A absolutely despise what companies like Taylor do. Rather than innovating their product, they realized its cheaper if they have their lawyers engineer a way to lock in their customers to their product over their competitors'.
And you seem to see this more and more. It seems that these days the product quality itself doesn't matter, it's all about the contracts that your legal team setup in the background. I have to ask the engineers that work at these companies: does it bother you that the only reason people use your product is that they would get sued if they tried using another product? How does it make you feel that your product is so bad the only thing keeping your customers in the door is the contracts your legal team drew up.
What happens if the replacement parts aren't actually as good, safe or reliable as the originals? McDonald's gets bad PR, or a lawsuit depending on the severity.
Look, I'm all for better repair options and Right to Repair, but McDonald's is selling consistency and their reputation is on the line (not the franchisee) when something goes wrong or people get sick.
For those reasons alone, it's not unreasonable to force franchisees to use a specific brand of machines, contract a specific company for repairs, and use specific OEM parts. CYA big time in so many ways.
What people are forgetting here is McDonald's has an interest in these machines working as well as possible (revenue + reputation), and the franchisee also has an interest in these machines working as well as possible (revenue). The franchisee however, does not necessarily care about the McDonald's brand and reputation, and given the option might choose degraded parts/safety to save money - causing a problem for McDonalds.
So... McDonald's says you have to use these approved machines and get service/parts from this approved vendor. Case closed...
The only people who seem to really care about this issue are customers. That won't be enough to force a private company to open the door to any yahoo repair company with Wish.com replacement parts.
> What people are forgetting here is McDonald's has an interest in these machines working as well as possible (revenue + reputation)
But clearly they are dropping the ball all the way to the third basement. If a piece of equipment is so bad that it's lack of reliability becomes a meme then you have issues.
What I really don't understand is that it seems that the franchisees are paying for the equipment manufacturer per service call. It would make much more sense to pay a fixed fee per ice cream machine per unit of time subject to some SLA. If you properly set up the incentive structure that makes the equipment manufacturer incentivised to seek ways to provide reliable, easy to maintain machines.
It is not like this is impossible. The same manufacturer sells reliable machines to all the other chains! So they can do it.
> The only people who seem to really care about this issue are customers.
And the franchisees? Who are losing money every time they are turning away costumers. (Not talking about the lost business because they are not seen as a reliable purveyor of ice cream, and people who crave ice cream go to some other place.) And losing money every time they call service for a piece of trash equipment.
> But clearly they are dropping the ball all the way to the third basement. If a piece of equipment is so bad that it's lack of reliability becomes a meme then you have issues.
I couldn't find numbers - however I have a feeling the issue isn't less reliability than expected, but rather McDonald's serves more ice cream products (by volume) than most or all other fast food chains.
Anecdotally, people travel to McDonald's only for some of their ice cream products, such as McFlurries, and then leave disappointed when the machine is not working. Very few people go to, say, Burger King just for a shake. This pattern makes the issue more visible.
> The same manufacturer sells reliable machines to all the other chains!
We have no real evidence of this though, do we?
It makes zero sense to have these conspiracy theories that McDonald's is being paid to push unreliable machines on franchisees or something. Few if any franchisees are even complaining about this issue, it's customers like you and me who are mad about not getting a milkshake, and then companies trying to shoehorn their way into the lucrative commercial repair business.
If McDonald's thinks everything is ok, and franchisees on average are not complaining, then what's the real issue?
No matter how we spin it, this particular situation has nothing to do with Right to Repair. It's about corporate standards for franchisees.
The franchisee’s do not like the situation. You immediately write everyone off as being conspiracy theorists, but you are failing to consider the incentives. Other companies negotiated a fixed service fee for the life of the unit paid at the time of purchase. McDonalds signed a contract that requires payment per service call. The company now has an incentive to make sure McDonalds has the least reliable machines and the franchisees have an incentive to not call in for a repair. No conspiracy needed.
Both you and parent are correct. Clearly its a case of incentives, while McD has the right to manage brand exposure.
Here's my contribution. Someone downthread said other chains use Taylor with a fixed-fee service contract, which directly incentivizes Taylor to deploy quality machines.
Here's the rub: is that the complete picture?
In other words, is it possible the Taylor repair service labor fees for McD customers (and recurrence) are justified because the machines themselves are a heavy loss leader for Taylor ? And what is the cost for non-McD vendors to acquire a similar-purpose machine, with fixed fee servicing ?
That will help resolve if this issue at the core is justified, vs legal (or business) stupidity by McD corporate / malfeasance by Taylor.
> What people are forgetting here is McDonald's has an interest in these machines working as well as possible (revenue + reputation), and the franchisee also has an interest in these machines working as well as possible (revenue).
The franchisee, however, has a countervailing desire to reduce their own costs which McDonald's is fairly insensitive to. McDonald's needs the ice cream to be available, sure, but are they above accepting kickbacks from Taylor the ice cream machine company to keep Taylor's cash flow going?
We are living in an obscenely corrupt and top heavy business environment where much money is to made by insider dealing in large companies with entrenched market positions. There really should be no better evidence of that than the fact than the evidence presented here: America's largest, most famous fast food chain, incapable of reliably serving ice cream to its customers because it's subject to vendor lock-in.
McDonalds exerts controls to protect its reputation, and does this through its franchise agreements with franchisees. This makes a lot of sense for both parties and customers. I remember when Jack In The box had outbreaks of E.coli in their burgers. McDonalds had new testing methodologies and equipment at franchises (and company owned stores) in a heartbeat.
The last thing McDonalds wants are customers getting sick from listeria and having blood on their hands[1].
At a small town in my Canadian province there is a seasonal ice cream stand/dairy bar. My Mom and Aunt go there since it's the town in which they grew up.
My Mom asked the person at the counter why does their soft ice cream taste so good. The person said "Because we clean the machine every day."
Right now their reputation is that their machines don't work. Worrying about the health of their customers is pointless if they don't have any customers.
> What happens if the replacement parts aren't actually as good, safe or reliable as the originals?
I don't see how that line of thinking is any different to the argument manufacturers are making regarding right to repair. The response is simple, all parts must be G.A. and manufacturers can't force the company they are sourcing their parts from to not sell to third parties.
McDonalds can very well sue the franchise for not following the guidelines and ordering bad parts.
Even if Taylor allowed anyone to repair their machines - McDonald's is unlikely to allow franchisees that privilege anyway, for all of the reasons listed above.
McDonald's is also large enough of a customer that we can assume the specifics of this machine were tailored or custom-made in part just for McDonald's. The automated cleaning and self-diagnosis system is exactly what someone like corporate McDonald's wants - take those liabilities out of the hands of individual franchisees and fallible employees. Make is as dead simple as it can be... machine says no-go, then it's a no-go.
McDonald's will not allow a system where a franchisee or random-employee decides the machine is "clean enough" and proceeds to use it anyway, potentially getting people sick.
So what will be accomplished here in this specific situation? Probably nothing...
All of this sounds great until you realize that McDonald's ice cream machine reliability is by far the worst in the nation. There is no other chain that comes close. The meme is a meme for a reason. Somehow, these other chains manage to solve these issues without causing massive reliability problems. I wish I could find the videos now, but there was a decently convincing (although with the usual "documentary grain of salt" caveats) argument that McDonalds took a payout to allow Taylor to predatorily extract value while providing shit service to their Franchisees. McDonalds, the brand, is already suffering reputational damage from their craptastic ice cream but they apparently don't care.
This makes the arguments about repuatational risk from shoddy repair parts fall flat.
Perhaps, flipping it on it's head, the issue is so visible because McDonald's ice cream is by far the most popular fast food ice cream?
From Cones to McFlurries to Milkshakes, I'm pretty sure they all use the same machine. McDonald's sells a tremendous amount of ice cream products.
> I wish I could find the videos now, but there was a decently convincing (although with the usual "documentary grain of salt" caveats) argument that McDonalds took a payout to allow Taylor to predatorily extract value while providing shit service to their Franchisees.
I find that very hard to believe. You're right, it's a meme for a reason after all, but sabotaging themselves makes no sense even if Taylor paid McDonald's for that racket. McDonald's has nothing to gain in that situation, only loss of reputation and revenue.
> This makes the arguments about repuatational risk from shoddy repair parts fall flat.
It doesn't though, and cannot just be hand-waved away. Imagine what the memes would be like if the machines were further degraded by bad parts or worse, got people sick at random locations.
McDonald's has a right to force consistency. It's their brand, and ultimately their wallet that bears the consequences.
They literally don't use the same machine. The McDonalds franchise contract requires them to use a specific, made-for-mcdonalds, model (mostly similar to the models sold to other chains, but not identical). And I'm pretty sure that people have done (informal) reliability studies by things like calling random franchises, and Mcdonalds isn't just more popular, it's actually less reliable.
You misunderstood. The ice cream products from McDonald's all come from the same machine. I was not asserting they are the same machines at other fast food brands.
The fact that these machines are likely custom made, or partially customized just for McDonald's is even more reason why it's reasonable for McDonald's to force franchisees to use specific vendors for repair/parts.
Even with right to repair, McDonald's can force franchisees to use specific equipment and parts and vendors. That is their right as the brand owner.
Which means... there is no reality where joe-random repair company is going to be allowed to repair joe-random franchisee's machines using parts sourced from who knows where. It's just not going to ever happen, there's too much liability.
McDonald's wants a machine that's so brain-dead simple to use safely and keep sanitarily that even a new-hire with 5 minutes of training can operate it effectively. They get that by forcing standardization on one unit and one vendor, and software safety mechanisms that provide a firm no-go when something isn't right.
> And I'm pretty sure that people have done (informal) reliability studies by things like calling random franchises, and Mcdonalds isn't just more popular, it's actually less reliable.
You'll need some sort of source for this. Most fast food chains only sell one ice cream product, usually shakes or cones, maybe both. McDonald's sells McFlurries which are very popular, in addition to seasonal products and then the regular products. Given McDonald's is also the largest fast food chain in the world, it stands to reason they sell more ice cream products than anyone else.
Which would, yes, mean the surface area is larger and more exposed. People go there specifically for a McFlurry and come away dissapointed. How many people go to Taco Bell specifically for a milkshake and nothing else?
> McDonald's wants a machine that's so brain-dead simple to use safely and keep sanitarily that even a new-hire with 5 minutes of training can operate it effectively. They get that by forcing standardization on one unit and one vendor, and software safety mechanisms that provide a firm no-go when something isn't right.
