I always had access to a Taylor manual and a Taylor technician via phone at no cost. Even with machines that were far out of warranty. Troubleshooting was never an issue for me.

I never worked anywhere else with a Taylor machine. Perhaps other companies have better deals or easier to use equipment. I would like to know if Wendy's and others machines operate using the same food safety standards.

> I always had access to a Taylor manual and a Taylor technician via phone at no cost.

Was that technician for free? Or did your franchise owner pay for it, out of (your) sight? The claim isn't that they do a poor job with technicians, just that they are perversely incentivized to profit from it.

The video also explains there was a (very limited) owner manual, while all the secrets were in the service manual. Which of those did you have access to?

I find it potentially a bit of a low blow to question Wendy's and others' food safety standards.

Did you see the video?

I had access to both. We did not pay for any of it. In fact the Taylor facility in our local market offered free “training” days once a year specifically for McDonald’s employees.

McDonald’s is much more political than people think. The franchise I worked for was very well connected and well represented. It’s possible that this access was something they pushed for or is not well known.

Payment type would also matter. If it’s a flat monthly fee then they’re incentivized to avoid service calls. I imagine franchises and Taylor itself would also vastly prefer such a scheme, as it would reduce cost variation.

I understand that companies like Taylor benefit from income streams being predictable. But as per the video it seems that their revenue model was predicated on having as many incidents as possible, each billed separately.

If you have many incidents, they become statistically predictable again.

Was it at McDonald's? The article specifically says that it's McDonald's machines that require (edit:excessive) maintenance and not the ones used by other companies.

From this comment tree I wonder if the problem is some evil company being greedy, or is it a lack of incentives in McD and franchise owner to update SOP to properly train and assign a worker to properly maintain the machine to keep the machine running to offer ice creams consistently.

Why do they keep an item on the menu if they are not being able to make it reliably?

It's a minor but important part of the profitability picture. While this is much less true today, one of the core concepts was always that McDonald's could execute things at scale no one else could.

Now there's a ton of competition and specialty shops, but in the past this wasn't always the case. A small town might only have one other location where you can get "fresh" ice cream. If you can execute on this machine properly and you have the market to support it they can be huge profit makers.

"Food safety standards" would not result in downtime rising from <1% to over 10%.

>>>I always had access to a Taylor manual

You expect people to RTFM.... come one this is 2021 no one reads manuals any more...

//wish that as sarcasm but the number of times I have seen a solution to a problem that plagued people for weeks be found clearly laid out in the manual for a given product is far to high

The reporting is based on conversations with franchisees, who are a part of the equation here too.

McDonalds franchisees are always in a tug of war with the company over various issues, especially loss leader products like ice cream and the dollar menu. Thus, it mysteriously “breaks”.

In some markets, a cone is $0.29 — it’s a money loser that the franchisee doesn’t like and probably doesn’t drive traffic in many locations.

I’d look at the human element before declaring a major manufacturer of a simple product incompetent. They wouldn’t be consistently failing for their biggest customer over many years.

This seems to be an issue with only McD. According to the video other vendors like Wendy's don't have this problem.

Remember that McD the company has nothing to loose from failing ice cream machines. That loss is taken by the franchise owners

>According to the video other vendors like Wendy's don't have this problem.

because their machines don't self-sanitize.

The video covers this. All franchises for all companies typically do this overnight.

They all have to be cleaned nightly, but they're not all self-sanitizing. The woman at the wendy's drive-through said they "wash" the machines nightly, which suggests they take it a part and wash it rather than running a self-sanitizing cycle.

Out of curiosity, is there a difference, work load aside, in the end result of the two processes?

Not necessarily. McDonalds owns many restaurants themselves as well.

This is funny to me as the milkshakes are relatively expensive here in Germany yet the machines in some locations still seem to be perpetually broken. I'm not sure if the milkshake and ice cream machines are the same thing but if they're not I guess some franchisees just don't want to deal with the hassle of keeping them operable regardless of whether they're loss leaders or not.

> It’s part of the problem because Taylor is incentivized to keep people calling in technicians, which means they deliberately update the machines with error codes even more difficult to understand. (Examples covered in the video too)

I do believe this happens but I'm also "skeptical" of the ability of a high attrition place with underqualified workers working under pressure to get themselves up to date in maintenance practices and manuals.

Edit: and yes, the franchisees are the ones who get the short stick. Franchises are thorny and usually not in the favour of the franchisee.

It is very common for engineers to hypothesize (often with limited evidence) that the problem is “the users” rather than the technology and its support infrastructure. I think this can be true, but two points:

1. The high-attrition low-skill workforce at fast food restaurants is a fact of the industry. (I am not endorsing it either.) So if a solution is failing widely when faced with the reality of its users, then the system is flawed not the users.

