All of this was unnecessary on the old ice cream machines. The downside was they had to be cleaned and sanitized every night and that meant you needed one more person on the closing team. It was all about saving labor costs.
The ad campaign for resolving this problem writes itself too. It's easily worth it. Worst case scenario, put the second machine where the pizza oven used to be.
I think your conjecture was correct 20 years ago but not at store with the latest remodels. Counter sales and inside dining are an afterthought.
The ice cream machines (all restaurant equipment, really) is very expensive and you generally don't buy more than you will actually use.
Lots of locations are in the smallest sized location possible that can fit everything they need to serve the menu.
Since the reliability of these machines seem very low, even having 2 machines doesn't guarantee that you're always able to serve ice cream.
And if you're able to serve all your customers with one machine, in times when both are functioning, the second machine doesn't really enable more sales. But you do have to power it, have a dedicated space for it, have someone clean it daily, and pay for the maintenance contract.
It's probably more beneficial to dedicate the space for an extra ice-cream machine to storage, frying station or something else that is more useful.
Another point is that I don't think not being able to sell ice cream reduces sales that much. Because by the time you find out the machine is broken, you're already in the store or drive through anyway
You see, demand for ice cream is very weather driven and that means nearly everyone wants ice cream at the same time. But each machine has a throughput limit. So, a lot of the time when they say the machine is broken, it's really just that the demand has exceeded the machine's capacity, and it takes awhile for the machine to freeze the ice cream mixture when it is refilled. If you had a second machine, that's when you switch to the second machine and by the time that one's capacity is reached, then the other machine will be ready to go again.
The machines also do what modern refrigerators do and they run a defrost/heating cycle to prevent ice from building up on the cooling equipment inside. If a defrost cycle happens at the same time as a freeze cycle, it extends the downtime because it then takes longer to freeze the ice cream mixture.
> to storage, frying station or something else that is more useful.
Storage and frying capacity is not at problem at most McDonald's. Two things they do really well is frying and just-in-time delivery.
> by the time you find out the machine is broken, you're already in the store or drive through anyway
A lot of people come with a car full of kids just for ice cream, they go to your competitor when you don't have it. If they didn't want the expense of an extra ice cream machine, they could keep ice cream sandwiches in the freezer and offer those as a substitute when the ice cream machine is locked out in a freeze or defrost cycle.
But even if they didn't, it's a cheap way to get people to show up and potentially order other, higher margin items. If your machine is broken, you lose that funnel and your customers go elsewhere.
I’ve even had the app be wrong and let you order an ice cream when it doesn’t exist - then they lose money giving you a more expensive substitute.
Some people go there every day and they tell their friends - that sums up.
We have 1 location in my area. I go maybe once a month hoping for a decent experience, but every single time they are out of key ingredients (no chicken, no beans, no chips, etc).
I really don’t understand how that can even happen at Chipotle where the entire menu consists of a grand total of (maybe) 10-15 core ingredients?
I would go way more often if they simply weren’t out or ingredients 90% of the time I go.
But he’s right about not canceling the order. I think last chipotle visit I subbed black beans for pinto, and tofu instead of chicken. The “sorry no chips today” was icing on the cake at checkout.
Chipotle is one of the very few businesses I have ever left a google review for because the complaint seems extremely simple to fix. Just stock your store and hire enough people to prep the food!
But variable reinforcement works better than fixed one, so ice cream machines working being a gamble might actually increase customer addiction.
They make some money for replacement parts, but that's rarely more than the occasional o-ring.
In context, it doesn’t matter whether Taylor is getting paid or Santa Claus is. The problem is that McDonald’s franchises were not able to fix them due to software locks.
Was that all 'active' time or was there a 'put things in the dishwasher / autoclave and let it sterilize for X minutes?'
Were there a lot of separate parts to wash?
Now I'm curious :)
Not a snark.. it's quite eye opening to see (and actually use) how much food a piece of commercial kitchen equipment processeses in a day and then how much effort it takes to clean them.
An example of cleaning a commercial deep fryer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFR5CN_kuI0
One can also try googling for other more detailed versions showing all the efforts in digging out all the burnt sediments/sludge :)
(And it’s often skipped, if you ever get soda that tastes off you’ve found someplace that doesn’t deep clean.)
The McD procedure involves draining the barrel, flushing it with water, then disassembling each barrel assembly and removing every o-ring and gasket.
https://youtu.be/SaYTx7qNJU4?si=Y2ZjWHQJHiKQfAFh
Each part is washed in detergent, rinsed, and sanitized. Rings and gaskets are relubricated with food safe petroleum jelly, then everything is reassembled.
Forget one ring or misalign one gasket and the machine will shoot dairy everywhere when repressurized. Cleanup and rework after that is messy, and probably wasted a lot of other nearby product and disposables. So don't do that.
After reassembly the machine is flushed with sanitizer then clear water then primed with the mix you saved from the beginning. Let's hope you stored it properly in the cooler before it started to spoil. It's expensive. If nothing has exploded it's ready for use after an hour of cooling down.
To do this in 45 minutes with no catastrophic errors is pro-level. And this is why McD went to a self-sanitizing machine.
The machines were reassembled the next morning. So the closers only had to break them down, wash, and sanitize.
Once a week any dairy mix left in the machine was discarded, this "breaks the cycle" of any bacteria in the mix. So on that night, you tried to let the machines run very low to minimize waste.
It's sort of complicated the first few times but it becomes very routine. Like everything at McDonalds, there is a detailed step-by-step written procedure on how to do it.
I'm guessing 24/7 operation changed when and how the cleaning was done, leading to more contamination instead of less.
The new machines came in long after I moved on to other jobs. In ideal situations, they re-pasteurize the mix overnight, leading to a drop in 1-2 person-hours of labor.
This is like asking if a developer can be trusted with a laptop
This analogy doesn't seem to track with my experience: newer devs don't understand computers and filesystems at all :D