That doesn't really jibe with the article:
"The machine overheats if it’s used too much within a certain time period. This results in mushy goop coming out or the machine shutting down and refusing to work until it resets and cools down," Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown tech, said in iFixit’s teardown.
Gonna go out on limb and rankly speculate that for health critical systems it's not advisable to assume that OUTPUT_GOOP || FAILSAFE is functionally equivalent to FAILSAFE.
Of course McDonalds the brand can do that. They literally _are_ doing that. Someone made a 3rd party troublehsooting tool that solved the majority of problems without needing to call a Taylor tech, and McDonalds corporate disallowed it.
The point is not "can they do this" the point is "is it necessary for them to do it for brand reputational reasons".
The steelman argument I've seen for this state of affairs is that (apparently) the McDonald's machine is much more complicated to allow it to self sanitize/clean every night and only need full disassembly every 2 weeks. The machines used at other chains apparently don't' have this automatic process and must be disassembled and manually cleaned more frequently. That would all be well and good...if it worked. The frequent state of disrepair of McDonalds machines pretty clearly indicates it does not.
They are mandating the use of a low-reliability machine, presumably in the name of lower labor costs (which you'd think you wouldn't have to _mandate_ since the franchiesees probably care more about labor costs than anyone), also mandating an expensive service contract for those machines. I'm just really really skeptical that 3rd party parts would make this situation worse. People already have the impression that McDonals ice creams machines are usually broken. I don't think this opinion is based on a quantitative assesment of uptime, where, if it got 10% worse, their opinion would decrease by 10%.
To try and summarise: I thin your argument that 3rd party parts would create enough of a reliability problem to meaningfully change their reputation, which is _already_ one of lack of reliability (deserved or not), is completely implausable to me.
> They literally _are_ doing that. Someone made a 3rd party troublehsooting tool that solved the majority of problems without needing to call a Taylor tech, and McDonalds corporate disallowed it.
And so what? It's non-standard and non-approved. McDonald's has no idea what that firmware/tool actually does. You (and the makers) claim it was better, but how do you actually know? Maybe it just bypasses safety and sanitary standards McDonald's has set for these machines... giving the appearance in the short-term of being more reliable.
In the end, it's McDonald's who will be sued if someone gets sick from a milkshake. Therefore, they can and will enforce standards, including machines and vendors. Heck, they probably have approved vendors and parts for everything inside a McDonald's, not just the ice cream machines. The toilet paper dispenser even most likely... but surely the stoves, fryers, etc.
Right to Repair has nothing to do with this specific situation. It's about corporate standards set for franchisees.
Additionally, the franchisees aren't even complaining about this. It's customers, like you and me, who are mad we can't get a McFlurry or something.
That's not going to compel any change other than make McDonald's realize they might need more machines per location.
> What happens if the replacement parts aren't actually as good, safe or reliable as the originals? McDonald's gets bad PR, or a lawsuit depending on the severity.
Mcdonalds will chose a provider with good enough parts or have a broken down machine... like it has now.
Volkswagen doesn't make oil, doesn't make it's own brake discs and doesn't make it's own wipers.... so what? You can buy TRW or ATE or Brembo or whatever brakes, castrol, shell, elf or whatever oil and valeo or bosch or whatever wipers. And a car is a lot more dangerous than an ice cream machine.
> Mcdonalds will chose a provider with good enough parts or have a broken down machine... like it has now.
So, what's the issue?
This entire thing is not about Right to Repair. It's about corporate McDonald's contractually enforcing standards on their franchisees. Which is reasonable.
> For those reasons alone, it's not unreasonable to force franchisees to use a specific brand of machines, contract a specific company for repairs, and use specific OEM parts. CYA big time in so many ways.
Oh, come on. It's an ice cream machine, not an aircraft. And it's not the end of the world if someone becomes sick because of a shoddy repair. It will inevitably happen in any kitchen. Restaurants, including fast food joints, cause tens of thousands of food poisoning incidents every single day.
Have we already forgotten the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit? If someone’s kid died from listeria after eating McDonald’s ice cream the lawsuit would make national news. It would destroy their reputation and cost a ton of money in damages!
The first google result says that 48 million Americans get food poisoning a year [0]. On average that's around 131k people per day, I'd say it's pretty safe to assume that at least a few thousand of those are caused by restaurants.
I'm not sure why you think this fact requires a citation.
I'd say it's safe to assume if you don't want to come up with a citation for two reasons:
48 million people annually is at the high end, and a multiagency report puts that number at 9 million known cases.
> Each year in the United States, an estimated 9 million people get sick, 56,000 are hospitalized, and 1,300 die of foodborne disease caused by known pathogens.
The other, is, of course, that restaurants make up a minority of meals in the US. While over half eat at restaurants regularly, that 56% is around 2–3 times a week.
I’ve long suspected part of the issue is the franchises not following properly cleaning and maintenance guidelines with them, leading to higher failure rates. I know McDonalds sells more ice cream than basically any other fast food place, including actual ice cream joints, so the same issue for them will likely cause more downstream failures than it might for others just because they’re working the machines harder.
Anecdotally I know in the McDonalds near my old apartment the people would say the ice cream machine was broken in part because they just didn’t want to have to clean it. So they really would prefer if people not order ice cream.
Careful with your stones in glass houses, on HN, of all places. We're the community in which virtually every Web site we deploy sells out privacy of its users to third parties. And that's before we get into the commonplace UX behavior against users' interests, numerous startups which are essentially investment scams, some of our most celebrated startup successes only existing because an app is a smokescreen that lets them violate regulations long enough, and general background underhandedness and entitlement so pervasive that we now consider it normal.
It's just that often the value is "I bought this and even though it provides no value, it's pretty enough that it impressed my boss and I got a raise and promotion"
Tu quoque fallacy. Calling someone a hypocrite doesn't address their argument. Also, obviously, you have no idea if the original poster a) is a web developer or b) is guilty of the behavior you mentioned.
I genuinely think Tu Quoque is misplaced by being called a fallacy, and I firmly believe that calling out someone's hypocrisy to their argument already shows - at the very least - a fragility to their stance, and can help to illustrate what about their argument is going amiss by using the individual's own experience and behavior to prove it.
Someone not doing X indeed doesn't say whether you should be doing X, but it stands ground that X has a flaw for adoption - and talking to someone that doesn't do it is a great way to examine why, and possibility use it to your argument.
> I genuinely think Tu Quoque is misplaced by being called a fallacy, and I firmly believe that calling out someone's hypocrisy to their argument already shows - at the very least - a fragility to their stance, and can help to illustrate what about their argument is going amiss
"they" have no "stance" or "argument", they're just the ones who happened to point out the problem. They themselves are irrelevant. They could strangle puppies for fun, and they could still point out the problem as well as if they donated both kidneys to child orphan strangers. They're just the person there at the time, pointing out the problem. It could have been anybody pointing out the problem, the problem is still a problem.
that's why tu quoque is a fallacy: attacking the person who pointed out the problem, doesn't resolve the problem, and doesn't seek to, either. It seeks to silence the person who pointed out the problem. Shooting the messenger is a related problem-solving anti-pattern, for similar reasons.
While valid, the problem being pointed out still requires a representative to do so, and I was just making the point that if the representative has experiences or behaviors that are inconsistent with the essence of the problem they're trying to address, it ought to be brought up. For an individual wearing a lanyard with the problem statement being, "there are too many lanyards in the world", you are well above your means to inquire on his participation within the problem firsthand, and how they're contributing to it (or lack thereof).
You are right that Tu Quoque is often used to silence the problem statement representative, but it shouldn't become a go-to card for individuals to claim when they're hypocrisy is pointed out (which I've seen, not saying it did here).
> While valid, the problem being pointed out still requires a representative to do so, and I was just making the point that if the representative has experiences or behaviors that are inconsistent with the essence of the problem they're trying to address, it ought to be brought up
this entire statement is the exact opposite of true: anyone can raise awareness of the problem regardless of who they are, it doesn't make them a "representative" of anything (just imagine them reading an anonymous comment card they pulled out of a box) and any inconsistency you see between them and the problem is irrelevant, and is a distraction if brought up
that is why tu quoque, what you are describing, is a fallacy
> For an individual wearing a lanyard with the problem statement being, "there are too many lanyards in the world", you are well above your means to inquire on his participation within the problem firsthand, and how they're contributing to it (or lack thereof).
you would be engaging in the logical fallacy of whataboutism, because your questioning of him doesn't address the problem, and is in fact counterproductive in solving the problem, because you are attacking an ally in solving the problem
this illustrates why tu quoque is a fallacy when trying to solve the problem
put another way, because their identity is irrelevant, a 100% equally valid question would be for him to ask you what are you are doing to solve the problem
the analogy is bad anyways, because in this real life topic, the whataboutism user is wrongly conflating two different actions, as well as ascribing actions to people who didn't do them. All the people who responded here pointing out that they don't, in fact, sell private data, were conveniently ignored by the original tu quoque perpetrator
Speak for yourself. If I only cared about the paycheck, I'd be in SF helping Google build its IoT botnet of Nests and Chromecasts.
Any new technology can be looked at through the lens of evil. I used to write code for stick-on wireless biosensors that massively improved living conditions for neonates and the chronically ill. Some health insurance company could use the exact same tech to institute a system like what the car insurance companies have with those "safe driver" tracker dongles.
I've been actively avoiding ad-tech and have chosen to work for companies that are doing things to lessen their influence and reach! And yet, somehow, I'm still having a successful career in software engineering!
> We're the community in which virtually every Web site we deploy sells out privacy of its users to third parties.
Simply don't do that, then. It's not hard. (And… why even increase your liability and reduce your hiring pool by being relentlessly unethical? The trade-off isn't worth it, even if you're a stereotypical heartless executive.)
My reply was intended more like: You're addressing a bank robber convention, to morally condemn a convenience store robber.
(That parent should have the guts to broaden their scope of condemnation. Unless throwing the first stone in a glass house was a clever Socratic prompt intended to lead to this discussion.)
My intent was not to dispute their argument, but I didn't have the stomach to see techbros piling onto that, as tends to happen. If the OP didn't point out that tech overall has become a cesspool industry doing comparable things, then someone had to.
indeed, with whataboutism, the intent never is to solve the problem, only to deflect, with the aim usually of ensuring the problem remains unresolved, and perhaps even undiscussed
> If the OP didn't point out that tech overall has become a cesspool industry doing comparable things, then someone had to.
I suppose this is true if you start with the assumption that someone is going to engage in the intellectually dishonest fallacy of whataboutism
as for your portrayal of HN, it is as self-serving as your prior analogy.
