Did you watch the film? The idea is that McDonalds are knowingly letting another company overcharge their franchisees, it's not about safety. Supposedly other fast food chains use the same machines without these problems.

Someone above posted a Wired article you should check out. Basically, McDonald's uses the same machine to make both ice cream cones and milkshakes, meaning it has 2 hoppers. In addition, it uses a pump instead of gravity, which allows them to serve more ice cream cones per minute but makes it vastly more complicated.

I can see how McDonald's would make a strategic choice to lower their time to serve a customer in exchange for a machine that is broken part of the time. They actually track and chastise workers based on taking more than some absurdly short amount of time to serve a customer. It seems like a corporate strategy for them, and this is in line with that.

I agree about the first part, but I'm not sure about the argument about other franchises.

The employees at most McD's are in a different class than most other franchises. This isn't universal, of course, but for the most part, McD's hires from the very bottom end. This isn't bad -- I see people with Down's, strong autism, and similar working at McDs, happily, and those folks need jobs. To do that, you want equipment which is a bit more fail-safe.

Otherwise, we'd have safety issues at McD's every week, and they're exceptionally uncommon. That's because of a robust process. Ice cream machines with more fail-safes at McD's make sense to me.

The really incriminating part of the video comes at the very end, where they locked out Kisch.