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Comment by mcdow | Hacker News Reader

Here's a great YT video on why McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken: https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4

TL;DW: there are some perverse incentives to keep them broken. Basically the owner operators are forced to use a particular brand by corporate. Corporate McDonalds has a deal with a particular ice cream machine company. That particular company is the only company owner operators are allowed to buy from, and the only company allowed to service the machines. And it's no skin off of McDonald's back for these machines to always be broken, the cost falls on the owner-operators.

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I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes. And if the franchisee's are paying unnecessary costs, making a Macdonald's franchise less lucrative for the owner-operator, that will lead to fewer franchises renewals and new franchises in the future.

I'm sure corporate has done the math and concluded that whatever money the machine provider pays them is higher than any expected losses in franchise revenue due to franchise owners quitting due to poor ice cream sales.

I'm pretty sure that ice cream is a high margin product like drinks and McDonald's has found an indirect way to extract most of the margins. The problem is that the technician service fees are a fixed cost designed to be revenue maximizing for the average restaurant. Franchises selling enough ice cream to pay the fixed costs stay in the game, the ones who don't simply keep them out of order. This is effectively a price discrimination strategy. By making the machine mandatory, they can offer the menu item in every restaurant, but they only have to collect money in proportion of ice cream revenue.

There's an uncertain future cost (basically an externality that impacts McDonald corporate) but in return they get a nice premium now and immediate uncertainty for franchisees. It's possible it's overall a net negative for MD corporate, but it's also possible it's an overall economically profitable trade (even though it's clearly immoral).

Been a while since I first watched the video. I would imagine the ice cream machines are a relatively small part of the McDonald's business. As evidenced by the fact that McDonalds ice cream has been an issue for quite a while. I would imagine franchises of a similar caliber to McD's also exploit their owner-operators on a similar scale because they can, we just don't necessarily hear about it because McDonalds is the largest.

McDonald's isn't known for its quality anyway. I've had my fair share of sketchy McDonalds experiences. McDs is as large as it is because it is cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous. McDonalds has no qualms with cutting corners on quality, as evidenced by its entire menu.

The days of cheap McDonald’s is long gone. I can get a meal served at a sit down cafe for about the same price now days.

But it’s still just as poor quality, if not worse than before. Last time I ate there I bit down on something in my burger so hard I thought I broke a tooth. I’ll never eat it again.

McDonald’s pricing is complicated. You can still get cheap McDonald’s, but it requires giving them something in return (e.g. information about you).

Indeed, you can practically eat for free regularly at McD's if you use the app.

Ehh I've used the app for a while, that's a bit of an exaggeration. But you get some"good' prices.

> Indeed, you can practically eat for free regularly at McD's if you use the app.

Bwahahah!

Not only you give data about you but now you are actively prefer to eat at McD instead of any other option and you are not even thinking about it.

I'd suggest the quality of McDonald's ingredients is superior than the vast majority of restaurants that rely on Sysco or US Foods. Just my opinion, I know it's not going to convince anyone whose mind is already made up about McDonald's.

aww man dont tell people about sysco. Once you learn to spot unmodified sysco foods it's impossible to stop and the illusion of sitdown restaurants is tarnished forever.

What are good places to start down this rabbit hole? (for those willing to have their illusions tarnished? )

One option might be to visit your local Jetro or Restaurant Depot, if you live in the US. If Sysco has showrooms/open warehouses I’m not aware of them, but Jetro and RD are of a very similar ilk.

Sure you can have french fries made from the best fat and potatoes but it doesn't change the fact that you're eating a burger with french fries instead of a steak with baked potatoes.

That's not an explanation. You could say that about a thousand things in McDonald's business. They are all a relatively small part, but in fact McDonald's has an army of people optimizing them all, and they are overall very successful.

Why do you think they would be able to abuse any of the operators? There are dozens and dozens of fast food franchises in the US, all in cut-throat competition. You may have heard of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Subway, KFC, Chick-fil-A, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Dunkin’, Sonic Drive-In, Popeyes, Little Caesars, Arby’s, Chipotle, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box, Hardee’s, Panda Express, Jimmy John’s, Five Guys, Wingstop, Culver’s, Zaxby’s, Raising Cane’s, Whataburger, Bojangles, Shake Shack, El Pollo Loco, Firehouse Subs, Jersey Mike’s, Del Taco, Checkers, Rally’s, Church’s Chicken, Moe’s Southwest Grill, Qdoba, Captain D’s, Freddy’s, Tim Hortons, Smoothie King, Blaze Pizza, Baskin-Robbins, White Castle, Portillo’s, Noodles & Company, Schlotzsky’s, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, Auntie Anne’s, Marco’s Pizza, Boston Market, Smashburger, Fuddruckers, WingStreet, Krystal, Papa Murphy’s, Hungry Howie’s, The Habit Burger Grill, Jamba, Nathan’s Famous, Steak ’n Shake, Waffle House, Big Boy, Pizza Ranch, Cook Out.

Modern capitalism isn't particularly rational. Money in the pocket is more tangible than minor brand damage.

If you want to be really cynical, you can assume that somebody at McDonald's and Taylor have crunched the numbers they know exactly how much they can squeeze their franchisees and the customer to effectively make money out of nothing. So many businesses operate this way now.

> I don't understand the last sentence. If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.

Try to quantify that to the MBA bean counters, good luck.

No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's, given that most employees in fast food stores are high school kids and I got the runs more than once from that shit, I don't trust them anyway to follow up with the stringent hygiene requirements that serving ice cream demands. Burger patties at least are grilled/fried.