I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's referencing DMCA and the like as "felony contempt of business model".
I'm sure it's been this way a lot longer than I imagine, but it feels to me like in the 80s or so companies became a lot more interested in making their shareholders happy than they were in making their customers happy.
His story Unauthorized Bread is a good one that explores just how bad it can get. Where the DRM in a toaster refuses to toast bread that isn't of the correct brand.
Probably more in the 90s since the 80s were all about total quality management.
But "companies became a lot more interested in making their shareholders happy than they were in making their customers happy"
is the BIGGEST problem with modern capitalism. That is why US is approaching 70% obese population and other dramatic social problems.
The first part is true. The second part varies if the machines' maintenance will be covered by McDonald's corporate or by franchisees. McFlurry machines are a gambit to extract more maintenance fees from franchisees because McDonald's corporate doesn't care. McDonald's corporate isn't eating this "tax'.
Are the other models just as complex as the Mcdonalds one? I can attest that the Wendys machine is much simpler in design than Mcdonalds. It only deals with one flavor, produces a product with only one consistency and has simpler instrumentation: it just has a simple indicator LED and on/off/clean toggle switch.
The Mcdonalds machine is a "2 in 1" unit where it produces soft serve but also has a separate mechanism for mixing up milkshakes in 3-4 flavors.
Also the Wendys machine requires complete disassembly and sanitation each night where as from what I can tell the Mcdonals machine does not.
Apparently the McDonald's machine also pasteurizes the mixture so it can go a few weeks without cleaning. That's an added complexity that most other machines don't have, and it's a huge risk safety-wise for pasteurization to go wrong.
There's no reality where there's enough soft-serve machines in McDonald's locations for the profits from this scheme to outweigh the damage to McDonald's reputation and actual revenue from customers.
Seriously it would be a drop in a very big bucket.
There is a hot mic admission by Taylor representatives that the McFlurry machine was designed specifically to increase maintenance costs to extract more money from franchisees.
No, in public procurement it's still bribery. You just carefully tailor the tender to the company that the fix is already in for.
When I worked in state government, every vendor of products was simply a middleman who marked a bunch of stuff up that you could easily buy from standard wholesale sources. Their catalogs would be three-hole binders of photocopies from other people's catalogs and printouts from ecommerce webpages with the prices whited out, and a pricelist typed up in word at the back. Every vendor of services was connected to an insider who tipped them off that purchases were about to be made.
The lowest bidder was selected from the people who could jump through the hoops required to submit bids, and who also fit the carefully written RFP.
In the case of Quiznos, it was kickbacks from the service company. Even when your soda machine was still under warranty, the franchise agreement required the store owner to use only one "authorized" company to repair the machines and pay them $75 per visit.
For anyone interested in a good video about this, there is YT video that details how the Ice Cream Machine's being broken is essentially a scheme that McDonald's corporate runs on their franchisees.
As someone who used to take apart and clean those machines I expected to hate this video but found it pretty spot on.
McDonalds was my first job and as someone who was pretty technologically inclined I started taking apart and fixing a lot of the old broken machines. I wouldn’t say the ice cream machine was completely impossible to fix, but it was absolutely a pain. We also had an older model so it may also have been simpler to fix.
One thing I would add is that it also highlights the importance of having a good maintenance person even in McDonalds. The reason why I knew a lot of the tricks with the ice cream machine is we had a guy there, who had been working overnight maintenance for >10 years there. The video mentions that you can’t expect minimum wage employees who have only been there for 2 weeks to know how to do these things. But there’s so much involved with running a restaurant that you can’t expect a 15 year old with no experience to do. But so often these positions are treated like any other low wage/low skill job. He probably saved the franchisee millions of dollars in maintenance costs over the years yet only was paid ~$20 an hour (if that).
I've seen this video and while it's informative overall, it's also about 10 minutes or less of information stretched out to 30 minutes. super repetitive throughout and trying to constantly tickle you with the idea that resolution to questions are coming any second now.
Totally agree. I couldn’t make it through 10 mins before being completely annoyed. It’s well constructed but frustrating to watch. It was constantly teasing their results throughout the video and I left knowing less than I did prior to watching.
Welcome to modern YouTube, where channels are heavily pressured to increase user watch-time or they'll get penalised.
I'm a huge fan of YouTube, it's the only tv/video/etc type content I watch in life, yet they're intent on destroying everything that made it amazing in the first place.
FWIW, I imagine the “invisible hand” is already in effect. That is, at the margins there are probably some potential franchisees who were dissuaded by McDonalds’ actions here.
It's probably not even that. As a franchise you are under the thumb of the big corporation. They have a lot more money, and a lot more leverage to break you if you start suing them. They can probably inspect your premises, find 200 violations normally overlooked and then suspend your right to use their branding or suppliers. Sure you might win eventually, maybe in court. And then maybe you can sue them that the inspection happened in retaliation, but do you really want to risk that?
I am not sure such a clause would be upheld in a scenario where the franchisor blatantly acts in bad faith outside of industry norms to fleece the franchisee. There is a reasonable expectation of good faith.
Can you summarize that video? I got about 7 minutes in and it still hadn't answered the question but did get an ad, so I gave up. Too much filler and noise!
The incentives here are all aligned against quick repair: Taylor makes more money when machines are broken. McDonald’s corporate has a lucrative service contract with Taylor. As a result, poor franchisees, who have no choice about what equipment to buy or how to service it, are forced to deal with broken machines and annoyed customers.
Why wouldn't McDonalds just not do that, and charge more to franchisees, and pocket 100% of the amount instead of whatever cut they have to give to Taylor?
Surely, franchisees and potential franchisees talk to each other, and if any appreciable amount of money was going out the door to fix the ice cream machine repeatedly, it would be a known cost of doing business.
One possible reasons is that repair fees might not show up in planning the way a guaranteed franchise fee bump would. You can get your franchisees to pay more money if they don't know they are going to be paying it ahead of time, potentially.
If the full extent of the repairs necessitated by the behavior were clear, obvious, and known ahead of time, then yeah, this would strictly be worse. But a slightly lower, but secret, fee might be preferable to a higher but obvious fee.
That's just me speculating though. Could also just be incompetence or maliciousness, or maybe just once upon a time a particular person in McDonalds corporate took a bribe to make it happen. Who knows.
1. McD HQ mandates franchises buy a special model Taylor-Made machine (not the same that like Chick-fil-a and others use). This is why McD machines stop working but other companies don't.
2. Every night there is a very specific maintenance routine that needs to be ran to clean and prep the machine for the next day. If it's not followed perfectly, the process will likely fail and the next morning workers will be greeted to a cryptic error code. Sometimes re-running the process will clear it, sometimes it wont. But this can take hours.
3. If re-running it doesn't fix it, then the franchise owner is stuck with the dilemma of bleeding money not having a working ice cream machine for customers, or calling an expensive hourly certified Taylor-Made repair person.
4. So they usually end up calling the repair person.
The idea is that McD HQ is working with Taylor-Made to make this problem happen so that franchise owners have to pay for expensive repair people.
Apparently the error codes have been reverse-engineered with a USB device that a third party created. But Taylor-Made is said to deny warranty and service etc if you try to use one.
Not sure if you knew this but it is actually explicitly asked in the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> This is why McD machines stop working but other companies don't.
Is it possible that what goes into those machines at McDonald's is thicker than Chick-fil-A's mix, rather than the machine being to blame? Just like some kinds of motor oil are harder on an engine than others.
Well the question is why does McD franchising terms stipulate they have to buy a special model of the machine, but it seems that no other fast food places that use ice cream machines from the company have such a requirement.
I mean I guess there could be other reasons of features or quality or something, but it seems a bit strange. I mean, in the end, it's just McD machines that constantly break down, so if anything you would think HQ would want to improve this situation somehow, when it seems they are completely uninterested.
Maybe McDonald's has decided, their unique ice cream mix performs better in taste tests, or that it works better for McFlurries, or whatever... but the one downside is that it jams up machines much more frequently.
If you already anticipate that your ingredients are going to break machines quite often, and that you'll require a lot of repairs, it would benefit you to standardize on a single large-scale support contract rather than leaving it up to every independent operator for themselves. Kind of the same way taxi fleets usually mandate one single specific model of automobile despite thousands of independent medallion holders.
In the McDonald's case, though, it wasn't a "hack". It was simply reporting the error properly.
Apparently one of the biggest failure modes is "overfull supply hopper doesn't heat fast enough". Just reporting that tells you what you need to do to fix the problem. Dump a couple cups out and rerun the cycle. Or "feed too viscous"--dump the entire thing and run water on a cycle. Then reload with a fresh batch.
This seems to be emblematic of that machine.
And, the problem isn't that these machines don't have good error reporting. The problem is the fact that these machines are terribly unreliable. A 15% failure rate is bad. However, there is no money to be gained from fixing the issues. So, neither Taylor nor McDonalds's will spend any money to fix it.
It's also emblematic that, given the health sensitive nature of the machines, no other company attempts to do heating in place. I presume that somebody in those franchises looked at the reliability numbers and laughed Taylor out of the room.
It's also obvious that technical measures would be useless at preventing this. Checking whether a local restaurant is following safety standards is for the local Health Inspector, not the machine vendor -- who would have the incentive to help them cheat as the one paying for their machines, if they weren't running a scam that makes the machine return false positives on purpose to generate profitable service calls.
A prohibition on "hacking" only protects the scam.
Below is a milkshake listeria incident from this month. There is a balance to be sought between "right to repair" and safe operation of equipment. The discussion here [1] about dangers of ill informed self-service ebike batteries is an example. I'd like to see the standards for chilled dairy equipment maintenance before I would believe any claims about capabilities for self-repair.
OLYMPIA – Listeria bacteria found in all milkshake flavors sold at Frugals restaurant at 10727 Pacific Ave. S., Tacoma, WA are associated with a foodborne listeriosis outbreak linked to six hospitalizations and three deaths. Investigators found Listeria in the ice cream machines, which were not cleaned correctly. No other Frugals restaurants are believed to be affected. The restaurant stopped using its ice cream machines Aug. 8, but Listeria can sicken people up to 70 days later. [0]
>More than 480 documents have been filed with the court in that lawsuit, and a trial is scheduled for this fall. Even reading documents from this lawsuit is a costly nightmare of an affair. The Superior Court of Alameda County is charging roughly $1 per page to get legal filings. To download the entirety of the court proceedings to date, the court wants $2,999.
