So naturally they neglect it; 'sorry, the machine is down now.'
The whole franchise model is having franchisees but ice cream mix or whatever. They won’t buy the mix if the machine is down.
I think it’s just hard to clean and people don’t like doing it. And everyone is short staffed. Googling cryptic codes is easy. Cleaning the machine is hard.
McDonald's doesn't make more off the ingredients of a day's sales of ice cream as it does off a service call, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. I'm not sure why you think it would.
It would be most profitable for McDonald's if the machine went down every single day. The problem with that is the franchises would stop selling ice cream, not that they'd have to trade $25 of ice cream ingredient profit for the profit off a high priced service call that you can respond to with a low-paid, minimally trained tech with a computer that just decodes a mundane error that can be fixed in seconds. A tech can probably do 15 of those a day.
Cones appear to sell more than McFlurries here.
McDonalds serves around 68 million customers per day (https://findanyanswer.com/how-many-customers-does-mcdonalds-...)
in around 39 000 restaurants (https://www.statista.com/statistics/219454/mcdonalds-restaur...)
Of those restaurants, around 9% have broken ice cream machines (https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/psychology/documents/c...), meaning there are around 61.88 million customers who had the opportunity to order a McFlurry.
I wasn't able to find good data on what percentage of customers order a McFlurry, but the linked article says they make 60% of dessert sales. I'm going to make a wild guess at this point that 50% of customers order a dessert of some description.
That means about 34 million people ordered a dessert, about 20 million McFlurries and 10 million other desserts.
Of those people, 3 million were not able to order a McFlurry because the machine was broken, so let's remove those 3 million from the total.
31 million people, 20 million McFlurries.
Assumption then would be that on average, around 1/3 of customers will order a McFlurry in a random restaurant (50% x 66%).
68 million customers across 39 000 restaurants is around 1 700 customers per restaurant per day, of which around 570 will order a McFlurry.
A regular McFlurry costs $2.39 (https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/), so a restaurant takes around $1 350 from selling McFlurries.
Taylor have a helpful calculator on their website (https://taylornewengland.com/sales/soft-serve-ice-cream-prof...), with likely optimistic estimates and don't show any wastage, but we're ballparking anyway. They say that food cost + napkin + cone comes to around $0.29, meaning daily profit from ice cream would be around $1 200.
Conclusion, it's pretty unlikely the difference is on the 'orders of magnitude' scale.
As a side note, given that the cost of a new machine is around $18 000 (https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...), after 15 days of the machine being out of order, the cost in lost sales is as much as buying a new machine (lower by whatever the Taylor callout fee is).
Given that 9% of 365 is around 33 (more than double the cost of a new machine), it seems that the more cost-effective solution would probably be to have a second, standby machine, from which McFlurries could be served while waiting for the callout.
If the ice cream machine is always broken, customers may come to expect a low standard of service and quality.
You also have the people who skip McDonald's entirely because one member of their party wants ice cream.
Given that a location can sell hundreds or thousands of ice creams in a day. I would expect the margin to be higher on their supply cut than the service call cut so it seems more profitable to sell ice cream than even if there was a service visit every single day.
I’m surprised at the “can’t do arithmetic” takes on HN with things as simple as this. Like somehow there’s a conspiracy to rent seek a less profitable product (ice cream machine service) over McDonald’s main purpose (sell fast food).
It’s funny to imagine people thinking that there’s some conspiracy my mcd’s to make less money. But I think it’s just a misunderstanding of how franchising works.
Oh sure the mcflurry machine might suck. But I nearly never get a bad coke, bad coffee, undercooked food or crappy fries. It's always the same no matter where or when I go.
I'm willing to pay a little extra knowing I'm not wasting time or money stopping by.
This I think is what McDonald's is trying to protect.
There's a reason I go to McDonald's more than, say, burger King, KFC, or wendy's for my junk food fix.
Food born illnesses (e.coli, salmonella, norovirus) have ravaged societies for hundreds of years.
only very recently in the west have we been able to say "this food sucks" because of our opinion of the taste, look. It used to be "I will eat this food that sucks" because even though it tasted sour that's all there was.
I balk at people throwing bread in the trash, that was near sacrilegious lol.
Anyway, people lived. There was struggle, yes. Perhaps it was better than the meaningless waste of life millions have today.
An experiment that isn't reasonable: Go to a Gastroenterologist, tell them you regularly or have no issue eating molded food/expired, and see if you carry the same heath insurance provider within a week.
You would balk at the realization that those eating habits you mentioned aren't thought of as "healthy" by those analyzing healthy eating habits and adjusting insurance rates off of it.
You know the "slug in the bottle" case?
Historically, people were not well protected, and traders took advantage of this. We survived because we're tough enough to ride out most food poisoning, but some childhood mortality probably comes down to this, as would some other shorter lifespan on the tables of mortality.
So yes, for most of human history we didn't have either corporations or laws about food hygiene. Except I think you'll find some of the earliest laws are in fact, about food hygene: market regulation was about markets in the literal, tables of goods in the square sense. The right to run a market came with the requirement to run it properly for the common good. Burghers prohibited butchers from dumping waste meat.
If the FDA wants to audit kytch to ensure their software and hardware is compliant, by all means. I am however not going to trust mcdonalds or taylor to do that.
In fact I would argue it is against corporations best interest in ancient time to ensure food safety, because it would increase waste
https://www.who.int/activities/estimating-the-burden-of-food...
For example, as recently as a century or two ago, milk routinely killed people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_sickness
The problems the UK dealt with in the 1800s sound horrifying. https://edu.rsc.org/feature/the-fight-against-food-adulterat...
And adulturated food in general was a serious problem in the US, in times still within living memory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_history_of_food_regula...
In some ways, it still is. A lot of people advocate avoiding processed food entirely, as a way to dodge these sorts of bullets.
I haven't done fast food in awhile because it's terrible, but this is a far cry from my experiences.
I've had undercooked chicken nuggets that were slimey, coffee that had sat in the pot so long it became sludge, and almost half of the time get flat coke or a different beverage than I ordered (diet instead of zero, or with strong hints of orange).
These aren't one-off experiences, but easily a quarter to a third of my past visits. To several stores.
McDonald's has shit quality control in every dimension. It's astonishing to me that they produced the breakout success that was Chipotle. Or that they maintain their present market cap.