> No one cares about ice cream from Mc f..ing Donald's

People care enough that there's a website mapping working McDonalds icecream machines across several countries, that has been up for years, and was referenced in the linked article:

https://mcbroken.com/

Quite a few places where softserve ice cream is not that widespread, McDonalds is one of the most reliable places to be able to find it.

> If the machines are frequently broken, that damages the Macdonald's brand in the consumer's eyes.

They are and it doesn't matter. You don't go to McD for the ice cream. It's been a running joke for decades how they're always broken.

> You don't go to McD for the ice cream.

Yeah. 'cause they don't have any 'cause the machine's broken.

I like how the answers include both "they've done the math and it's worth it" and "they're idiots who don't know what they're doing". I don't think anybody cares what's really going on, as long as they can say McDonald's is bad.

I think the machines are broken way less often than people give McDonald's negativity over. In my estimation that's probably why corporate hasn't cared to fix the problem until recently.

Sure, a lot of people notice when they're broken, but a lot of people notice when AWS is down for an hour ~one time a year, too.

On top of that, depending where you are if your local McDonald's has a broken ice cream machine you probably aren't all that far away from another one. Perhaps corporate gets their sale either way?

Most importantly, McDonalds has a strong incentive to avoid headlines like "37 people hospitalized after shit-bacteria in improperly maintained ice cream machine", which is why the machines self-monitor and shut down at the slightest excursion from some specified norm.

And McD wants the machines maintained by the official technician, because they'd rather screw their franchisees a bit than risk someone ripping out the offending sensor.

IMO, the perverse incentives come on top of this (Taylor has no motivation to make the machines more transparent since they profit from the call-outs, McD either doesn't care or may even prefer this since it could reduce the risk of "creative" solutions like an employee holding an ice cube next to a sensor), but the "McD would rather have 50% of the ice cream machines 'broken' than have a single one serve E.Coli to its customers" is what kicked this whole thing off.

then why is it that its only the ice cream machines that have problems not not things like the soda fountain any other food production tool?

Perhaps because the environment the ice cream machines create are the most friendly to bacteria and other things that cause the most issues?

Then why does the Frosty machine always work at Wendy's? That's made by Taylor too.

The Wendy's frosty machine doesn't have the same automatic cleaning cycle and pasteurization feature that the McDonald's ice cream machine has. Thus Wendy's employees need to tear the machine down and clean it by hand, a long and tedious process.

The whole reason McDonald's wanted this machine was to reduce training costs and labour. However, the machine does need to be operated correctly or it simply shuts down.

As someone who has cleaned a soft serve machine, its not really long or tedious.

Maybe for you but when closing a Wendys down for the night you need to begin the teardown process quite a bit before official closing time. You need to wait for the machine to allow the remaining frosty mix to melt, dump the remainder into a metal bucket (to use for tomorrow). Then you have to flush water through the machine to be able to disassemble it, then the machine needs to be loaded with a sanitizing solution (along with all the parts which are placed in the hopper).

Finally you gotta re-do all of this the following morning! Sure its not like taking apart an iPhone but its not a 5 second job either.

The worst part? This damn machine can only produce one flavor of frosty at a time! The mcdonalds machine avoids all of this, produces 3-4 flavors of milkshakes from one unit and handles soft serve ice cream!

soda is syrup and carbonated water, neither becomes a breeding pool at room temperature

It's not a self-contained TPN compounder in a hospital cleanroom. It's a machine that has many parts that get wet with sugary water. It has parts that need to be cleaned that seldom are, and judging by the average fast food employee, would probably be better off left alone than further contaminated by them attempting to clean it. Google "soda fountain mold" and you will be stunned to see how nasty these can get. I don't eat fast food often, but I skip the drink unless it's from a meticulously clean place.

In general, acidic or basic foods are very safe from bacterial contamination standpoint. Soda is very acidic (due to all that dissolved carbon dioxide).

It's not that it doesn't get bacteria (they live everywhere), but it's unlikely to get pathogenic bacteria. This makes sense, a highly acidic environment is very different from a human body.

That's why foods such as milk, ice cream, potato or egg salad, are the most dangerous from the bacterial contamination standpoint.

In fact strong acids and bases are so safe they also kill the bacteria in the human body, along with the host.

Soda is not "very acidic", for the exception of coke, which has strong acid added to it. Carbonic acid is very weak, and won't prevent bacteria from growing.

Carbonic acid has a pH of around 4 in sodas. Stomach acid is 3. Both are enough to discourage bacterial growth.

It doesn't prevent _all_ bacteria, as I said. But it prevents most of pathogenic bacteria.

Yet Wendy’s and Dairy Queen don’t have the exact same incentives?

> Here's a great YT video on why McDonald's ice cream machines are always broken: https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=IK1S-Yx9Zq4nEVrr

As habit or policy, can we all agree to get rid of the tracking information in Youtube links?

* https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4

My bad! Fixed. Didn't even realize the YT links had tracking info on them!

FYI, it's the "si" query parameter; It identifies the account that clicked the share button

Similarly Instagram started adding tracking querystrings (igshid or something like that), and for a good few weeks any Instagram link with it was completely broken for me (few loops, errors, and throwing me to the home page), I had to manually remove that part of the url.

US franchises have been able to buy machines from Carpigiani instead of Taylor for ~7 years.

Implicit here is the assumption that (a) when evaluating many franchises McD is still attractive for new owner operators despite the obvious flaw, or (b) switching costs are high for existing McD owner operator victims, and the issue wasn't known or believed to be this bad when they started.

Stories and comments about that video:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

List of related threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41949811

Well that or they have the option to buy the real Italian machine not the Taylor piece of crap. It’s just super expensive and comes from Italy

Very weird, here in Canada I don't think I've ever been to a McDonald's without working ice cream machines.

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