Something that I don't see discussed in the comments yesterday:
There seems to be this other company that made a device to read error codes, and then theres legal trouble surrounding that and the copyright on the firmware of the original controller board.
But all this seems like not the best approach-
The electronics on the original boards themselves do not appear that complicated. This machine itself, mechanically, cannot have all that sophisticated of mechatronic interface.
Why not just circumvent everything with a completely new 3rd party control board that replaces the OE electronics completely and runs the machines?
People design and develop systems every day for fun even that are an order of magnitude more complicated than the control system of this ice cream machine.
Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system.
At some point if they are leased, breaking the lease and buying the machines outright and then upgrading the controls would potentially be the way forward for the franchises.
Unless in the lease there is a clause that breaking the lease requires repossession of the hardware from the premises.
At which point franchises need to stand up to McDonalds corporate and demand a new supplier of machines of a new design.
> Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system.
It’s not the warranties that concern them. The franchisees are worried about running afoul of McDonald’s corporate, which limits what franchisees can do even to owned equipment.
> Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system.
But Taylor (presumably) won't repair them if they have modified boards and it's a breech of contract for them to hire anyone else to repair them.
To latch onto your comment: What about competition? Ice cream machines are not complicated, relatively speaking. Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation? They could build their own - high efficiency, high quality, high reliability, low maintenance cost - line of ice cream machines and distribute them to the... over 40.000 McD's franchises worldwide.
The company that they purchase ice cream machines from make reliable, efficient machines for other resteraunts. McDonalds corporate has a stipulation that franchisees mist purchase the same, old ice cream machines. The major problem with them, as I understand it, is that any sort of malfunction leads to the machine shutting down and displaying an archaic, nonsensical error code. When you look the code up and how to resolve it almost always says that you need to call a licensed maintenance tech. It is all about propping up the service division of the machine's OEM.
McDonald's is trying to run an industrial volume process with ingredients subject to contamination and spoilage... using minimum wage young workers with varying levels of attention/dedication to details.
It's a difficult set of constraints that includes a non-negligible amount of blaming the machine for willful lapses in procedure.
> McDonald's is trying to run an industrial volume process with ingredients subject to contamination and spoilage
You're getting at the heart of it. McDonalds used to use very simple Taylor machines that were very reliable. The only problem was they had to be taken apart, cleaned, and sanitized at the end of every day. That required an extra employee at closing for about an hour, and another employee the next morning to put the machine back together. This wasn't difficult, but it wasn't totally obvious either so it did require an employee who had been trained on how to do it.
McDonald's wanted to save the training and the $10-$20 of labor, and a few dollars of product waste that this was costing them every day, so they asked Taylor to develop a machine that didn't have to be taken apart and sanitized every day. Taylor did that, and the machine got a lot more complicated. It heats itself up to a temperature that will kill bacteria, then cools back down. If there is a power glitch or fault or for any reason that cycle is interrupted, the machine locks out and has to be "repaired."
Also, as part of the daily cleaning and re-assembly of the old machines, all the O-rings and seals would be inspected and lubricated and replaced if they were cut, worn out, etc. Now that doesn't happen so you get more failures of seals, leaks, etc. which can also shut the machine down.
We don't have any evidence to support this claim though.
McDonald's appears to sell a lot more soft serve (by volume) than any other fast food chain. People go there specifically for McFlurries and others, and then leave disappointed when the machine is not working. Few, if any, go to Burger King or Arby's only for a soft serve product.
So, the issue appears more visible. But that's not evidence that McDonald's machines are less reliable. It could simply be they're the most used.
McDonald's is nearly 6 times larger than Wendy's by number of stores, and double the revenue, with more than half of that revenue coming from franchise fees[1], if I'm reading this correctly.
That's why a lot of fast food chains don't offer soft serve. At McDonald's scale, their peers that do would be KFC (only some locations?), Burger King, and Wendy's.
And I would hope that Dairy Queen, a company founded in 1940 to sell soft-serve ice cream (original formula 1938), is better at selling soft-serve ice cream than McDonald's.
Also, they're a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway since 1998.
There is a detailed video about it. Ultimately, conclusion seems like it is collusion between the two corporates to get profit at the expense of franchise owners
The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken by Johnny Harris
To be quite frank, McDonalds seems to hire a lower grade of worker than the rest, or at least their workers perform worse than the rest because they're paid poorly and overworked, or for some other reason...
McDonalds is a franchise, so "McDonalds" doesn't hire the workers. Each independent franchise owner does. There are some franchise owners who own numerous locations across an area, so sometimes the same party is to blame for quality and hiring practices. For sure some hire really bottom of the barrel, but I've been to some where the workers were top notch. I remember one lady that was so smart, helpful, and cheerful that I wanted to hire and train her! It all depends on the individual franchise owner's philosophy/approach.
> Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation? They could build their own - high efficiency, high quality, high reliability, low maintenance cost - line of ice cream machines and distribute them to the... over 40.000 McD's franchises worldwide.
That's exactly what this machine is.
The issue is that it's doing something novel--sterilizing the machine while full of liquid--in order to be able to be run by unskilled (read as: super cheap) labor.
The fundamental issue is not that the machine breaks down--that's to be expected in a novel industrial machine.
The problem is that there is no incentive to fix the design of the machine. Taylor gets no extra profit for doing more R&D and fixing the machine--precisely the opposite, in fact, as they get less repair revenue. McDonald's, itself, gets no extra profit for doing more R&D and fixing the machine, either, and would have to spend money on training if they went back to traditional machines.
The total market for these machines is effectively the number of new McDonald's. Call these a $20K machine and McDonalds opens 500 stores per year in the US. That's $10,000,000 in new sales revenue in a year, max. That puts net profit at about $1,000,000 per year (call it 10% of gross revenue--probably optimistic for this kind of machinery)
And now we hit why Taylor certainly isn't jumping to fix this and no competitor really wants into the space. Net profit of $1,000,000 per year gets dwarfed by the service revenue really quickly.
These machines are local ruled monopoly made by management to squeeze money from franchise restaurants. This is not about competition or service this is legal scam scheme to make money.
Apparently the machines are cheap and McD likes that.
The cost of maintenance is thrown onto the franchisee (350$ per 15min as explained in the article) which McD doesn’t have to care about. So Taylor seems them cheap because they know they will get their end from maintenance which the franchisee pays for
McDonalds corp cares whether franchisees succeed or fail. Failing franchisees start cutting corners, which results in McDonalds stores which are run down, with poor service and product quality and this harms McDonalds corp's reputation and bottom line. This is the reason McDonalds corp won't let just anybody start a franchise, you have to buy your way into this game by having at least a million dollars liquid, to prove to the corp that you have enough cash on hand to run the store properly. They also don't let a franchisee put the store anywhere they like, rather they choose and develop properties themselves to make sure those locations make strategic sense for the corp as a whole (they don't want two McDonalds franchises sitting right next to each other competing, driving each other out of business.) Furthermore if you want to be a franchisee you have to go through their training courses, you can't just buy a McDonalds franchise on a whim and gift it to your trustfund son. If you want your spoiled son to own a McDonalds franchise, you need to persuade him to go through their training program.
If Taylor machines were actually a real threat to the viability of many McDonalds franchises, McDonalds corp would make changes. It is against their interests for McDonalds franchises to fail and they already employ several severe and strict measures to reduce the likelihood of failure.
If this system seems overbearing, then simply start your own burger shop, or get a franchise from a fast food brand who doesn't give a shit like Subway. Subway will give a franchise to somebody with a tenth as much money, don't care if franchises sit on top of each other, etc. Not incidentally, Subway has an abysmal reputation for consistency, quality, cleanliness and food safety. McDonalds food is crap, but it's crap in a way that is consistent and safe (in the short term; it might give you diabetes but it probably won't give you botulism.)
McDonald's operations teams: yes, they are probably fed up.
McDonald's investors: they also own the companies that make the expensive failure-prone ice cream machines. They are double dipping by writing themselves expensive repair contracts.
> Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation?
Let's make something very clear here. McD does not concern itself with the woes of the franchisees. Not one ketchup sachet worth of worry. Costs? Not their problem.
Reputation loss maaaaybe.
Taylor gets exclusivity from McD and in turn gets exclusive access to maintenance.
I see other commenters making the point "they are trying to make bottom dollar employees operate a machine with food safety worries". Absolutely correct. Which should be grounds for McD to ask Taylor to incorporate the more user friendly panels and operation.
Look at cross pollination of corporations where the McD board members also are. It's about propping up the system of extracting money from franchisees.
The base issue here is that the same group of people own McDonalds AND the company who fixes the machines.
They have zero monetary incentive to allow the franchise owners to fix the machines in any way. It's a net loss to them if they don't break down as often or they can service them without an expensive technician.
> The Superior Court of Alameda County is charging roughly $1 per page to get legal filings. To download the entirety of the court proceedings to date, the court wants $2,999.
I was surprised by this, b/c I've been able to view court documents for SF Superior Court without paying anything. AC even charges per search query!
Part of it is holdover from the paper era, part of it is because these court document systems are run by third parties that need to get paid. Court systems are underfunded nationwide to run their own IT/software dev and just pay for third parties outright to cover costs fully.
$1 per page is hardly to cover the costs ,this single case to access just so far would come to $3000! Alameda Superior court also charges for every query!.
SF court just a county over is able to this for free.
I am not saying there are no costs , but whatever costs they just be charged to the litigators in civil or the government in criminal once not to the public every time
You can thank the Reagan administration for that. They gave the rights to all Federal court records to WestLaw. There was a small company (whose name I forget) who got shafted as DoJ gave everything to WestLaw. And if you file a case in federal courts, you have to use WestLaw's page numbering. Which you can only get if you subscribe to them.
The semi-joke is that we have the best legal system that money can buy.
The meta point I heard the other day was that property law used to givern how we use things, but that computing has changed all interactions into contract law. Instead of having broad governance by government of how we relate to property, each company is free to create it's own set of laws governing use (free to ensnare us as it will).
What a wretched abomination! This imposes against the spirit of man the toolmaker, man the creator, man the scientist to let each company prohibit exploration & understanding & fiddling with the things they have released unto the world. Black boxes are against the Enlightenment spirit that has given rise to society.
> McDonald's ice cream machines, is the holy grail of the right to repair movement.
This is not true though.
Even with Right to Repair laws, McDonald's can and will force franchisees to use the approved machines, contract the approved repair vendor, and use approved parts.
It's McDonald's decision, whether we agree with it or not. It's their reputation, and ultimately their wallet at stake. They can, and will contractually force franchisees to do what they want. That's how franchises are run.
