> McDonalds makes more off the ice cream ingredients than fixing the machine. That argument doesn’t make sense.

McDonald's doesn't make more off the ingredients of a day's sales of ice cream as it does off a service call, probably by a couple orders of magnitude. I'm not sure why you think it would.

It would be most profitable for McDonald's if the machine went down every single day. The problem with that is the franchises would stop selling ice cream, not that they'd have to trade $25 of ice cream ingredient profit for the profit off a high priced service call that you can respond to with a low-paid, minimally trained tech with a computer that just decodes a mundane error that can be fixed in seconds. A tech can probably do 15 of those a day.

I’m not sure how productive it is to argue with fake numbers but the base revenue off an appliance service call is maybe $125-250 (based on commercial utility service experience). That’s the revenue, so I’m not sure what the profit would be to McDs corporate but maybe $10-25.

Given that a location can sell hundreds or thousands of ice creams in a day. I would expect the margin to be higher on their supply cut than the service call cut so it seems more profitable to sell ice cream than even if there was a service visit every single day.

I’m surprised at the “can’t do arithmetic” takes on HN with things as simple as this. Like somehow there’s a conspiracy to rent seek a less profitable product (ice cream machine service) over McDonald’s main purpose (sell fast food).

It’s funny to imagine people thinking that there’s some conspiracy my mcd’s to make less money. But I think it’s just a misunderstanding of how franchising works.

The brand reputation cost is difficult to measure, though.

If the ice cream machine is always broken, customers may come to expect a low standard of service and quality.

You also have the people who skip McDonald's entirely because one member of their party wants ice cream.

Probably by a couple of orders of magnitude? So say they sell 1000 mcflurries in a day at $1 each for $1000. A couple of orders of magnitude would mean a service cost of $100,000 or am I missing something. Even if they only sold 100 which seems like absurdly low, then it would suggest a service cost of $10k.

They definitely don't sell 1,000 McFlurries a day. Assuming they fulfill one order every 30 seconds, and McFlurries are reasonably purchased between noon and midnight (never heard of a breakfast McFlurry). That's 1,440 orders per day. McFlurries are not going to have a 70% attach rate.

I live in South East Asia where there's fewer McDonalds restaurants, but they're much larger and higher volume than I've seen elsewhere (Europe, most of US and Australia). The ice cream machines often sit at the front of the restaurant (since many restaurants are located in malls). Many people pass by and buy ice cream only. But you can still order them with your regular menu from inside the restaurant. They sell a LOT of ice cream here.

Cones appear to sell more than McFlurries here.

Yeah, but then you have a family that orders 4

If any location is getting to 1,000 McFlurries then all I have to say is... America.

Assuming spherical customers in a vacuum...

McDonalds serves around 68 million customers per day (https://findanyanswer.com/how-many-customers-does-mcdonalds-...)

in around 39 000 restaurants (https://www.statista.com/statistics/219454/mcdonalds-restaur...)

Of those restaurants, around 9% have broken ice cream machines (https://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/psychology/documents/c...), meaning there are around 61.88 million customers who had the opportunity to order a McFlurry.

I wasn't able to find good data on what percentage of customers order a McFlurry, but the linked article says they make 60% of dessert sales. I'm going to make a wild guess at this point that 50% of customers order a dessert of some description.

That means about 34 million people ordered a dessert, about 20 million McFlurries and 10 million other desserts.

Of those people, 3 million were not able to order a McFlurry because the machine was broken, so let's remove those 3 million from the total.

31 million people, 20 million McFlurries.

Assumption then would be that on average, around 1/3 of customers will order a McFlurry in a random restaurant (50% x 66%).

68 million customers across 39 000 restaurants is around 1 700 customers per restaurant per day, of which around 570 will order a McFlurry.

A regular McFlurry costs $2.39 (https://www.fastfoodmenuprices.com/mcdonalds-prices/), so a restaurant takes around $1 350 from selling McFlurries.

Taylor have a helpful calculator on their website (https://taylornewengland.com/sales/soft-serve-ice-cream-prof...), with likely optimistic estimates and don't show any wastage, but we're ballparking anyway. They say that food cost + napkin + cone comes to around $0.29, meaning daily profit from ice cream would be around $1 200.

Conclusion, it's pretty unlikely the difference is on the 'orders of magnitude' scale.

As a side note, given that the cost of a new machine is around $18 000 (https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-...), after 15 days of the machine being out of order, the cost in lost sales is as much as buying a new machine (lower by whatever the Taylor callout fee is).

Given that 9% of 365 is around 33 (more than double the cost of a new machine), it seems that the more cost-effective solution would probably be to have a second, standby machine, from which McFlurries could be served while waiting for the callout.