grill) and the vendors need R&D funding to get a machine going.

McDonalds corporate absolutely must be complicit in this. They have the purchasing power to dictate specifictions to Taylor for any piece of equipment.

Many other restaurants have soft-serv ice cream and don't have these issues with the machines. And many of them use Taylor machines, they just have to be cleaned manually which adds labor costs to the restaurant.

When I worked at McDonalds, one crew member on the closing shift had the responsibility of cleaning the soft-serv and milkshake machines. Every part of the machine that contacted the dairy product was disassembled, washed, and sanitized. It took the better part of an hour. This was done every day. The next morning it was put back together by the opening shift. That was another labor cost.

McDonalds is trying to save between 1.5 and 2 hours a day of labor with the machines that do the automatic heating/sterilization. That's the only reason any of this is happening.

> 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.

Hrm. I did that, too in 1988/89 in a corporate store. Though it was different there and then. I took about an hour, but most of the time was for parts swimming in buckets, IIRC 4 different ones. While the parts were in the buckets one did other stuff. Also no morning shift to assemble that. That was the task of the last shift, who disassembled and cleaned them. IIRC that's the way it was done at the franchisees.

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?

Service-Level agreement? Point of Sale? Piece of Shit? Point of Service? Not sure what you're talking about here, tbh.

Considering the context is retail, POS almost certainly is Point of Sale, a common retail acronym.

Thanks, I thought so. But I always understood that to be in reference to the tech involved in the cash transaction. So if the article was about McDs getting a lower fee for electronic transactions, the POS makes total sense.

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.

I'm sure I'm not alone in downvoting due to the tone you took in GP comment and not for asking a perfectly reasonable question. Just FYI

Thanks. I didn't intend a bad tone, but thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com