The reality is this is not a Right to Repair issue. This is a franchise contract issue.
That’s literally one of the questions at stake. If I buy a machine — whether I’m compelled to or not — why shouldn’t I have the right to fix it myself?
A contract does not contravene federal or state law.
> A contract does not contravene federal or state law
It does in this case. If you do not follow McDonald's instructions and/or contract, they will terminate your franchise.
As much as you believe a franchisee has a right to use whatever machine they want, and repair it with whatever parts they want, that's just not how franchises work.
They are franchises, not individual restaurants. They do not get a choice over how long to cook the burgers, what size fries to offer, what grills to use, and what soft serve machine to use and it's sanitization standards.
There's an approved parts and vendor list for everything in a McDonald's restaurant. Franchisees basically get a catalog of approved things they can use.
McDonald's sells consistency above basically anything else. They have clearly decided having machines be inoperable is better than risking getting someone sick. The machine's are designed for inattentive employees with little to no training to operate effectively and safely. If the machine says "no go", then that's final. McDonald's wants that safety and consistency across all stores, and that is their right as the brand owner.
No Right to Repair law will change the terms of franchise agreements. Franchises that refuse to honor their agreement will simply be terminated. That's McDonald's right.
Honestly... as far as fast food franchises go, McDonald's is perhaps the most clean and consistent - given their massive size (double their next closest direct competitor). It's a marvel things are as safe as they are, given the varying quality and level of caring each franchise owner can have.
People cut corners when things get tough. A franchisee with autonomy over things like deep cleaning of the soft serve machine will choose not to do it if they can sell more (quite literally what people are advocating for in this very thread). It's not their reputation and brand at risk, it's McDonalds'.
Frankly, it's a good thing McDonald's exerts this level of control.
If you don't agree to, refuse to follow, or ignore McDonald's terms, they will refuse to allow you to operate using their brand (ie. franchise).
There is no law that forces McDonald's to extend you a franchise license. It's their right to run their brand how they want.
Part of the franchise contract would be an agreement to use their approved vendor/parts list.
> or to harm others
Their policy exists for exactly this reason - prevent food borne illness from difficult to clean and maintain machines, ie. soft serve machines.
Anyone who has worked in a restaurant with a soft serve machine knows how much of a PITA they are to maintain and clean. Which means they don't get properly maintained or cleaned on average. McDonald's policies force franchises to maintain the machines. It's really simple, and it's really good.
I agree with you that this idea makes no sense. But I think your argument doesn't make sense. McDonalds can't deny someone a franchise license on the basis of them being black. They are compelled to not consider race when offering franchise licenses regardless of whether or not they'd like to. (I say that because, as far as I know, having non-race-blind preferences on who to do business with is not a crime, only acting on it is.) I see no reason a similar law couldn't theoretically also force them to not consider whether owners modify their ice cream machines.
If some law passed and McDondald's was going to lose control of franchises, consistency and their brand, they'd probably pivot to a mostly or entirely corporate-owned/operated model.
However, it's unreasonable to assert a franchise should be able to use whatever devices, machines, standards and consistency they want... which is what is being advocated here it seems.
You can go anywhere in the world and get a Big Mac or McFlury and expect it to be the same consistency as anywhere else. That's what McDonald's sells - consistency. If they lose that control, then they are not a brand anymore, just a loosely connected chain of independent restaurants doing whatever they want. That's not in anyone's best interest.
McDonald's can deny a license for pretty much any reason, or no reason, and nobody would be able to compel them otherwise. It is their brand, and nobody has a right to operate using that brand unless McDonald's allows it. That's the entire point of a franchise - use someone else's brand.
Ever go to a fast food restaurant and get watered down soda? That's what happens when the franchise owner has autonomy over those types of decisions. Save a few cents and piss off customers. Who do you get mad at - the franchise owner or the brand?
While gross, nobody gets sick from watered down soda - people can get sick from improperly cleaned soft serve machines. McDonald's avoids that by exerting this level of control.
Yeah, can't believe that in 2023 the quest to find a sympathetic defendant for basic consumer protections laws is when the lack of protections harms corporate profits.
This is bad for the people you are elected to represent -- snooze.
This is bad for your stock portfolio -- we have to act now!
The issues with the ice cream machines at McDonald's go far beyond anyone's desire for profit and has become a cultural meme that anyone who has desired a frozen dairy products from McDonald's in the past decade can relate to.
>anyone who has desired a frozen dairy products from McDonald's
That's a sentence I wasn't expecting to read, ever. There are only two types of people that I have ever met that would fall into that category: kids, who don't know any better about what food stuff they eat, and addicts.
I may be wrong, but I thought this "exemption" wasn't required in the first place.
DMCA 1201 applies to copyrighted material, and even then, only to measures that control access to the work. The Chamberlain v. Skylink case in the court of appeals for the Federal Circuit (which is binding in all other federal courts) established that the prohibitions can't apply to software the user is already entitled to use. The Court put it this way:
"Consumers who purchase a product containing a copy of embedded software have the inherent legal right to use that copy of the software."
In case it's not discussed the ice cream machines are broken software wise. there was a big Todo about a third party who hacked it and sold a product that just made the firmware better or human friendly. McD stole it.
these are so awful there is a website tracking when they are down at mcbroken
A company called Kytch built a small, third-party device that could be attached to the soft service ice cream machines that read and interpreted Taylor’s error codes. Kytch has been engaged in a lawsuit in California state court with Taylor and McDonald’s for more than two years.
Namely, that McDonald's franchises agree to only use repair labor from a contractually enforced monopoly. McDonalds and the ice cream machine company collude to extract money from franchises. He also compares McDonald's ice cream machines to Wendy's, which are the same brand under a different contract scheme and finds that Wendy's does not have the same problems.
I see it slightly differently although his research is great. I think this could be one of those carrot problems.
I think there’s a possibility Mcdonald’s hates that they need to sell Ice-cream. There’s a probability Icecream’s an inescapaable loss leader and their lowest margin item and that it is a poor loss leader due to it’s substitution effect with probably their highest margin product - soft-drinks. Because neighbouring restaurants offer ice-cream - Mcdonald’s also needs to - because people often feel like an ice-cream. If they don’t provide ice-cream while BurgerKing does then they lose high margin Fries and Softdrink sales. By offering icecreams with the minimal tolerable 85% reliability (ice cream isn’t a deal breaker - few people cancel an order when they can’t get a sunday with it - but it is an enticer - they remember Mcdonald’s ice-cream is nicer than Burger King’s when they get it - it’s the equivalent of Wendy’s ice-cream but cheaper). So there’s a possibility they’ve figured out that 85% reliability maximises high margin sales and minimises low margin ones.
Maybe they’ve figured out how to offer low cost high-quality ice-cream just enough of the time to maximise gross profit. A second order effect of 15% reliability - is the lack of reliability also discourages ice-cream orders - because - people try to avoid disappointment and decision making in group situations under time pressure.
Markup on soft-drinks and fries are massive compared to ice-cream. As you mentioned Free flow ice-cream probably has the highest food safety management cost on top of the low gross margins. It also gives staff cold hands and melts quickly in summer. It’s not a great loss leader but an inescapable one. Their other option would be to raise ice-cream prices but wendy’s grade ice-cream is an enticer. It would possibly cost more profit than 85% reliability.
There’s potential for profiting from co-operation on the lack of machine reliability but the franchisees will also be maximising profits by offering the minimal amount of ice-cream possible to not cost big-mac + frys + soft-drink sales. Mcdonald’s could possibly be paying high machine fees for exclusivity so Burger King doesn’t get an option of higher quality Ice-cream.
The only person really missing out is someone wanting an ice-cream 15% of the time - who like the franchisee - may be disappointed in the reliability of the ice cream machine - but is also better off financially - even if they don’t realise it. A possible third order effect is it breaks food addictions to things like ordering thick shakes on the way to work - regular consumption of sugar + saturated fat is not a healthy combination. Health management is a large concern for Mcdonald’s.
I’m happy with low-cost high quality ice-cream 85% of the time. I prefer that option to more expensive Ice-cream. I think this is part of the magic of the market economy. The invisible hand.
Are carrot problems killed by their public disclosure? I hope not, I like the 85% probability of cheap delicious ice-cream.
An amazing thing would be if there was tech in the machines making failure rates non random. I wonder if they fail more in winter than summer for instance which would educate the consumer about the lack of reliability so when summer comes less ice-cream is ordered.
This just my 3 minute thought experiment (brain fart) but could be a great topic for a behavioural economist such as the freakonomics blog to cover.
I don't think you watched the video which provides a much more simple explanation (and more importantly simple to carry out) than "ice cream is a loss leader that a bean counter discovered 85% reliability minimizes losses".
For one, franchise owners decide when to do repairs that are prohibitively expensive. Two, the failures are not "random" and likely store based (one franchise down for 2 weeks rather than 10 franchises down a day) because it's owner discretion on when to fix it. Three, there is demonstrated profit in the McDonalds <-> Taylor collusion based monopoly.
There's no need for an elaborate spreadsheet conspiracy. Taylor is using a contract which enables them to charge exorbitant amounts for labor and prevent the free market (iFixIt and Kytch) from providing equivalent labor (theoretically under equivalent liability) at a much cheaper cost.
Mcdonalds is making a contractual obligation on behalf of the franchises and that contractual obligation benefits McDonalds at the cost of the Franchises.
I'm sympathetic to right-to-repair, in general, but this argument bothers me:
> “The current barriers to these works include service passwords and digital locks,” the petition reads. “Commercial ice cream machines, such as the Taylor manufactured ice cream machines used by McDonald’s, frequently fall into disrepair when its daily pasteurization cycle fails. Circumventing the digital lock on the software would enable owners and repair professionals to diagnose and perform the necessary repairs to get these devices back up and running.”
They're talking about a safety-sensitive process failing and consequently locking out use... mere syllables before asking for the ability to circumvent locks.
Which prompts the concern that some fast food employees, their managers or small business owners, sketchier repairpeople, and Aliexpress gadgets are going to effectively use that lock circumvention ability to circumvent a safety feature, eventually killing children whose parents treated them to ice cream cones.
A lot of the time, the reason why it fails is simply because the feed bucket is filled too much to heat it up to a high enough temperature in the 4 hours, but the error codes give no indication of this unless you go into a service menu which the code is not available to the owners of the machines. If you could get into the service menu, you could find out what the problem is, fix it, and have it successfully complete a cycle, if you had access to the settings, you might be able to set it to try for a 5 hour cleaning cycle to give it more time to heat itself up to clean itself. It's not about trying to bypass a safety lockout, it's about being able to troubleshoot the issue and fix it.