Of course, you might argue that it’s impossible to build a system that works with this type of users, which leads to:

2. The video argues that failure rates at competing fast food restaurants are vastly lower. While I can’t verify this myself, if we assume it’s true then it’s strong evidence that the problem here is unique to McDonalds and therefore doesn’t represent some systematic impossibility.

I don’t care much about ice cream machines, but in the broader technological sense I dislike “users are the problem” arguments. The whole point of tech is to make users’ lives easier. When other people are doing that and you’re not, there is a problem.

While I understand this viewpoint and I don't necessarily disagree with it, this one piece of equipment is unique and that's why I think it is so often "broken".

No other piece of equipment has the mix of complexity and niche impact on the restaurant. Even the brand new at the time espresso machines are mostly self cleaning. There's no other object that requires this(minor IMO) skill level to operate. So it's just left undone. It's widely regarded that while it's a high profit machine most of the time you can run a highly successful business without it.

There is another bit in the vid I watched there was a dongle they could buy for awhile. It was telling them exactly what they did wrong and how to fix it. Basically taking the obscure error code and turning it into human with pictures. The franchise dudes were extremely excited for it.

That lends a decent amount of credence to a 'process' issue. If that many people are messing it up. Then something is wrong either in the physical or training realm or both. I usually have to have this conversation every few years when someone says 'oh we will just train the users'. Then I go 'dude I know how this should work and I am totally lost, do you expect someone who does not give much of a crap about it to pick it up?'.

One thing the vid misses though is the lockout rate could be coming from mcdonalds itself in a different way. They do not want to end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit and bad publicity. Remember the lady who spilt coffee on herself, and got 2nd/3rd degree burns. That cost them a lot of time, money and bad press. So they may have set the machines to be oversensitive.

I agree with you, and I was not blaming the users/the workforce. As you said it is a fact of the industry.

McD is known for making their processes simple and repeatable and it seems the machine is failing that paradigm.

(And oh well, my comment was speculative and made before I saw the video, the users really can't do much when the company hides information from them - though we don't know exactly how the procedures are laid down in the manual and how they can be improved. it's one thing if the manual says "fill this up and press the button" another if it says "fill this up to this line and check A, B and C before pressing the button")

> McD is known for making their processes simple and repeatable and it seems the machine is failing that paradigm.

Which, coincidentally, is based on Frederick Taylor's theory of Scientific Management. Pretty sure Frederick Taylor and the Taylor making the ice cream machines aren't connected in any way though.

I can imagine that it’s hard to keep up to date with maintenance practices and manuals when the manuals are explicitly unavailable, as is the case for McDonalds.

This isn't a high attrition work place!

Sure in general McDonald's is. However there are always a few people who have been around for years who know a lot more than the average worker. They are in management or maintenance. They have more training, and better wages. (not to be confused with the person who has been there forever but never advanced to such a position)

Anecdotally, my local McDonald's never has trouble with their milkshake machine-- it's my local Burger King that frequently does.

So a franchisee-specific training problem would make a lot of sense.

My sister worked there as a kid and labor on demand had certain chaotic results.

To give an IT analogy if an IT department staffed based on corporate's seemingly random rolls of the dice it could be painful to make sure weekly backups get done weekly, for example. Especially if the only feedback was when the restore process occasionally broke down. Whereas if some dude is always at work every Friday morning at 8am he can get in the habit of being the guy who always runs the backups. Also imagine if the only way to run backups was to flip the power switch for a half hour and hope you know how to complete the backup in less than a half hour... nobody wants to be that guy who shut off the DB server even if maint is required...

On the other hand... if you're swapping people in and out of a roll, it forces you to have an SOP and training.

If it's the same person for 5+ years, I can guarantee there's nothing accurate written down (even in regulated industries).

Given the two problems, I've seen more dumpster fires as a result of the latter than the former.

Wendy's has 2 soft serves (vanilla and chocolate). McDonalds has like 8 ice cream/shake drinks, so it shouldn't be a surprise that McDonalds would have a more expensive and complicated machine to get 4x as many varieties.

Can we please keep gender warfare off HN? (or at least when it has nothing to do with the story/discussion)

The sentence would have worked just as well with "being condescending" in place of "mansplaining". To me, mansplaining has clear gender overtones.

No. It's literally got the word 'man' in it. Nothing gender neutral about that. Please stop and don't encourage this kind of behavior.

I'd say: no.

I literally never heard of it used in a women-explaining context.

I use "womansplaining" or "ladysplaining" when i'm talking with other women, sometimes.