iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald’s ice cream machines::McDonald’s ice cream machines are notorious for breaking all the time, so iFixit wants to help people repair them without the help of the manufacturer.
deleted by creator
Well hopefully it won’t be up to McDonald’s.
Let me introduce you to lobbying, and also hiring some lawyers to argue in the company’s favor.
Damn, I really wish you hadn’t
Yeah, I wish it wasn’t such a big factor weighed so heavily in McDonald’s favor.
It actually doesn’t help or harm McDonald’s Corporate at all on this issue. That’s why they’ve been fine with the status quo. It would help McDonald’s franchisees quite a bit, so I suspect McDonald’s won’t send lobbyists to deal with what they view as a non-issue.
Taylor, the manufacturer of the machines on the other hand stands to lose a significant percentage of the profits they currently make, and absolutely does have a dog in this fight. Thankfully they don’t have McDonald’s type funding, so it’s possible that we can win this one.
If I remember correctly I saw a video explaining this. Same goes with the device. Apparently the company that makes the machines and McDonalds have some sort of agreement where McDonald’s gets the machine at a huge discount but they have to use that company for repairs and only them. Win win for both. Company also added script to stop the device from working. Something like that.
Either way im at the point where I completely forget that McDonald’s has ice cream.
Here’s the video: https://piped.video/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=F9x-GPjuXEaSk7zO
Company also added script to stop the device from working. Something like that.
I don’t think it’s quite that devious. That kind of “feature” would probably be racketeering and ripe for lawsuit. I think it’s more that the machines are temperamental as fuck and the methods to fix the machines are kept under a very tight lid.
That’s the one!
They also have birthday ice cream cakes
This guy went on a deep dive to uncover the scam that is McDonald’s and their ice cream machines. https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=F9x-GPjuXEaSk7zO
Worth the watch
I can’t believe how much of an antitrust it is and it’s just somehow allowed.
Is this a US only thing? I’ve travelled all over europe and americas and I always try to go to each country’s Mcdonalds to see if they have anything different. NEVER have I encountered a broken ice cream machine.
Broken ice cream machines are a regular thing here in the UK.
Do they really break all the time or they just don’t fucking clean them when they should and they refuse to keep working
There’s a 4 hour heat cycle it has to go through as part of the cleaning. In addition, the machines are apparently very temperamental and throw errors a lot, but the error codes are (arguably intentionally) obscure so typical employees just aren’t going to know what’s wrong with it. Also machine servicing is done exclusively by the machine manufacturer, so if any work needs to be done to it they’ve gotta schedule a tech call-out.
I have no clue about the McDonald’s ice cream machine but the one I used to have to use when I worked at Burger King could have various issues, for instance the most common reason it went down was it getting low on mix and someone not refilling it, if that would happen for about 30+ min it would freeze the thing solid and at that point you have to turn it off for hours, and you still probably have to tear it apart and run hot water through it which would make a huge mess just to get it in unfroze. Worst part is I was a closer, and if the people on the shift before me weren’t keeping up with it, I could come in to it being frozen… I hated that thing
Both I’m sure
I was under the impression that the maintenance was a pain in the ass and McDonald’s workers are payed less than the cost of living so therefore aren’t doing shit like that.
Cmon MegaMan.EXE let’s bust the Viruses in the Ice Cream machine
The ice cream machine at my local McDonald’s always works. I eat their ice cream somewhat regularly and never been told it’s down.
Guess we’re done here folks. This guy says it’s not a problem so it must not be!
At any given moment about 10-13% of machines are down in the United States. Just go to the mcbroken website to see
By the way, the one near me has been down for like two years…I think they just don’t want to pay the extortion fee to fix it. Or maybe they are too lazy to clean it properly. Apparently corporate doesn’t give a damn because I’ve complained and they still never have ice cream
I very much suspect that the ones that have their machines down more often are just struggling/refusing to pay the repair fees.
One near me that rakes in more than almost any other in the country always has their machines working. Yet the one that’s always empty about 20 miles away almost never has their’s working.
According to the video (it’s elsewhere in the thread), the standard for uptime for industrial machinery is amazingly close to 100%. Given a million opportunities for such a machine to have a fault, you should want less than a handful of times that it actually craps itself.
McDonald’s machines are down more than 10% of the time.
If I was a big industrial conglomerate like GE, VDL or Samsung and I had a machine that was down 10% of the time, and the error reporting was opaque and forced me to call the manufacturer for a service technician, AND all the critical operating parameters are behind some special manual that only their service technicians are allowed to have, I’d fucking sue the manufacturer.
That’s pretty interesting if it’s true, makes me wonder if they’re doing anything differently from the other stores that keeps their machine working.