> You're conflating "I can't get the diagnostic repair codes that Taylor can" with "Kids are going to get hurt because the machine is malfunctioning"
But the article and the linked vice.com article suggests that the device isn't just decoding error codes, it's also providing a hardware bypass for safety features like lockouts.
no, the article says "groups seek permission from the government to break arbitrary software locks and passwords that keep consumers and repair professionals from diagnosing and repairing equipment they own or are authorized by the owner to work on." It doesn't mention "lockouts", or bypassing safety features. It's about access to the machine, and the diagnostics that a repair person has access to, but the owner does not.
The franchise owner is the machine owner, and therefore can cause a repair person to become “authorized by the owner”.
The franchise owner may have a contract with McD or Taylor in which they agreed not to make certain repairs, but I’m pretty sure they do not, because otherwise Taylor wouldn’t need to lean on the DMCA to argue that certain repair tools are illegal.
Q: Why don't you call your 'shakes,' 'milkshakes'?
A: Great question. Our shakes contain milk from our reduced-fat soft serve, which makes them thick and creamy. Dairy regulations actually vary from state to state on what can officially be called a 'milkshake.' We like to keep it simple and refer to them strictly as 'shakes.'
(Note they say "reduced-fat soft serve" and not "ice cream")
In order to call it simply “ice cream”, it would need to have at least 10% fat content. They could choose to call it “reduced fat ice cream”, but I’m guessing they’ve decided that that doesn’t sound as appetizing to consumers as “soft serve” since to most people, “soft serve” is just a type of ice cream. Marketing finds a way. said in the voice of Ian Malcolm
They can't call it ice-cream because legally it isn't in at least some states. They likely aren't using enough cream, or they're adulterating it with other ingredients that some states don't permit. What exactly are you refuting?
All modern industrial machinery has safety features that often include shutting down the machine. Most machine owners are allowed to send mainteance in to evaluate the reason of the shutdown, resolve the issue and restart the machine, without calling the OEM.
Imagine if a walk-in cooler had a high-temp alarm, and the machine shut itself down, and locked the cooler as a result, then told the owner to call the cooler OEM. Thankfully it doesn't work that way, it might alarm then you diagnose (radiator fan not running, fan coils covered in leaves, whatever) resolve and restart.
The lock doesn't prevent using the machine - it prevents restarting the cleaning process. The fact that the cleaning process hasn't been completed is what prevents using the machine.
There is no danger in unlocking the cleaning process so the cleaning process can be restarted.
responsibility for restaurant sanitation falls on the restaurant
if you're going to mcdonalds, with your children, with the view that they will serve you and your children spoiled, contaminated food, and kill you and them, unless a little computer gadget physically prevents them,
you might either have poor judgement,
or you might be a contrived plot device in an implausible hypothetic scenario dreamed up by a HNer
I didn't catch any explanation of why McDonalds is still using these machines if it is such an issue. I've had plenty of soft serve from other machines that tastes just the same, or better.
Also, what reasoning did McDonalds corporate have for telling franchisees not to use the device?
This must be some bizarre and long contractual agreement between McD and Taylor
In short, McDonald's continues to use these frequently malfunctioning ice cream machines due to their long-standing exclusive partnership with Taylor. The cost of repairs fall on the local franchise owners, not McD Corp.
They require Taylor machines for product consistency. Same reason they sell Coca Cola (legend has it this was a handshake agreement made by Ray Kroc and still is) and a franchisee can't decide he's going to serve Pepsi.
No, they require everyone use THE SAME MACHINE for consistency. Nothing about that requires them to use an ancient machine that is constantly broken with an abysmal service contract.
McDonalds has Walmart level bargaining powers with vendors. The current setup, where a machine breaks and you have to call a specific technician for insane rates is not an accident. McDonalds could change that tomorrow if they felt like it. No business relationship at McDonald's scale will ever be tilted away from their benefit.
The ancient machines were more reliable. I worked at a McDonalds for about 5 years in the 1980s and cannot recall one day when the Taylor machines didn't work.
The old machines had higher training and labor costs though, and over thousands of stores this was an issue. Presumably the newer machines are overall less expensive, even accounting for the lost sales on days where they are offline, and the associated repair costs. They may also be necessary for the newer ice cream products. In my day we only had vanilla soft-serve (cones or sundaes) and shakes with three flavors.
McDonald's isn't in business to keep Taylor repair techs employed. If it was costing them more than the alternatives, they would make a change.
McDonald's corporate and restaurants interests aren't always financially aligned.
They seem to be moreso than the abuser that is Subway, but I expect this is a situation where what's good for McD corporate isn't what's good for franchisees.
when the machines are properly maintained they work. source - worked at a mom and pop franchise of mcd way back. Corporate franchisees cut corners a lot and cause the machines to error out. onus is on them to pay for repairs and suffer down time and lost sales. customers like ice cream and MCD corporate are partners with the company making the machines so they gain and it's technically not their own issue.
I’m fact restaurant franchisees and the franchiser are typically in a state of near-conflict. They have very different incentives and methods of making money. The notable exception is Denny’s, who go to great lengths to foster good relations with their franchisees and let them have an actual say in how corporate runs.
Ice cream has a legal definition in the US, and it doesn’t require cream as an ingredient.
>Ice cream shall contain at least 1.6 pounds of total solids to the gallon, weigh not less than 4.5 pounds to the gallon, and contain not less than 20 percent total milk solids, constitued of not less than 10 percent milkfat. In no case shall the content of milk solids not fat be less than 6 percent. Whey shall not, by weight, be more than 25 percent of the milk solids not fat.
Whether McDonald’s product meets that standard, I am not sure.
In order to meet that standard, cream must be introduced to get that amount of fat and solids. So, no, it doesn't meet that standard. If it did, McD would advertise it as such and they don't.
In addition, real ice cream purveryors would be up in arms over it. And they have in the past.
It is ice cream, they even call it as such on their website. People are so weird about commercial food production and this didn't always used to be the case, its GMO hysteria but for 90s kids. Like clockwork as soon as you explain what different preservatives, binders, emulsifiers and conditioners actually do and how they do
it they stop being scary.
It's not really more complicated, just different. It's funny, the F in FDA stands for food, so you still need to deal with the FDA and its regulations, just different ones.
Its really more of a paperwork/comiance thing than anything. I.e. genaric drugs.
Source- I've designed medical devices and food processing equipment for 20 years.
I shouldn't have been so terse. I didn't mean to suggest that the regulatory side didn't exist in commercial food equipment, obviously it does.
OP seemed to suggest that medical devices was rife with situations parallel to McDonalds/Taylor, and that just doesn't seem to be the case; partially because the landscape is more complex in terms of who pays, how liability is distributed, and how the maintenance work is done, etc.
Which isn't to say device industry doesn't have lots of its own problems, they just look different.
I am OP, and the parent commenter to this comment both.
I was making exactly the opposit point you are.
I have actually worked directly with the manufacturer of the pumps in those machines (Watson marlow), and also designed and saw through to clinical release many similar complex medical devices with the same exact pumps.
The situation is nearly identical between these two examples, it's just the names of the forms you need to fill out are different, and the division of the company that supplies your components is different, but it's all the same thing just a different name.
Ok, I confused myself somehow about who I was replying to, my apologies. The OP is jmsflknr though, no?
However, my point was not meant to be about the pump design nor the regulatory bodies involved, so I think we are just miscommunicating. My fault for quick replies.
I was responding to "There are so many of these situations in medical devices." by which I took you to mean that there are many parallel situations the the McDonalds/Taylor issue in the linked article and the franchises inability to keep them in service, or accept 3rd party help in doing it; I read this as the core point of the article.
When I said "things are more complicated" I meant the relationship between the various entities and how systems get deployed, managed, maintained, etc. doesn't look the same.
So is that what you meant?
It's possible you just mean there are similar technical issues in the pumps, something I'm happy to accept you have direct experience in; in that case I just misread you. If you had said there are similar (identical) pumps in some medical devices I would have understood it that way.
It read to me like you were making a far broader claim.
Not the OP, but I think the mistake many people make is that they assume that the goal is to get the machine pumping out ice cream, without considering that the ice cream might make people sick because the machine wasn’t properly sanitized as well. Hence the regulations and paperwork.
This isn't about the regulations (which must exist and do have some parallels) but about systemic differences in how the industries work which mean that it wouldn't play out the same way it has in fast food franchises, is all.
I'm replying here because I cant reply to your comment below.
I'm still saying the opposite, I'm saying that those 2 industries (food equipment and med devices) are actually very similar in the way they operate. Having direct experience in both.
Good manufacturing practices, maintenance, etc. Are all the same no matter the application. Things are remarkably similar if you look past the surface level.
The dialysis industry is dominated by 2-3 large players who dominate the market, reimbursements, everything. They are Da Vita, Fresenious and I think there is a smaller third one.
Dialysis machines are very similar in practice to ice cream machines. They have peristaltic (and other) pumps inside with wearable parts that need to be replaced on regular intervals for not only reliability and safety concerns, but for biological concerns. Bugs grow inside them, even though thy have a daily self sterilization cycle they run. So they need to do preventative maintenance every few months and change out plastic wear parts inside like pump heads, seals, valve seats, etc. Keep in mind these machines are used constantly, these companies view an empty seat at a dialysis center like lost revenue, so they do there best to keep the machines busy.
Da Vita buys Gambro Dialysis machines, Fresenious makes their own. In both these cases there is a huge volume of disposables and accessories that go with these machines, both the daily disposables but the PM stuff too.
Lots of these dialysis centers do things to improve their bottom line that is off label. They do things like washing and reusing dialyzers which are explicitly single use. They do so with other stuff also.
Some newer systems are starting to use different techniques to not allow this, not allow these kinds of practices.
This isn't just dialysis. So many medical products have the classic razor/razor blade model and they typically actively design in proprietary lock in features so as not to loose out on that precious razor blade revenue.
Ah, I think I see where we diverged. You were focused narrowly on the technology, I was focussed on the broader situation, where I don't see the equivalent of the franchise owner or the ice cream consumer in your dialysis example; if nothing else unlike the ice cream machines the dialysis units mostly function well for reasons related to how the two situations differ.
There is some tech parallel I agree in e.g. protecting consumables , but that’s an aside in this context , and largely symptomatic if the way health care is paid for in US that drives towards a razor:razor blade model.
Anyway that was a long walk for a short drink of water!
So.. one of the smokescreens Taylor uses is that their proprietary control software is necessary to ensure the sterilization procedures happen correctly, so they can trot out the argument "if you tamper with our machine you could kill somebody".
But it's a damn ice cream machine.
The stakes get a bit riskier when it comes to medical devices because it's much easier to imagine the scenario where you tamper with a pacemaker, you're going to kill somebody. You tamper with a dialysis machine, you're going to kill somebody.
>so they can trot out the argument "if you tamper with our machine you could kill somebody".
>But it's a damn ice cream machine.
It's a machine holding fluids that are highly conducive to bacterial growth, and is a pain to clean because it has tons nooks and crannies. Someone dying (if there's a preexisting condition) or getting seriously sick due to subpar cleaning is very plausible. People get sick from improperly maintained ice machines[1], and those are arguably simpler and are holding less hazardous liquids (plain water rather than milk).
And yet restaurant operators are allowed to open close their refrigerators and freezers at will, not subject to third party refrigerator maintenance company monopoly.
...because they're not part of a franchise. Part of being a franchisee is that you're accepting the standards/regulations of the franchisor in exchange for use of their brand. I think it's very reasonable if mcdonalds had some sort of regulation like "all soda fountains must be disassembled and cleaned every 24 hours", and enforced that through hardware interlocks.
Should they also be allowed to swap out their cola products with generic brands? RC Cola instead of Coca Cola won't hurt anybody (much safer than tampering with a dairy machine!), but franchisees are made to buy Coca Cola specifically. Agreeing to this sort of thing is part of the deal of being a franchise.
How are you going to label that their ice cream machine is using generic parts? The whole point of a franchise is that I know what I'm getting. What's the point of a "mcdonalds" brand, when any franchisee can swap out arbitrary components/ingredients as they wish, and I have to carefully assess whether the replacements are up to snuff?
That's why I'm saying they need to label it if they serve rc not coke, just say what they're doing.
If they use one brand of straw that is approved vs another brand of straw that is also approved they don't need to label it, there is not material difference.
That's what I'm saying the parts in the ice cream machine are, not materially different.
The comparison you should be making is if they changed the ice cream base mix they put in the machine. Yes, in that case they should tell customers they are using soy milk or whatever, but If they use a different part in the machine that is equally suitable then it matters not.
Right, but what does it mean if I walk into a mcdonalds, and I don't even know whether I'm going to be getting coca-cola or RC cola, or worse yet real mcdonalds fries™ or generic sysco fries? It might as well be a generic burger joint. What's the point of the mcdonalds brand in that case?
For medical devoces its the manufacturer, and it's notified body.
It's no different than for the origami manufacturer.
It's all covered in ISO 13485 (and another similar standard for the software portion if your product contains software). It's called the risk based approach. You define what's called essential performance or your device, things it must do or the patient or caregiver is harmed. You then do a FMEA to determine what failure modes exist, and what the result of each failure is. You then make sure you have mitigation in place for each of those situations. You then document that all, get it signed off internally, by the FDA, by your notified body, and by the test house (for 14485, FCC testing, etc). All that makes up the stack of documents that allows you to sell a medical product.
It's no different if it's a generic product or a new novel one, same process same standards.
For food machinery it's also thr FDA for things like design and materials, and it's the local health department for those items. It's a similar but different ISO standard you need to meet depending on the specific machinery.
The stakes are actually higher for the ice cream machine. Inproper use of the ice cream machine could kill dozens. A pacemaker malfunction would just kill one at best.
It's why airliners need to have triple redundant systems, doubke fault tolerant. Medical devices only need to be double redundant, single fault tolerant.
I (dont) love it when people whonhave not ever designed a real medical device that's actually on the market make claims about what it's like to design a real medical device that's actually on the market.
> Poorly cleaned ice cream machines at a Washington-based burger joint were linked to a listeria outbreak earlier this year that landed six people in the hospital, three of whom died. Two of those who were hospitalized told investigators they had milkshakes from the same restaurant before getting sick.
I think there's some pretty good podcasts about this.
Essentially - this should be a fight between franchisees and McD's. It's also a bad look for McD - yes let's get a lot of bad PR about how we screw over franchisees. If they do that to their partners - what do you think they're doing to the food?
Who are we kidding - we know what they do to the food. The less you deal with the arches the better.
McDonald's used to hit a sweet spot. For most people, food needs to be fast, cheap, and/or good. My theory is that it needs to be two of the three of those.
Until about 2 years ago, it used to be cheap and fast. Now it's neither of those things.
My bellwether is my youngest. He's 10 and would rather just eat at home if McDonald's is the only option. Last week he chose peanut butter sandwiches instead of chicken nuggets when we knew we'd be actively on the road during supper. So that's something.
The food around here hasn’t changed much, but price increases have removed and real discounts compared to “high end fast food” and there’s not a real major reason to still choose the McDs.
My kid is price agnostic but has had a couple bad experiences that turned him off. I think more due to labor/staffing issues than anything else. But they slipped a pickle in his burger once (very unappreciated) and the nuggets came under cooked once (also very unappreciated) so he’d actively boycotting although he doesn’t really know it
It almost makes you wonder if there's some sort of McDonald's kickback scheme here. They make the franchisees take the machine, knowing it's going to break down, which makes the franchise owners have to pay through the nose to get it fixed, and then which McDonald's gets a kickback.
When you have a machine that fails that often, and has become that much of a publicity problem, you would think a company like McDonald's would say OK enough is enough, we're changing the machines.
>It almost makes you wonder if there's some sort of McDonald's kickback scheme here.
Given that there's been a lawsuit between the OEM and the startup making mods for the machine for 2 years and no such documents have been found in discovery, my guess is no.
McDonalds employees pretty consistently can't even get "no pickles" right. Does it really surprise people if McDonalds corp wants all dairy machine maintenance done by actual professionals instead of overworked/disinterested/whatever/etc teenagers?
If Taylor were scamming McDonalds, or were bribing somebody in McDonalds corp to go along with it, McDonalds corp lawyers would be crawling all over them. That evidently isn't happening, so it seems safe to assume that Taylor is doing exactly what McDonalds corp thinks they should be doing. If a burger shop proprietor doesn't like this, they're free to open their own burger shop without a McDonalds franchise. It shouldn't be hard for them to sell a superior product, but they'd lose access to McDonald's reputation. And protecting that reputation is probably the entire point of this ice-cream machine drama.
I remember one night closing our store. I was 16, and the dude in charge of cleaning the shake machine and the sundae machine was a bit of a stoner. Back in the day all the cleaning was manual (1982). So the dude would pull out all of the frozen shake mix, then run a soapy water mix through it, then a sanitizer rinse. Took some time, and closing was always a rush.
So he either forgot or decided to skip the sanitizer rinse.
Now if you put soap in dairy products, you end up giving people diarrhea. So a few days later we got a lot of complaints and the guy ended up being fired. He was dumb enough to joke about it.
It's not like it was his career; he was 18 and headed to college somewhere. For $2.10/hour, that's what you got. If the manager didn't doublecheck everything, stuff like this happened.
McDonalds tech is designed around the following principle; "Imagine how stupid the average person is, then realize half of all people are stupider than that."
By your logic we shouldn’t allow kids at all near food preparation and treat it like medical devices and require years of training to operate let alone fix them ?
There is a middle ground between let 15 year old kids fix it and only allow company technician who is billed at hundreds of dollars a hour to fix a common and trivial problem which a third party technician could do it for much less and much faster
If franchisees were willing to have maintenance people on staff, then there wouldn't be a need for complex, self-managing systems. But they either can't afford to, or are unwilling to pay the added cost.
> Does it really surprise people if McDonalds corp wants all dairy machine maintenance done by actual professionals instead of overworked/disinterested/whatever/etc teenagers?
Why not a third-party professional technician that does not charge $300 for 15 minutes of field repair? Additionally, the video points out that the error codes are purposefully obtuse. At the very least we could require these be clear so anybody could understand what the code meant.
Some decades back I had worked at several different McDonald's and the ice cream machines were a major thing because so much revenue came from them. The machines were cleaned on schedule and the rare times they broke there was someone out the next day to get it working again. As a customer, I can only recall one time when I wanted McDonald's ice cream that the machine wasn't working.
I'm curious to know if my experience is an outlier or maybe things have changed. Or perhaps some franchises don't put as high a priority on the ice cream, or perhaps even the claims are a bit exaggerated. Or maybe something else that I'm not considering.
I’ve never ever come across a broken McDonald’s soft serve machine in Canada. Is there something fundamentally different going on up here or is this an outlier? Any other Canadians able to chime in?
For anyone who wants full details on this story, there is an 82-page complaint by Kytch against McDonalds for false/misleading descriptions under the Lanham Act, including a number of other state law claims. A must-read for anyone who finds this dispute entertaining.
This is a well documented thing. McDs is colluding with their buddies to artificially make money via bogus broken machines. They make way more money with this scam rather than selling their legally not even called ice cream, simply due to the sheer magnitude of the contract to repair. What a boring dystopia.
Is everyone 100% sure it's McDonald's machines that are faulty? Couldn't it be that McDonald's specific ice cream mix or blend is just a little bit thicker, or stickier, or whatever, and that would increase the failure rate of any brand or model of soft-serve machine?
I wish they'd rather petition for real right to repair, instead of selling screwdrivers and full PS4 Slim Optical Drive assemblies, but not a single sheet of schematics.
I guess that would look very differently in the eyes of the companies who recently became their BFFs.
I bet they have already hacked the machine. They just need legal cover to release their smooth findings. Once the judge okays it, the details will be published in 3 days. I hope.
Ice cream machines are not printers with cartridges. If you allow unqualified labor do "refills", there will be food contamination and people will die!
But we let worse things slide, so who cares. Enjoy your ice cream! :)
What exactly do you think is the difference between McDonalds employees and the people working your local ice cream parlor? Did those people graduate from ice cream academy in order to qualify for the job?
Soft serve machines that take liquid mix are in nearly every single establishment that offers some form of Ice cream. This isn't special technology.
As other's have pointed out, McDonalds, or their franchises, wanted to eliminate the couple hours of labor usually required to clean those machines daily, and so developed their own mix, and Taylor made special machines that would "self clean" to support it. For safety reasons (probably), those machines lock themselves down if anything goes off the sanitized happy path, and only super expensive Taylor techs have the requisite knowledge to get them back on track.
McDonald's is alone in this struggle because they wanted to save $20 a day in wages. It's $350 per 15 minutes to fix the machines, so assuming it's just one button to fix them (it's not) it only has to break down less than once every 18ish days to pay off, but it doesn't scale well if the machines are less reliable than that.
> Did those people graduate from ice cream academy in order to qualify for the job
Some of them actually did graduate from "ice cream academy". Local Ice Cream parlor has reputation to maintain. Sometimes it is even directly operated by ice cream company.
McDonalds just runs automated machine somewhere in corner. They have no reputation to maintain, it is just borrowed franchise.
> If you allow unqualified labor do "refills", there will be food contamination and people will die!
If they're still the same machines from decades past when I worked at McDonald's then refilling the machine is just dumping a bag of mix in the container on the top. It doesn't take much qualifications. Slightly easier than refilling a printer.
It's not quite the same machine... the current machines have a nightly cycle that will raise the temperature to (re)pasturize the equipment and mix. This cycle often fails, for various reasons which then reads an error code requiring (an expensive) technician to fix.
The machines from decades past had a manual cleaning cycle that included draining the system, partial disassembly and disinfection of parts. Most assistant store managers (and some shift managers) are/were trained for this job. Of course most other restaurants are using these older designs without issue. Also, McDs themselves used these older machines without issue at the time.
The board members for McDs are also board members for the equipment oem, and the licensed repair orgs. It's about extracting money from franchisees more than it is about food safety. It could mean a reduction in maintenance and labor, but there's no reason that higher level store managers/assistants can't also be trained in basic maintenance on these newer machines.
I would not let typical McDonald worker anywhere near my car.
Meat is cooked just before the use, it does not get poisonous very easily. Ice cream is very different. How would you ensure that managers throw away "good enough" batches of ice cream every evening?
The thing is, there are few industries that are as cut-throat as fast food. Wherever franchisees see an opportunity to save even a couple dozen bucks, they will take it, laws don't matter.
And enforcement is pretty lacking in itself. Most people won't report it to the authorities that they got the runs from some ice cream, the authorities will only hear about it when dozens of people arrive at the hospital with the same symptoms, and even then most public health departments have already been understaffed prior to COVID to follow up on the hospital reports and conduct inspections.
What McD/Taylor are doing here is, as fucked up as it is, the only meaningful way they can make sure they're not labeled a public health risk.
And yet you don't see Wendy's frosties killing people all the time? Are their machines magic or is following a "take everything apart, soak it in this sanitizing liquid, rinse it, put it back together" not actually hard for a kid who has been trained and given ample time to do the task? Also I'm not convinced most fast food employees are kids anymore. Plenty employees are well into adulthood.
"Qualified" person is not somebody who had evening school, and can hold screwdriver.
There is a chain of custody, paper trail, spare parts certification, logging... For example if there is a heat ex-changer that sometimes does not work, it may cause a lawsuit. McDonald (and insurance companies) wants to be able to sue ice cream machine manufacturer.
I also want to be able to replace any "suitable" parts in my car, but sadly government does not allow that! Remember, when everyone lost their shit with Volkswagen "cheating" in their software?
Kytch board: "reservoir is overfull, remove product and start again"
Ah yes, good thing we ensured those fucking rubes did not touch the ice cream! Better schedule a $2000 service call to solve this impossible error. Excuse me while I park my ferrari next to my grand piano.
I think it’s more franchise owners sign an agreement.
The device should be legal if you or I buy this machine. However installing it at McDonalds by a non “certified tech” might be in violation of the franchise contract
Like many corporations nowadays, McDonald's is basically a real estate holding company. The actual franchised businesses that operate on their land are tenants, and as their landlord, McDonald's is, IMO, only incentivized to help them succeed financially insomuch as they desire to collect as much rent from them as possible.
This ice cream machine thing is, IMO, an obfuscated method of transferring more value from the ground level businesses to McD's corporate, via the Taylor machine vendor middleman. In other words, paying more rent.
Yes, McDonalds is a large owner of real estate. Does this mean that's where they get their profits? Not so much.
Most franchisees pay roughly 10% of gross sales to McDonalds as "rent" (this is in addition to the 4% they pay as a monthly service fee for other aspects of the relationship).
Since this "rent" is based on gross sales, the primary incentive on McDonalds part to increase the franchisee's sales.
Your argument also ignores that roughly 30% of McDonalds profits comes from stores it operates itself.
As always hanlon’s razor applies: far more likely incompetence than malice.
They don’t care to fix the software product or service here because they don’t have to , it is a captive market , you can buy realistically machines [1] from one company and service from.
McD also benefits from this due to Veblen luxury good like effects : being a limited product, you are far more likely to now the ice cream when the machine when it is running as it is now a special occasion adding to the overall satisfaction, we wouldn’t be talking about it so much if those damn things worked, like we dont talk about French fries machines .
[1] the Italian alternative is not the good enough they don’t have state side ops , parts can take weeks to arrive , few restaurants will actually buy them
I think more money is going to Taylor in recurring service revenue. But there were probably kickbacks to McDs when the use of this machine was mandated
>>This ice cream machine thing is, IMO, an obfuscated method of transferring more value from the ground level businesses to McD's corporate, via the Taylor machine vendor middleman. In other words, paying more rent.
>But there were probably kickbacks to McDs when the use of this machine was mandated
I see this being insinuated since day 1, but after 2 years of lawsuits no document has surfaced during discovery to support this claim. I realize absence of proof isn't proof of absence, but given how much this piece of evidence will help Kytch's case, if not in court of law then in the court of public opinion, I'm inclined to tentatively conclude no such malfeasance has occurred.
Kick-back doesn't have to be a one time thing - my guess (unsubstantiated) is the contracts involved routinely time out, requiring more 'golf-course negotiations.'
In theory yes, but in practice, I feel that the transferred value could be ambiguous and obfuscated, even intangible. I would be surprised if McDonald's doesn't have a world class general counsel and legal team that can get very creative. I readily acknowledge this is a cynically conspiratorial take with no evidential basis.
The franchisees hate the machines, but some people at the corporate level are I'm sure very happy with the big stacks of cash Taylor provides to insure the exclusivity. Reputational brand damage from having always broken Ice Cream machines is apparently less of a concern than losing those sweet greenbacks.
There is no exclusivity. Franchisees can buy Carpigiani machines instead...but...
"(McDonald’s agreement with franchisees also allows them to use an actual Italian machine, sold by Bologna-based Carpigiani, that McD Truth describes as much better designed. But given that its replacement parts can take a week to arrive from Italy, far fewer restaurants buy it.)" [1]
"Then there is the Carpigiani K3. Take all the issues with the Taylor C602 and fix them and then you have a K3. It's by far the better machine with tech support that anyone can call into. The only complaint is that most of the parameters are initialized before being translated from German to English."
Maybe the machines the poster on Reddit saw/dealt with were modified, Carpigiani is Italian[1], so while it is well possible that some settings are not translated from Italian to English, it is unlikely that they were "natively" in German.
[1] Specifically from Emilia Romagna, not far from Ravenna, i.e. it is not the case of a bi-lingual Italian/German region such as Trentino Alto Adige.
In which direction it's not? McDonald has a copyright of their machine — others shouldn't reproduce it. It's like saying some movie has bad scenes and I want the right to fix it by violating the copyright.
Ok, so first off, you can't copyright a whole machine. Patents cover ideas, copyright covers creative expression, which legally includes software. And the specific part of the law iFixit is worried about is DMCA 1201 which covers software that is designed to prevent copying of copyrighted works.
In the specific case of Kytch, they built another machine that reads error codes off the electronics on a machine that deliberately attempts to hide the error codes from McDonalds franchisees. This doesn't modify the software on those electronics, so there isn't a copyright violation. And Taylor doesn't have a patent on usable error codes or reading them off a machine deliberately designed to obscure them. This shouldn't be covered by any reading of DMCA 1201, but they want the Copyright Office to say, "yes, this is legal" anyway.
I'm not entirely sure why you're invoking Ayn Rand in your grandparent comment.
Although different items can come together to form a product, it is McDonald's who brought them together as a WHOLE. This is strictly their property, and they have the right to keep their trade secrets, regardless of how bad they are.
If customers have problems with the machines, they should not buy them or use them. They have the freedom to choose. Additionally, if McDonald's has defrauded them in any way, they should sue McDonald's. There is a free choice.
iFixit may be great engineers who can perform magic, but they are literally asking Congress for an exemption to violate copyright law. This will not end with McDonald's; others will follow suit.
As for Ayn Rand's argument, because it provides the right expression in one line.
>but they are literally asking Congress for an exemption to violate copyright law
They are literally not. The Copyright Office cannot actually grant exceptions to copyright law, they can only grant exceptions to DMCA 1201(a), the part of the law that makes it illegal to break copy protection. This is because copy protection software gets in the way of otherwise legal uses of copyrighted material and DMCA 1201 was not intended to overthrow fair use[1].
What iFixit is asking for, is an exemption to break copy protection on things that copyright does not protect. Copyright owners are not entitled to prohibit repair of machines with their software in it. The legislative intent from Congress has been very clear[0]. The only reason why this is even a question is that some hack fraud of a company might decide to throw spurious 1201 claims at people fixing products they own. This wouldn't necessarily be Taylor. It could be, say, Future Motion; which uses DRM to block you from replacing the battery cells in their OneWheel electric skateboards.
This question is valid independent of the other questions regarding trade secrecy or contractual obligations you brought up, because DMCA 1201 does not apply to anything but copyright. The printer manufacturers[2] and garage door opener companies[3] found this out the hard way.
The findings of the Lexmark International case(the link you have provided) are very important to understand in this context, as they provide us with all the information we need.
1. Is the software lock protected by copyright law? If so, no one should copy it.
2. Did McDonald's/Taylor defraud the users? If so, the users can sue them.
3. Is Kytch copying the software lock and selling it? If so, that would be a violation. However, you have said that they are not copying it; they are simply reading error codes and providing a different output. In that case, I do not see why they would need to invoke DMCA 1201 for an exemption. This is a completely different situation, like someone creating a keyboard or stand for my laptop. Kytch should apply for their own copyright in this case. Their appeal should be made in this direction.
And you seem to see this more and more. It seems that these days the product quality itself doesn't matter, it's all about the contracts that your legal team setup in the background. I have to ask the engineers that work at these companies: does it bother you that the only reason people use your product is that they would get sued if they tried using another product? How does it make you feel that your product is so bad the only thing keeping your customers in the door is the contracts your legal team drew up.